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Indeed, and the article leaves out other relevant issues, such as where else the question was discussed, and also when - the article rather glibly suggests a rescue mission could have been launched, but that would have been a very risky action in its own right, even if it had been started on the day of the launch; it remains uncertain whether Columbia's oxygen could have been stretched out long enough even then. There were no other alternatives. This led to a certain realistic fatalism: "Then [Linda Ham] delivered the sentence that would define the rest of the tragedy; a sentence that was repeated as common wisdom by almost every senior manager that I talked to over the next two weeks: ‘You know, if there was any real damage done to the wing, there is nothing we can do about it.’ As unsettling as that was, I had to agree; going back to the first shuttle flight it had been well known that there was no way to repair the heat shield in flight. Nobody, not even me, thought about a rescue mission. Why would we?" - Wayne Hale, https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/after-ten-years-d... Once it became clear, during the investigation, that the foam impact had created a hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon leading edge of the wing, the board's chairman, Admiral Hal Gehman, insisted that a test should be performed to demonstrate that this was likely. As this meant destroying one of the few spare parts, and it had not been decided at this point to retire the shuttles, he was unsure whether this was worth doing, but what convinced him to go ahead was the number of engineers and managers who still doubted this could have happened, despite all the evidence. It is never just one thing. The whole of Wayne Hale's retrospective starts here: https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/after-ten-years-w... |
Especially when Boeing is involved