NASA's Foamy Business

A year old post of mine, titled Debris Falling from Discovery has been my most-read page ever. Another piece, Time to Dump the Shuttle also attracted a lot of readers:

“This is sickening… with all the billion$ spent on the Space program, we’re dealing with pieces of foam, tape, glue, pieces of junk protruding, falling off… are we talking about kids’s toy models or space-age design and materials here? As so many other’s stated, instead of band-aiding it, it’s time to dump the old Shuttle , and either build a brand new one, or leave space travel to the Russians … or perhaps Private Enterprise.”

I don’t want to write another “hit” article like this. Yet I can’t help but wonder reading this:

“The seven crew members of the space shuttle Discovery will arrive at Kennedy Space Center today to take one of the biggest risks of their lives. They have a 1-in-100 chance of dying during their spaceflight that begins Saturday.

Those, at least, are the official odds that NASA has given.

Michael Stamatelatos, who as director of safety and assurance requirements at NASA is the agency’s risk guru, said that number should be taken with a grain of salt, because NASA used to say the chances were 1 in 7,000 until Challenger proved that to be overly optimistic.

Two top officials at NASA took the unusual step of dissenting from the space agency’s decision to go ahead with the launch without fixing the potentially catastrophic problem of foam falling off the external fuel tank — the very problem that doomed Columbia 3 1/2 years ago.

The agency’s safety director and chief engineer wanted to wait and fix the problem. But NASA Administrator Michael Griffin decided a July 1 launch is worth the added risk for a variety of reasons.” (original story at CBS News, emphasis is mine)

I don’t know about you, but I think a 1:100 chance is really, really big. A “Business Decision” has been made, overwriting the Safety Director. This is as bad as it gets. I really don’t want to write another “sensational” post.