Shuttle Assessment Tool was Inferior

An anonymous reader writes " Shuttle report in Houston Chronicle: 'The computer program Boeing engineers used to predict that a debris-damaged Columbia could land safely wasn't much more than a simple chart of past foam damage, accident investigators said Tuesday.'"

Comments

"Just a Spreadsheet" doesn't much matter

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They had only guesses as to what kind of material (foam, ice, ice-loaded foam, etc.) hit the wing. Only crude estimates as to how much hit, & where. They'd NEVER done real inspections (ultrasound, X-ray, etc.) of those carbon-carbon composite leading edges (to look for delamination, fractures, internal erosion from oxygen entering through surface pinholes, etc.) I haven't heard that they had ANY real test data from larger hits.

In this context, it doesn't much matter whether the "program" is half a million lines of gigaflop-sucking Fortran or a Buck Rogers Secret Decoder Ring. They were (fairly contentedly) starved for meaningful input.

GIGO.