Slashdot Mirror
NASA Test Shows Foam Could Be Culprit
Ben Hutchings writes "The BBC has a report on an impact simulation that aimed to recreate the impact of insulating foam on Columbia's wing. The result was a large hole that probably could not be repaired in orbit even if it was known about."
It'll be interesting to see what the reaction to this failure will be.
Challenger didn't really rock the way we did Shuttle missions because the problems that led to its explosion were not core to how the Shuttles are built -- someone / some process screwed up and there was a relatively reliable way to make sure it wouldn't happen again.
Columbia, on the other hand, was destroyed because the design of the Shuttle is so fragile that once you develop an external problem, you're dead -- since they're using tiles that are individualized, there are no spares they could carry that would help them fix this sort of problem.
Hopefully, this will be a step in the right direction -- either a radical redesign of the Shuttle, or its abandonment in favor of a more robust solution.