"NASA officials have consistently said in recent months that while they value the task group's role, space-agency managers ultimately will decide whether the shuttle is safe to resume launches."
My question is: why go through the charade of the CAIB and this subsequent review? Why bother if the results will simply be ignored?
The Shuttle is a bad design. Period, full stop.
The CAIB was just public relations exercise for NASA. They blamed the entire accident on a single piece of foam striking the orbiter wing from bipod ramp foam. This is based on footage of the launch showing a fuzzy piece of something white flying past the wing... And of course everyone knows by telepathy that it was icy foam from a single bipod ramp that was the culprit and not the hundreds of other potential sources of debris that can knock off Shuttle tiles and cause disaster. No, the CAIB had to look like they knew where the problem happened so that NASA could fix it.
It was darned bipod ramp foam. Evil foam. No one should have ever trusted the foam. It's not like the thousands of other ways that tiles could have fallen of the orbiter wing were of any consequence to the CAIB. But they were to NASA engineers, who, although apparently still convinced of the guilt of he bipod ramp foam, spent weeks cataloging hundreds of other sources of ice debris that weren't guilty. They even reworked old stats on debris in space knocking off tiles... Why would they bother if the CAIB report was right?
It was politics. Sometimes in Engineering people have to look like they know what the problem was specifically - even when they could never in a million years figure it out.
Though Rand Simberg makes a good point:
Of course, as is often the case when it comes to space (and sadly, other) reporting, it's the media who should be embarrassed. If they had had a little more technical competence at the time, they would have pointed out that some of the CAIB recommendations were technically unrealistic, and that Sean O'Keefe was foolish to pledge to meet them all. This was, in fact, the first point at which it was becoming clear that he was the wrong man in the job.
True, I wouldn't doubt that judging the Shuttle preparedness for flight based on the CAIB report is not realistic, but the issue is the Shuttle itself. Robot Guys is right: It's a bad design. It is a white elephant in space. And it's incredibly unsafe.
We shouldn't be looking to any task group for advice, we should be looking to NASA engineers. And right now there are some NASA engineers that do not feel satisfied with the situation thus far from what I've read in recent weeks. They've been shoved aside and we've been told that the Shuttle is "A-0K." Well it's not. The Shuttle external tank fuel sensors were malfunctioning in fueling tests. The problem is believed to be fixed, but needs to be confirmed by performing another fueling test.
Another fueling test was promised to Engineers. That hasn't happened. I just hope the fix worked - for the sake of that crew.
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