Was lousy. The rationale states, we havent changed anything, we havent experienced any safety of Flight Damage in 112 flights. the Concluding Sentence the rationale was lousy then and it still is. What i take that to mean is that Linda Ham is raising a concern, but they appear to rely on the fact that previous flights which had suffered this foam loss, had returned safely. In other words, weve gotten away with this. This is a failure to learn from past similar events, simply because those flights did not have catastrophic consequences. The classic the classic normalisation of deviance. You have to make sure that every incident is thoroughly investigated and properly assessed. And that wasnt done for the 112 foam loss
Late october of 2002, after sts112 atlantis, i went to a meeting about that flight. I had put together a report about the Foam Loss and the damage to the solid rocket booster. And i presented the case that said, that amount of foam, that mass, in one chunk coming off Shuttle Atlantis this was the vehicle telling us something is wrong, heres your warning. At risk of being insubordinate, i said to the heads of the Shuttle Program sitting around the centre table, i was adamant at that meeting, either fix the problem or dont fly an external tank on the next launch, which is impossible. From that meeting, i never heard any discussion of lets get a better understanding of this
I was shocked to find that there were over a half a dozen occurrences of foam strikes recorded. So, we turned that in into the investigation board. 1983 was the first bipod ramp foam loss. 1990, 1992, 92 again, 1994. As well as those bigger pieces, we saw small pieces of foam fall away all the time. What we call popcorning. When popcorn pops, it pops up and comes out and so thats what we call it, popcorning. They werent very big so youre not talking about much damage to the tiles. And so, it had become the norm at nasa. This mantra its only foam, its only foam