so, it s difficult for us to believe as engineers, as management and as a team, that this particular piece of foam debris shedding from the tank represented a safety of flight issue. -i caught some segment that ron got into in which he said in a declarative voice. -right now, it just does not make sense to us that a piece of debris would be the root cause for the loss of columbia and its crew. there s got to be another reason. -well, how can he say that? where is he getting that from? what a big denial. -to be certain it was foam is nonsense, right? but to be certain it wasn t foam is equally nonsense. right? and that s what they were saying. it s not foam. well, how do you know? -i know from the accident investigation team s perspective,
no one was gonna go public and say, we know what didn t happen. -you get that shot right there? that s a nasa official. he s holding a piece of foam, which he is now saying could not have had enough impact cause it s too light to have damaged those tiles that we ve been talking about. -i knew ron. i had respect for ron. ron was linda ham s boss and a good manager. but what s always the first step in grief? denial. -i called ron and i said, ron, let me just remind you, ok? we had a clear understanding that we are not gonna eliminate anything until the data has come in to definitively eliminate it. -to bring that out and dismiss it, you know, pre-emptively, i think speaks volumes. at the very least they had to acknowledge it. but it was acknowledging their own mistakes
-the pressure on the management team to stay on schedule and the concept of, it s just foam is leading the charge through all of this. -so, it wasn t like they weren t talking about issues at all, but there certainly was a big focus on the on the schedule. -here s an e-mail, it s tuesday january 21st, this was sent six days into the columbia mission. this is a private exchange between linda ham and ron dittemore, two of the top managers in the program. the rationale for flight for the sts-112 loss of foam was lousy. the rationale states, we haven t changed anything, we haven t experienced any safety of flight damage in 112 flights.
look what happened a minute after launch. got this very, very slow look at that piece of foam right there that struck the shuttle as it came off. the question was, what did it do? i didn t know for sure. i still was the armchair analyst. but challenger was deep in our memory. .and this was kind of a similar scenario. in the wake of challenger, nasa management just tried to shut everything down, and it created a huge amount of bad blood between the media. it made nasa look guilty as hell. how will they respond to this?
-for the second time in nasa s history, a space shuttle has been lost along with its entire crew. once again, we are asking ourselves, how could this have happened? -do you have any idea how big that piece of foam was that came off? -we d heard some reports that during launch there had been some concerns that some debris hit the wing. is that true and is that any cause of concern and that could have caused today s problems? -it is true. it was judged that, erm , that event did not represent a safety concern. -this happened under my watch, but i didn t have the answers. in every public forum i m gonna have to be in, how am i gonna explain this to anybody? at this time, we have no indication that the mishap was caused by anything or anyone on the ground. -nasa never wants to look stupid. nasa wants to be the agency with the answers. -my thoughts are on what we missed,