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
i felt like it was my responsibility to talk about the foam strike, to get it out there in the public. if you take a close-up here, that bipod is the place where they think a little piece of foam fell off and hit the leading edge of that wing. i talked to the folks in the control room, and i said, you know, can you cue up the launch replays? alright. let s take a look at this launch. 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,
I think we have enough information to say we found the physical cause of the shuttle crash. But there were still people at nasa who didnt believe that foam could break reinforced carboncarbon. Were here at Southwest Research Institute in san antonio, texas, to conduct a test to show whether foam could create a hole big enough to destroy the vehicle. Everything came down to whether or not the Foam Shot was gonna break an rcc panel. But if our investigative analysis is wrong, then what . Five, four, three, two, one. Whoa [ Indistinct Chatter ]
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 nasas 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 . Wed 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 todays problems . It is true. It was judged that, erm , that event did not represent a safety concern
On the best information that we had at the time. Nobody wanted to do any harm to anyone. If a bunch of things went really right and they identified very early on and got images early on and everything went about perfectly, just maybe there could have been a rescue mission. But its questionable whether you could get the other orbiter, which would have been atlantis in this case, processed and out to the pad in time without putting that crew at serious risk. We would have had to pull together this huge effort in the eleventh hour to figure out how to fly one shuttle next to the other to conduct an operation that youd never trained or prepared for. It was not in the art of the possible given what we knew. The one tool we could have tried to look at was changing the Way Entry is done, trying to change how it enters the atmosphere