-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, what i missed to allow this to happen. -but if you overlook something, it will come to bite you one day or anot
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, we ve 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 wasn t done for the 112 foam loss. -people were saying they were willing to accept the risk. what they didn t understand is how much risk they were accepting.
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 that s what we call it, popcorning. they weren t very big so you re not talking about much damage to the tiles. and so, it had become the norm at nasa. this mantra it s only foam, it s only foam. hey, we see foam loss all the time. and it never did any damage to the vehicle. we don t have to worry about it, it s only foam.
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, here s 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 don t fly an external tank on the next launch, which is impossible. from that meeting, i never heard any discussion of let s get a better understanding of this before we schedule the next launch. -in other words, again, they were thinking it was more of a turnaround issue. and so, it wasn t preventing shuttle flights from going forward.
Hey, we see Foam Loss all the time. And it never did any damage to the vehicle. We dont have to worry about it, its only foam. Two missions before columbia it happened on sts112 atlantis. A significant strike hit the skirt of the solid Rocket Booster and actually put a dent in it. Prior till the launch of columbia, and a couple of the meetings, the topic of foam coming off 112 came up. Theres probably, erm. 15 to 20 people around the table and then theres a lot of other people at nasa in the room. We talked about starting to look into this a little bit more because weve seen it come off on, you know, more than one flight now. We should understand if theres a way to prevent it