<story><title>How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle</title><url>http://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/how-we-nearly-lost-discovery/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jevinskie</author><text>&quot;We informed the foam technicians at our plant in Michoud Louisiana that they were the cause of the loss of Columbia...&quot;&lt;p&gt;That to me is pretty disgusting. In an incident like the loss of Columbia, there is no one, true &quot;root cause&quot;. To assign blame to those foam technicians was disingenuous and just another instance of &quot;passing the buck&quot; that seems to happen so often in the post-mortem of NASA failures. NASA knew of earlier foam strikes (STS-112) yet chose to continue flying without diagnosing the problem. Even during the tragic STS-107 flight, engineers knew of foam strikes and their concerns were ignored. Even though they would have been almost completely powerless to remedy the situation on STS-107, the higher-ups decided to continue on with the mission instead of addressing the concerns with the heat shields. The article author states later in the article that he apologized to the foam technicians. Commendable, but I am still bothered by the fact that NASA was initially so eager to place the blame on a single contractor instead of owning up to their own culpability. Leadership and responsibility needs to come from the top, especially in such a prestigious organization!</text></comment>
<story><title>How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle</title><url>http://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/how-we-nearly-lost-discovery/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>InclinedPlane</author><text>Every Shuttle in the fleet has had one or several extremely close scrapes with death. To look at the Shuttle record and see the history of calamity it&apos;s easy to think that we just had bad luck, but quite the opposite was the case. We were enormously lucky with the Shuttle, in a fairer world we would have lost more of them, and sooner. The Shuttle was plagued by many fundamental design flaws which combined to make it an inherently unsafe system. Within the last years of the program that knowledge finally started to sink in, which is why the Shuttle was essentially restricted to missions to the ISS.&lt;p&gt;Some of the achievements of the Shuttle program have been inspiring, and the vehicle itself is pretty to look at, but we should have canned that program long, long ago.</text></comment>