For NASA, Misjudgments Led to Latest Shuttle Woes

Source URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/science/space/31foam.html?
Posted at: http://www.air-attack/com/news/news_article/560

"We are ready to fly."

It was June 24, and William W. Parsons, NASA's shuttle program manager, was speaking to reporters on a telephone conference call from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. Two and a half years of study and struggle, he told them, were over at long last. The shuttle Discovery could blast off in July.

At a closed-door meeting that afternoon, senior shuttle managers had ruled that the chances that debris from the giant external fuel tank would strike the Discovery at liftoff - in the kind of accident that doomed the Columbia and its seven astronauts in February 2003 - had been reduced to "acceptable levels."

The possibility that a large chunk of insulating foam might break away from a section of the tank called the protuberance air load ramp - PAL for short - never came up. It had been ruled out months earlier, checked off on a long list of items no longer worthy of urgent action.

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