Re: GO FEVER IS WELL ENTRENTCHED:(

Bob Haller wrote:
post-Columbia mission. The damage sites were not as deep, but the
number (176) is above the average (144) over the 25-year life of the
shuttle program.

This statistic alone is not enough to draw conclusions. Over the life of
the programme, there could have been the vast majority of flights with
144 hits exactly with just a couple with different numbers, or it would
have been a wild variations from 300 hits at the upper end and 20 at the
lower end yielding 144 as average.

The story that concerns me most is the statements made here that NASA
only focused on fixing one area post Columbia since it was the area that
shedded the fatal piece of foam. The "don't fix what isn't broken"
theory. I had been under the impression before that the WHOLE tank had
been totally reviewed by NASA, especially when you consider how long
tyhe stand down and studying has been since the accident.

And while the current delay due to sensors is an improvement (detecting
problem a couple months before launch instead of a few minutes before
launch), it is still puzzling why such a highly visible problem wasn't
tackled with whatever modifications necessary to prevent re-occurence.

What this tells me is that perhaps one problem is that making changes to
the shuttle has become so complex in terms of procedures that they
prefer to leave it as-is and run the risk of a failure, a risk judged to
be acceptable.


And such a mentality will continue to hunt that CEV thing if it ever
gets built because even though it may not be re-usable, if making any
changes to the assembly line/parts requires so much
overhead/time/money/testing, they may just decide to live with known
flaws which will be reproduced in every CEV built.

Ironic that change controls, designed to ensure quality assurance, would
end up hindering quality assurance.
.