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 Wednesday, February 19, 2003
This sort of thing makes you sick. It appears that NASA and Boeing engineers fooled themselves into believing that nothing was wrong with the shuttle. Even if this is not the proximal cause, it indicates some serious defeciences in the process of shuttle safety. Comparing a 3 cubic inch piece of foam to a huge, greater than 1000 cubic inch piece, with no apparent real world evidence, is not science. You should admit so and try to really figure out what is happening. Maybe, just maybe someone could have fixed things. This is what happens when science and engineering get taken hostage to political needs. As Feynman said: For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature [unlike Congressmen] cannot be fooled. Another quote from a NASA administrator in front of Congress indicates that someone was fooled and dangerously:NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe pushed so hard to downplay the foam strike that he told Congress last week the foam was probably going just 50 miles per hour. He said the debris traveled just 40 feet powered by the force of gravity, a statement that thoroughly contradicted the Boeing reports. Weatherwax, the aerospace engineer and risk analyst, chuckled when he heard that. With wind whipping around the shuttle at hundreds if not thousands of miles per hour, the piece of foam broke He compared it to a styrofoam cup hitting a truck. No, the air resistance would have slowed the piece down tremendously. In reality, the shuttle hit it, not the other way around, and at a high rate of speed. And they knew that these pieces were falling off on previous mission, after changing the process for insulating the external tanks. Will we hear again that engineers tried to get management to do something about this and failed? American engineers are some of the most creative in the world and, as demonstrated by Apollo 13, extremely creative when allowed free rein. I guess when you have to fly something with so many points of failure, you have to get used to ignoring reality to some extent. Would you drive a car that had 1000 places where a catastrophic failure could occur? Yet, NASA tried to portray the shuttle as so safe that we can send tourists or teachers up. I just hate to see brave people die because of the stupidity of administrators. It is beginning to look like it happened again. 10:41:05 PM 
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I feel as and today hearing that MS is buying Virtual PC from Connectix as I did when I heard that they were buying Bungie. We are hearing the same words about how this is a great opportunity, that things will be bigger and better, etc. But Bungie is no longer the leader in developing leading edge games. Halo is a shard of what it could have been and is avaiable only for Xbox. I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I just hope the smart guys at Connectix get out and have a good time but the days for VPC may well be over, at least as we know it. 6:02:11 PM
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