Dear Declan,

I was contacted today by a reporter for a major television
news network. He told me about three rather surprising
developments in the _Columbia_ disaster. (By the way, I
refuse to call it a "tragedy.")

Item One: There was a meeting on 24 January 2003 which
was coordinated by phone and in person at NASA JSC. The
meeting included engineers from Lockheed Martin's
Michoud facility where the external tank is made. It
also included engineers from United Space Alliance.
Several engineers felt that there should be attempts
made to image the underside of _Columbia_ in order to
assess the damage they felt certain was there. These
engineers dissented from the management decision to do
nothing.

Item Two: On the morning of 1 February 2003, before
the _Columbia_ re-entered and broke apart, an Air
Force satellite, which must be supposed to have been
a Keyhole spy sat or similar, did image the shuttle
minutes before re-entry, and the images show significant
damage below the left wing.

Item Three: The NASA engineer who was on ABC News
Tuesday night talking about foam insulation being
changed a few years ago, and how it "popcorned" off
the external tank to damage the shuttle's tiles, has
been gag-ordered.

As an interesting aside, the change to the foam
insulation was to remove freon from its composition,
no doubt in a silly gesture toward environmentalism.
The curious thing for me, of course, is how one can
worry about foam insulation with a bit of chloro-
fluorocarbons, yet do nothing about the massive
chlorine compounds put into the upper atmosphere
with the solid rocket motors (loaded with ammonium
perchlorate).

It appears clear to me from private analyses that
the _Columbia_ could have jettisoned extraneous
materials and reached the space station's orbit,
though without sufficient fuel to make a subsequent
de-orbit burn. (However, de-orbiting a shuttle
with no heat shield seems obviously undesirable.)
Moreover, the space station's orbit is adjustable,
and the space station can be refueled in orbit by
_Progress_ vehicles.

So, we have in my view clear cut negligent
homicide, seven counts, to lay at the feet of
NASA shuttle managers. I'd certainly like to see
them go to trial and sit there while a jury of
their peers reviews the evidence against them.
If found guilty, I would like to see every one
of them in prison for maximum penalties on each
count, as the least penance they should pay.

Instead, the government seems far more dedicated
to rounding up my redneck friends in East Texas
who have nothing like meaningful evidence of the
shuttle's problems. Indeed, the place to look
for interesting debris would seem to be off the
coast of Florida, where an ice-saturated hunk of
foam (that accumulated water from two thunderstorms)
may be found laying on the sea bottom next to
a bunch of tiles it knocked off.

If NASA gets a budget increase out of this latest
deliberate negligent homicide, as it did seventeen
years ago after _Challenger_, I shall vomit quite
a bit.

Regards,

Jim
http://cambist.net/