Last night I was listening to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. He covers a wide range of topics, some really strange, some very disturbing and some quite interesting. Last nights topic, space, planetary discoveries, NASA and the Space Shuttle missions was right down my "alley" of interests.
One comment guest Richard C. Houghland made really got me thinking and at the same time was pretty upsetting. Houghland, a former space science museum curator; a former NASA consultant, and during the Apollo Missions to the Moon, was science advisor to Walter Cronkite and CBS News, made the comment that NASA has known for years the insulating foam on the shuttle external fuel tank was a serious problem.
The foam problems, at least in part, have their genesis in radical environmentalism. In 1997, during the Clinton administration, the EPA, under the leadership of Carol M.
Browner, put pressure on NASA to switch from a freon based foam application to a more environmentally friendly method. While government agencies, at least at the time, were exempt for many of these regulations, NASA complied, most likely under heavy pressure.
Immediatedly, with the first post change shuttle mission, they saw dramatic increases in the number and severity of damage to the heat tiles from insulating foam disintergration. While over the intervening years the engineers attempted to alleviate the problem, they were not able to eliminate it. The 2003 Columbia disaster is directly linked to these fundamental technological changes brought on by a desire to "save the ozone" from the minimal amounts of freon emitted during the application process.
I can't totally blame the Clinton administration for the Columbia disaster though. Long after the radicalism of the Clinton era, NASA maintained and continues today to use the use of the non-freon foam application process, despite the reams of data documenting the problems with it.
This culture, perhaps hindered by governmental, burecratic, corportate inertia; perhaps infected itself by that same radical environmentalism that tend to permeate much of elitist scientific thought; perhaps simply in an act if self-preservation and seeking a course that would be non-confrontational with the environmentalists and the media; refused to take another look at the pre-1997 technology the, while not perfect, worked much better that the current system.
The problem is, even after Columbia, and now the problems discovered in the recent launch of Discovery, NASA, both publically and according to insiders privately, refuses to reconsider the fundamental problems with the current foam application system.
All it will take is someone with the guts and gumption to think outside the comfort zone of bureacracy and push the issue. Will it take another Columbia disaster to really get their attention, I hope not.
Related articles:
Did PC Science Cause Shuttle Disaster? FoxNews February 07, 2003
Fixing the Foam: Preventing Disaster, Getting Clear Picture FLORIDA TODAY
5 July 2005
Shuttle Foam Loss Linked to EPA Regs NewsMax July 28, 2005
Be sure to visit Front Line Report
