Interesting...

[The_Finman]

[ QUOTE ]
NASA retiree, Jose Garcia, who was a technical assistant, did not want to speculate Saturday on a possible cause but said budget cuts throughout the 1990s resulted in the elimination of many safety checks and balances during launch preparations. He went public with his concerns, all the way to President Clinton, in fact, but said nothing changed.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,77303,00.html


[/ QUOTE ]

[Gone_with_the_Wind]

I'm not buying that. There was no cutting corners on the launching pad. If something looked the least bit out of line, the mission was scrubbed.

Mr. Garcia should keep his retired butt out of this.

[Beowulf]

If it is true, then it's another reason to hate Clinton.

[Gone_with_the_Wind]

No. It doesn't matter if the budget was cut. No shuttle that is compromised gets launched. Even if the president himself ordered a launch... and the president has no such power to order a launch... a compromised shuttle would be scrubbed. If the president budgets NOTHING, there are no flights. Period.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Gone, cutting corners on the launch pad is not necesary if you are cutting corners in the inspections that precede it ever going to the launch pad.

I am wondering just what corners are being cut. This is the second time the insulating foam has peeled off, so what is different over the last year or so?

One thing I am sure of, no NASA managers seem willing to risk their careers opposing budget cuts that might endanger their ships; if there were then why didnt we hear from them?

NASA should be run by experienced engineers and not political Machivaleans planning their next promotion.

[Beowulf]

Maybe, just maybe, if the shuttle fell under the same jurisdiction of the FAA, this wouldn't have happened.
I am an aircraft technician for a major airline. The rules are simple, if it's not safe, it doesn't fly.

On another note, people seem to big deal plane crashes or the space shuttle disaster, wanting to ground everything. Only a couple hundred people, mostly in small planes, die per year in aviation accidents yet some 50,000+ people will die on US highways this year while 100's of thousand more will be injured yet we seem to live with it. What's wrong here?

[Gone_with_the_Wind]

The peeling of the insulating foam has happened more than twice. It wasn't considered to compromise the mission.

My father was in aerospace. We were watching the launch of the Challenger the day it exploded. He said immediately he KNEW what it was. The "O-rings". He said the O-rings were a chronic problem and they didn't take the problem seriously until the Challenger disaster. Now, perhaps, we have the same thing going on. Too bad it takes a tragedy like this to make them look at weakness.

I'd like them to take it a step further and check out the "zipper effect" of the ceramic tiles. Everytime the shuttle comes back on the dry lake bed here in California, tiles a missing, and it only takes one tile to start the zipper effect.

[Beowulf]

I deal with O-Rings daily. I know one thing, if they aren't properly installed, they will fail quickly. I have to lube each one with a special grease and be sure it's not pinched at installation. It may be more of a maintenance issue more than it is the part. If installed right, they last forever.

[Warlady]

I find this hard to believe too. I don't think they would compromise the safety of the crew for any reason.

[Rhino]

Actually, I not only find it easy to believe, I knew this several years ago. NASA was told by the Clinton administration to do more with less just as we military members were. But don't misinterpret that to mean that safety defects were just ignored. It meant that less time was available for quality work, and for quality inspections that may have uncovered defects. The defect rate at NASA went up the same way it did for us in the military. I had a NASA payload engineer tell me about this back in 1998 when I was considering a job there, so there's nothing difficult to believe about it at all. Besides, when you think about it, do you really believe you can lose thirty percent of your workforce and not have more defects when trying to produce the same product in the same way? These cuts were not a "streamlining" that included new efficiencies to allow less people to do the same job. They were simply cut and told it was too damn bad. The same thing happened to us in the Air Force. The real tragedy was when things inevitably started to fall through the cracks, as they will whenever you overextend your resources, some of the bastards actually looked for somebody they could label as "guilty", even though none of the workers were actually the root cause at all. You can imagine what that did to the dedication of the workforce, and to the quality of their performance. This was but one of the unseen consequences from the Clinton budget cuts. Most people assumed that the cuts meant less was being done, when that was not the case at all. In fact, my wing had the operations tempo almost double during his tenure, while our budget was cut almost in half. In other words, nobody ignored defects. They just didn't find as many because they didn't have the resources to do that. This all came out in a GAO report two or three years ago too. A followup was released on it just yesterday that said NASA had since hired more people, but the experience level of the workforce had not yet come back up to the level it should be. So yes, I believe it very much.

[Warlady]

Yeah seems you're right Rhino. I just read CaliGirl's thread. Here (http://freeconservatives.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB1&Number=106400&page=0& view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1) Thanks Bill Clinton. Is there anything he didn't screw up while he was President?

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Dunno, WL, maybe condum sales?

[Warlady]

glen no doubt. Especially since they were hanging them from the White House Christmas tree.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Oh, and here I thought they were just white balloons!

[**DONOTDELETE**]

If it is a problem with the tiles, then maybe they will start training all the astronauts, or a least send one trained astronaut a flight, that can find and repair damage like the tiles and other structural problems in space. They could have repaired this before re-entering earth's atmosphere if they had inspected the outside of the shuttle and were able to repair damage. On the news, it was said that no one on the shuttle was trained to repair the tile damage.