Shuttle Humor, Risk Estimation

[Tim May]

On Monday, February 3, 2003, at 03:01  PM, Harmon Seaver wrote:
>
>     The biggest question there is why didn't they inspect it? Seems 
> very
> bizarre, since that's what they did in the past.

That's what they _reported_ later that they did in the past...there 
certainly was no public announcement that Keyhole satellites were being 
tasked to look at the shuttle tiles.

One might assume that they did in fact look at the tiles this time 
around, noted the damage, reported to Admiral Poindexter the "toast" 
conclusion, and  that was that.

Had the landing gone OK, we would have been hearing about how NASA had 
verified that little damage had occurred.

Now, it's "we didn't have a chance to look, but even if we had, there 
was nothing anyone could do, so we didn't look."

(Of course, there is _much_ they could have done, including coming in 
at a more westerly landing site, either Edwards or White Sands. Or, 
with about 10 days of advance notice, Atlantis could have been ready 
for launch and rendezvous to take the crew off, and perhaps even to 
transfer fuel to let Columbia go into a higher parking orbit until 
repairs could be arranged.)

But the ostrich was strutting and now NASA is dying.

--Tim May
"Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David 
Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11