Foam strikes happen all the time and we've never lost a craft, please stop making hyperbolic worst-case assessments about a non-issue, it won't help your career path (or mine).
Can you explain? My comment was in the context of Columbia.
“An investigation board determined that a large piece of foam fell from the shuttle's external tank and breached the spacecraft wing.”[1]
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt with your definition of “we”. But your tone seems to point directly to the types of biases I referred to. It’s worthwhile to research the history of the industry as an whole.[2] Prior to the disaster, do you know NASAs response? “Foam shedding happens all the time…it’s ‘in family’ and not a problem.” It was still out of spec for a good reason. The term from the investigation report is “normalization of deviance”.
It seems even as technology progresses, we’ll still be anchored by faults in human psychology.
I think it was an attempt to illustrate the biases that play in and cause safety regulation to be written in blood. Either an attempt at a quote from within NASA, or actually one (I am insufficiently familiar with the entire background of the broken tile to say).
