Because of William Lancewiesche's interesting Atlantic article, I read v. 1 of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report this weekend. The three most interesting points are the compromises made in designing the Shuttle compared to NASA's original goals, the pressure to keep shuttle flights on schedule to meet a '04 goal of completing part of the space station, and the decision not to image the shuttle in orbit using national intelligence assets. On this last point, my favorite sentence in the report is: "Program leaders spent at least as much time making sure hierarchical rules and processes were followed as they did trying to establish why anyone would want a picture of the Orbiter." There's some hindsight at work in the report; in particular, I'd like to know more about the other safety issues that were on the table during the flight and how the managers ranked those issues by safety significance. The CAIB gives glimpses, for example, of a 150 pound 'overweight' issue during orbit (i.e., the shuttle was too heavy).
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