GaryP

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Foam shot at a fiberglass mock-up of a space shuttle wing knocked loose a seal Thursday, providing hard evidence for accident investigators who suspect Columbia was doomed from liftoff by a debris strike.

The investigators suspect a seal along the leading edge of Columbia's left wing was damaged when a chunk of foam insulation from the spaceship's fuel tank slammed into it during launch.



http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp..._investigation

sakrilege

When I was an employee of Martin Marietta, the ET contractor, I worked with many people who had done work on Apollo and Skylab. Many of them were quite unhappy about the multiple component design of the shuttle (ET, SRBs, Orbiter) as compared to the single unit as was Apollo. There were other bids that were for a single component shuttle. The challanges of keeping the components from interfering with each other during the launch never were totally resolved. That's not to say that a single unit design would have been problem free, hindsight is easy. If I recall correctly, it was the low bid that won.