Posted 9:41 AM by Blah blah

Hi to those of you coming here from Joe Club! You guys crack me up!

Photos and Videos from Inside the Columbia Space Shuttle. Foam?

I'm watching the memorial service on NASA TV live.

Sigh. This really makes the death of the astronauts hit home with me: from NASA's shuttle page, see individual bios of the crew, plus

-Crew photos from Day 12 and
-Videos of crewmembers on Day 15. They sounded so upbeat and enthusiastic.
-The start of 16 pages of videos from the flight. This page and this page show the launch, and this page shows the crew talking to the press.

Sadly, NASA now thinks that a piece of foam that peeled off the space shuttle's external fuel tank, during launch, MAY have damaged its heat protecting tiles enough to cause the accident. Engineer's '97 Report Warned of Damage to Tiles by Foam (NY Times).

NASA photo of particles hitting the shuttle's left wing.

This piece of foam was maybe three to four feet long and weighed less than three pounds. Turns out the shuttle "tiles were only two inches deep," but "the impact could have damaged a swath of tile as large as 7 inches wide and 32 inches long, according to an agency memorandum made public yesterday."

Very sad. If so, it means the astronauts were doomed from the very beginning of liftoff, or at least after they first entered space. What is this "foam" they talk about? Something soft like styrofoam??? I assume that at the shuttle's incredible speeds for liftoff, even a three pound object would hit it with a hugely damaging force, like a rock might hit your car on the freeway.

"The report went on to speculate as to why the foam dropped off. As it turned out, to be environmentally friendly, NASA had eliminated the use of Freon in foam production, Mr. Katnik reported. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., later concluded that the absence of Freon led to the detachment of the foam. While the formulation was later improved, the episode revealed potentially dangerous new ways in which tiles could be damaged. " [From a 1997 engineer's report on a previous launch of the shuttle Columbia.] Very ironic.

As many people said this weekend, we are so used to space travel being predictable and "safe" that we forget how really fragile everything is, including human life. I wonder what happens usually when space junk and rocks in space strike the shuttle? It must be travelling at least tens of thousands of miles per hour in orbit! Amazing.