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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (3125)	2/1/2003 12:05:02 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15987

Going to take years, if even then, to figure this out, IMO. Yeah, we will shortly get a "Press Conference" that will say nothing. What we can know at the moment is. 1) It happened during the hottest period of re-entry when we were out of communication with it. That means little or no telemetry to help in the investigation. 2) The most obvious guess would be a tile breakdown that lead to the heat buildup causing the craft to come apart. 3) The pieces we get will be so shattered that it will be doubtful if they are of much help in figuring out the cause. No "Black Box" out of this crash.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (3125)	2/1/2003 1:03:33 PM
From: Ish	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15987

<<as well as be remotely detonated from miles away.>> An aneroid detonator could have been used although it sounds like they hit the air layer a little off rather than a bomb. This will ground the shuttles and we have 3 men on the space lab.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (3125)	2/2/2003 1:23:31 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15987

Columbia WAS also the oldest Shuttle in the fleet, circa 1981. And this incident underlines the fact that we desperately need to build new orbiters to replace the shuttle fleet, and that NASA has been so drained in the past decade that it obviously can not do a proper job of ensuring safety and proper operation of manned space vehicles. These extremely complex machines are over 20 years old. People shouldn't have to die to drive home a point. Derek