Some students at Utah Valley State College claim that NASA’s report on the Columbia disaster is covering up the true cause.
… sensors in the wheel well near the left wing began to heat up at the same time sensors on the wing started going offline. MacLean and his students reached the conclusion that the left wing experienced a structural failure and broke off the shuttle due to overuse and fatigue. …
… MacLean, Seals and another student, Gordon Campbell Jr., believe NASA administrators are using the foam to deflect scrutiny of the age of the space shuttle fleet, which they say is a sign of mismanagement.
Well, I’m not big on conspiracy theories, and I don’t know the details of what they are alleging. However, one quote caught my attention:
“We don’t drive 20-year-old vehicles. We put them in space,” said Seals, a safety coordinator at Mountain States Steel who is majoring in technology management. “We had a classic car show at UVSC this spring. We should have had a space shuttle there.”
Seals (a student) reveals by this quote that he doesn’t know much about the aircraft industry. (And the shuttles are a lot more like aircraft than cars.)
Yes, most 20-year-old cars are in bad shape. But what about planes? Well, according to this, the U.S. Air Force’s B-52H bomber averages about thirty-four years of service.
If every time you drove your car, you had a mechanic go over it, examining everything, replacing parts that seemed worn, etc., then you’d expect your car to be doing pretty well after twenty years. The care and maintenance that people put into their cars is nothing when compared to the amount that goes into each shuttle between flights.
So, does this mean the students are wrong? No. But it gives me the impression that their analysis is probably too superficial.
(Note: This entry was originally published on my now-defunct political blog, Attilathepundit.com.)