Aziz Poonawala has a theory about what happened to Columbia. He thinks that the left gear door opened in flight.

I’ve no opinion on that, and it may be true, but it then begs the question…why? How would such a thing happen, on this of all flights? It still doesn’t really solve the mystery.

But I’m really posting this to make this point. To me, it doesn’t matter that much what the proximate cause of the accident was. As I’ve said in various venues, what surprised me was not that it happened, but that it took so long to happen, and that NASA was lucky for so long.

The Shuttle, as a program, is now, and always has been, a failure, in terms of the original goals set out for it. Now, it is a dead program walking. It may fly for a few years now, but I suspect that at the end of the day there will be a consensus that we have to have different means (and I mean this word in the plural sense) of getting people to and from orbit. Different in the sense that it is safe, affordable, often, routine, and varied. No more monocultures.

My focus is not on the technical details of exactly what went wrong (I am a recovering engineer, after all) but on what we’re going to do to fix it, in a broad policy sense (not a Space Shuttle program sense).

I see this as a rare opportunity to actually change the tenor of the debate about space, and our future in it, and I’m going to emphasize issues relating to that, which I consider much more important. If you want blow-by-blow descriptions and theories of the forensics of the investigation, there will be many places to do so. This will not be one of them. I’m simply not that interested, which means that I won’t want to take the time to discuss it, and my opinion won’t count for much, because I’m not going to be paying much attention to it, except at the highest level, where there may be policy implications.

That is all.