Tom over at the Alleywriter asks:

Why wasn?t the flight of the Columbia aborted immediately after that piece of foam struck the craft?s wing? There is, supposedly, always at least two locations set up for emergency landing of the shuttle in case of just such a problem.

The only answer I can come up with is money. It costs a lot of money to get a shuttle mission off. It takes a lot of time and a lot of preparation. Some pencil-necked engineer put money ahead of safety and it cost us a shuttle and 7 astronauts. His penny-pinching has cost far more than a dozens of aborted missions.

I love all these Monday-morning quarterbacks. Particularly when they don’t even understand the rules of the game.

Tom, just because you can’t come up with any other answer doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.

Consider the possibility that a) they didn’t know if the damage was a problem, since this had happened before with no problems, b) aborts are extremely risky, and have never been even attempted, let alone successfully completed and, most importantly, c) they didn’t know about the insulation hitting the vehicle until the next day, after it was already in orbit, because they only found out by reviewing launch films.

In any event, “dozens of aborted missions” would in fact cost much more than the loss of an orbiter and crew, particularly when one considers that at least some of those aborts would probably result in loss of vehicle in themselves, but even without considering that, it would come to many billions of dollars in reflights and ISS program delays.

He also thinks that NASA warned people away from debris because parts of the Shuttle are “classified.” This is nonsense. The entire Shuttle design is in the public domain. The only thing that was sensitive was the standard box used for encryption for communications, which, if found, might give someone an idea of exactly how we encrypt data, and thus help them break it.

Consider instead the possibility that NASA didn’t want the public tampering with key evidence, and perhaps ruining the investigation, which again, is the reality.

I wish that people would read the damned FAQ, instead of indulging in ignorant speculation and conspiratorial fantasies.