Kathy Sawyer has a long, but worth-reading description of Columbia’s last flight. It provides a hint of what will come out in the CAIB report on Tuesday.

…Don L. McCormack Jr., a senior structural engineer, gave the management team its first formal report on the foam strike: “As everyone knows, we took the hit . . . somewhere on the left wing leading edge.” The review was still going on, he told Ham, and “we’re talking about looking at what you can do, uh, in event we really have some damage there but . . .”

Ham interjected. “Hey, just a comment. I was just thinking that our flight rationale [for going ahead with launching after the foam strike in October was] that the material properties and density of the foam wouldn’t do any damage . . .” She suggested looking at that data and also the data from a 1997 flight where there had been debris damage.

McCormack agreed and noted that on the earlier mission, “we saw some fairly significant damage area” on the wing — but on the glassy ceramic tiles that cover the underside of the orbiter, not to the carbon fiber panels on the leading edge.

Returning to Columbia’s situation, Ham continued, “And really, I don’t think there is much we can do, so you know it’s not really a factor during the flight…”

Sound familiar?

And this was disturbing:

Conventional wisdom among the engineers was that the RCC, designed to withstand higher temperatures than the tiles, was also more resistant to impact damage. But they really did not know. Nobody had tested the question. This fact had been clearly noted in Boeing’s written Jan. 23 assessment of the potential damage to Columbia: “No SOFI [spray on foam insulation] on RCC test data available.”

The engineers had, in effect, been guessing. And neither Ham nor any other manager challenged the conclusion.

[Late afternoon update]

Check out this related piece from Friday’s WaPo.

Ham, the lead flight director, has been singled out by board members and others for having deflected concerns about wing damage and for having failed to investigate the adequacy of the engineering analysis because — as she told reporters July 22 — she did not feel competent to do so. “For her to say ‘I don’t have the technical competence’ is just mind-blowing,” said Perrow. “She should either have stepped down or gotten someone to train her.”

Vaughan, at Boston College, criticized Ham’s self-described effort on the seventh day of the flight to chase down rumors that some engineers wanted to get imagery of the shuttle and to remind the engineers to go through authorized channels.

“Who would speak up in an environment like that?” Vaughan said. “There is no indication that management has been trained to ask for dissenting opinion. People are often reticent to come forward when they think it contradicts what they think management wants.”

Mind blowing indeed. A lead flight director who is self-admittedly not competent to “investigate the adequacy of the engineering analysis”?

I hate to say it, but considering this was Dan Goldin’s NASA, was this disaster caused, in part, by affirmative action?