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?

Depends.

Under the old school, clearly competent people were kept down because they didn't fit the mold because of their race or sex or some other obviously "disqualifying" factor.

Now what factors are "disqualifying" can be more subtle. For instance, people who aren't automatically "yes" people tend to have a harder time of it. For instance, I know highly qualified women who have quit the field because of an atmosphere of lies and abuse. Not abuse based upon sex, but abuse all the same.

Are things worse now than before Goldin? I think they are. But that's mostly because of the way the field is organized. If Goldin had decided, instead of promoting affirmative action, to resist it as much as possible, compliant males would have been found to carry out orders.

This source describes Ham as "a 21-year NASA veteran, former flight director and one of the highest ranking women in the high-pressure world of human space flight operations" and suggests that she is being scapegoated. What was her career path? Does anyone have any information which might indicate that she was, or was not, being promoted to meet a quota?

I don't know the circumstances surrounding Linda Ham's career, but I do know from personal experience that safety questions originating outside NASA (from consultants and contractors) are often greeted with scorn, because of the prevailing NASA assumption that they are the only smart people in the world. I've also watched (during meetings prior to developmental tests) as higher-level managers stepped on their engineers' qualms about failure modes, because taking them seriously would have schedule impacts. It's ugly.

The guys in the trenches (and I'd include Ham) aren't the problem (or not much of it, anyway); it's the higher-ups pushing schedule above all who contribute most to the disasters, IMHO.

I don't want to join the crowd in scapegoating Ham, but seriously, can you imagine Glynn Lunney or Gene Kranz in this scenario?

"He deflected concerns about wing damage and failed to investigate the adequacy of the engineering analysis because -- as he told reporters -- he did not feel competent to do so."

I don't disagree with you, Rand. In the present-day NASA it's hard to find people of Lunney's and Kranz's caliber -- either male or female. It's not that they're filling the slots with quota hires, it's that they're filling them with kids just out of college, who grow up inside NASA and never know any better. They're told they're the only bright people around, and shown how to do the job... wrongly, altogether too often.

I read Jay's link and parts of the Gehman Report, and one thing stood out: Ham wasn't doing anything that wasn't routine for her post -- she was just doing the normal job, the one her own managers expected her to do and praised her for doing. I honestly think she thought she was doing the right thing, in all her actions; she may have been a fool for thinking so, but then the more perceptive NASA-ites tend to leave after a while... which is part of how they got into this mess.

It's more properly an indictment of the "NASA culture", the one which Frederick Gregory, NASA's deputy administrator, found so difficult to define (see the 05:15 p.m., 08/05/03 update in Jay's link). And it's not going to change while people like Gregory are running the joint.

If you suspect you are incompetent aren't you supposed to step aside? Have you ever heard of anyone doing that? Of course not. Linda Ham wasn't about to give up such a position. High level people clearly in over their heads compensate by wearing their authority like a sword.

I assume she's a human being and entitled to all of the failings that come with the title. I can't buy the argument that she is a scapegoat. The text of the CAIB report indicates that she is clearly culpable. However, she had lots of company who shared her occupational situation.

She should have been removed before someone got hurt. For that matter, the CAIB reports identifies quite a few people that should have gone with her.

Here are the facts folks, I am a shuttle technician in Florida and work tile as well as mechanical. Linda Ham in our opinion is no scapegoat she is as quilty as can be for these astronauts deaths. There were not many out here at the cape who did not think that shuttle wasnt seriously damaged by the foam. I personally had many long conversations with my engineers as to the extent of the damage early on into this flight. How Ms Ham could not have known this shuttle was not seriously damaged shows her utter inexperience or plain criminal negligence. For her to remain in NASA is a disgrace.