Keith Cowing says that this is more bad news for NASA, but I disagree. If the cause was worker carelessness, at least we now know what it is, and it's easily fixable, by retraining workers, or hiring new ones. Ideally, of course, you'd like to have a system that's not so sensitive to the individuals who have to implement it, but at some point, the people are part of it, and you have to look for quality there as well.

Cowing cannot resist taking a whack at Griffin. It's an automatic jerk reaction like you get when you put voltage to the leg of a dead frog. Oddly, he was never really critical about O'Keefe. I wonder why that was?

Mr. Simberg is right about this foam issue--if this turns out to have been a manufacturing/handling flaw rather than a design flaw, then it can be remedied. However, it raises the equally serious question of quality control. QC was identified as a problem for the Columbia foam event, and one would expect that NASA would have fixed it. But have they? It is always easier to focus on technical issues, but it is the people issues that often predominate.

Cowing Berger cannot resist taking a whack at Griffin Cowing. It's an automatic jerk reaction like you get when you put voltage to the leg of a dead frog.

Oops - I guess I don't have HTML figgered out for this page. Meant to post

[Cowing] Berger cannot resist taking a whack at [Griffin] Cowing. It's an automatic jerk reaction like you get when you put voltage to the leg of a dead frog.

The joke doesn't work when you stumble on the punch line.