Was Columbia ‘PC’ed to death?
This September 2003 link comes from the
As recent news reports have pointed out, the wreck of the
Columbia was almost certainly due to a chunk of insulating foam prying loose and hitting some heat-protecting tiles, leaving the spacecraft vulnerable to intense heat upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.That is all the mainstream news–and
NASA –have been willing to report. What they have not said is that the foam in use at the time was a substitute, replacing a material that had previously worked well but containedFreon , a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned because of the ozone depletion scare.As Cato Institute adjunct scholar Steven Milloy reports, NASA could have sought an exemption. Freon, after all, is inert and nontoxic, and its connection to ozone depletion is tenuous at best. However, having been burned by EPA once before, NASA succumbed to what Milloy calls “PC foam.”
Milloy writes, “PC foam was an immediate problem. The first mission with PC foam resulted in 11 times more damaged thermal tiles on Columbia than the previous mission with Freon-based foam.”
The last time I pointed out a report suggesting that something considered environmentally friendly might not be, I was shouted down. Seriously, it was like I advocated clubbing baby seals to death. We’ll see how well-behaved the envirowackos are with this post.
From left to right: David M. Brown, Rick D. Husband, Laurel B. Clark, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, William C. McCool, Ilan Ramon.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
Perhaps yes perhaps no. What we’ve got here is failure to correlate. Not enough data to anything other than that someone is throwing around a lot of loaded terms in the quoted article.
Here
Pishaw… you and your facts. I mean mediamatters? When do they ever competently and completely research/debunk anything?
Well, at least we know who the folks at the Heartland Institute are listening too…Oxycontin man!
Who gives a Royal Sh*t, anyhow? We might as well take the billions given to NASA and dump the buckaroos into Kickapoo Creek. What a joke. If a bunch of people hadn’t died because of this stupidity, it would almost be perversely funny. But, it ain’t.
The bureaucracy killed Columbia, just like it killed Challenger.
Foam has been hitting the shuttle since STS-1 in 1981. That was a no-no in the flight rules book, but the exceptions were made and kept getting made. I enjoy reading the minutia of post-flight reports, and there were always 100+ dings in the tile, some bigger than the current ding the MSM is currently agog about, after every flight.
No, 14 men and women died because the damn thing was designed poorly back in 1972. What is amazing is that those techs on the ground who service this thing have been able to keep it running as well as they have for as long as they have.
Steven Milloy??? That man has been bought and sold about a thousand times over. He’s a bigger whore than the street walkers down on Adams.
Seriously, Billy … if you’re going to keep calling environmentalists “envirowackos”, you need to find a more reliable source than Milloy and his cronies to back up your claims.
I notice how the detractors don;t address the premise but only the origin of the article.
http://tinyurl.com/yvaj9g
This article does not cite references.
Knight: Some environmentalists ARE enviro-wackos. They like to burn SUV’s or better yet destroy our economy. Then there guys like the former heads of Greenpeace and The Sierra Club…
Whenever a new drug study comes out, I always look askance at the data published by the drug company about their own product. They’re trying to sell their product, and they’ve got a lot riding on the success. Despite oversight, data points get dropped and side effects get overlooked. The drug companies are biased reporters when it comes to their own products.
Milloy’s bread is buttered by the world’s biggest polluters. I’m not just flinging poo and calling people un-American as the current Republican leadership is apt to do. Milloy is an unquestionably biased source when it comes to environmental matters.