Miles O’Brien:
It happened 16 days earlier on launch day; 81 seconds after Columbia left the pad, a suitcase sized piece of foam, part of the insulation covering the external fuel tank, hit the leading edge of the left-wing. Everyone saw it, including me at the launch site.
There was a piece of debris which struck the shuttle as it came off. And this is made of what's called carbon-carbon. If something fell on that and caused some damage, who knows what the implications of that might be.
As soon as I saw this video after launch, I called my NASA sources.
Engineers were looking at it. They determined looking, very closely at these high-speed, very close, close cameras that they have, that this was not a significant issue.
They said that foam had been flying off shuttle fuel tanks since day one.
How much had this been kind of ingrained into being something that just happens?
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