Word: foams
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...took the stage shortly after 11 p.m., the band decided to provide the audience with a reminder of its heavy-metal past. Sets of "gerbs"--sparking pyrotechnic fountains--shot up from the stage as the band kicked into its first song, Desert Moon. Within seconds, flames crawled up the foam-covered wall behind the band and spread to the 9-ft.-high ceiling. Thinking the blaze was part of the band's act, a few fans let out cheers...
...there were problems with the theory. First of all, the foam may seem as hard as a brick, but it isn't nearly as heavy. Even if the debris had been moving at 1,000 m.p.h. when it struck the shuttle's left side--about twice as fast as it was actually going--computer analyses suggested it could have done little damage. "It's difficult for us to believe...that this foam represented a safety issue," said shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore. That, at least, was the agency's position on Wednesday. On Thursday, however, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe...
...foam was not behind the disaster, the wheel well might have been. Some of the flaky temperature readings that came down from the ship in its last few minutes originated in the left well, leading to fears that explosive bolts intended to help lower the wheel if it became stuck might have blown, damaging the ship. But the very purpose of the bolts is to detonate in the wheel space and do so safely. What's more, the well temperatures rose only about 40ºF in the last minutes of the flight, worrisome but not nearly high enough to trigger...
...With the foam and the bolts moving down the list of likely causes, a meteor hit moved up. Few people suggest that a cataclysmic collision simply blew the ship out of the sky--not so low in the atmosphere, anyway. But up in orbit, a bad ding by a rogue rock could have done enough damage to cause serious drag as the ship descended through the atmosphere, and Columbia indeed heeled sharply to the left before it disintegrated. Pits and gouges in the protective tiles are common during flight; ships routinely pick up close to 100 of them...
...NASA last week, but space-agency employees remain worried. "It's really pretty somber here," says a NASA contractor at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "People are worried about layoffs, like after Challenger." In New Orleans, the work force at the Lockheed Martin plant that applies the foam to the shuttles' external tanks had already fallen from 4,800 before the Challenger explosion to 2,000 now. There's concern that Columbia's death could slash the payroll even further. Things are similarly glum in Chicago at the headquarters of Boeing, the shuttle's principal contractor, where workers...