62 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
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62 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
Still from Ground Camera
LOOK AT THE IMAGES, WHAT HAPPENED?
The truth is you simply don't know. If you are puzzling over the
strength of tiles, you have been misdirected. There is video footage of
some sort of impact on a wing mostly covered in white tiles, and a slide
describing the effect of a benign sounding ‘foany hitting those tiles. But
what is the evidence for an impact on a tile? The shuttle is certainly not
made entirely from tiles; I can see a window in the picture. You should
instead be asking more questions, “What happened?” “What hit what?”
and “How bad is that?”
It was bad. The foam, a very tough material, had hit the leading edge
of the wing, a weak point, punching a hole through it. The wing failed
on reentry and tore the shuttle apart. Clearly, a full discussion of the
possibilities did not occur amongst the shuttle team, or perhaps it only
happened amongst the engineers in private. Once the analysis was tidied
up and presented to ‘management’ it was a one-way communication of
the conclusions, not a discussion of the underlying ambiguous thought
process. The result: people passively listened to the information rather
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015752
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