62 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? Foam Debris f i . 7 et — > 4 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