If you saw that CNN special at 8:00pm
[EST] last night, first aired on May/2001, about a news-documentary on
shuttle preparations made at KSC,
you might have been left with the same impression, and left with the same questions that I was.

Two of the NASA employees focused on in that documentary were Mike DeAngelo and Gene Nurnberg.
Mike DeAngelo's job working on the
space-shuttle DISCOVERY's vulnerable, complex and expensive internal rocket-engine systems with no obvious hair-net or hair-cap on to keep strands of his long graying hair from falling
onto or into the maze of propulsion-components was both puzzling
and...alarming.
For instance, JPL's employees, working
on unmanned space-craft being assembled wear clinically-clean
garments, masks, and elastic hair-caps to keep so much as a smudge, exhaled
vapor and or strands of hair off of delicate components on JPL spacecraft.

Another question, raised by
Mike DeAngelo's remark that the space-shuttle mechanical/propulsion systems are not "mechanic friendly",
is WHY weren't the space-shuttles made more "mechanic friendly"?

And finally, since that CNN documentary
focused on the Space Shuttle DISCOVERY,
which [ominiously and ironically] lost
one heat-tile on one of its aerilons
during some spaceflight [in late 1999/early 2000?], why weren't quick-reaction contingencies developed
to spot and deal with any potential heat-tile problem for a shuttle in orbit?

Jacob