Hello,

Spaceflight now has a detailed and interesting article on the next shuttle launch, the places where foam came loose, and the amount of foam "liberated" from the shuttle in total during liftoff.

"Engineers have not yet found any obvious manufacturing problems or defects that might explain the potentially catastrophic foam loss that marred shuttle Discovery's July 26 launching. While a variety of possible fixes are under study, it's not yet known how long it might take to identify root causes and as a result, there is virtually no chance of launching the next shuttle flight in September as originally planned, a top NASA manager said today...

"When you look at the amount of foam on the tank and the performance overall, the tank really did a pretty phenomenal job," he said. "When you look at it emotionally, you kind of feel one way. But then when you start looking at the hard engineering data, you sure get a different feeling. The tank was launched with 4,192 pounds of sprayed-on foam insulation. Ascent and post-separation photography showed just 1.2 pounds of foam was liberated. So in terms of the aggregate, that's a pretty small number, one out of 4,192," Gerstenmaier said. "It's still not the performance we'd really like, but it gives you a feel for how the tank performed overall."

In Raoul's post below, Homer Hickham states, ""You simply don't place a fragile bird at the base of a big, quaking nightmare of rocket engines and a massive, debris-shedding fuel tank and get anything but an engineering debacle," Hickam said before recommending the shuttle fleet to the junk heap."

I doubt NASA will ever put humans anywhere but above "rocket" fuel/the top of a rocket. The chances of debris falling is too great.

Regards, Vince