Latest Breaking News On - Ron dittemore - Page 1 : vimarsana.com

-okay. good morning. we're ready for roll. -in a meeting, there's 20, 30 people in the room. there's people joining from kennedy. there's people from huntington beach, california, representative from engineering, a representative from the crew. the chairman of the meeting was linda ham. -she basically ran this mission. -if there were going to be any changes, she headed up this team that would have to approve any changes. -she was effectively the deputy to ron dittemore, the program manager in those days. linda has excellent judgment, can grasp complicated problems very quickly. she was the first woman to be certified as a flight director.

"ron, let me just remind you, ok? we had a clear understanding that we are not gonna eliminate anything until the data has come in to definitively eliminate it." -to bring that out and dismiss it, you know, pre-emptively, i think speaks volumes. at the very least they had to acknowledge it. but it was acknowledging their own mistakes and that's hard to do. ♪ -each week there was a new trailer load of debris showed up, came right in this hangar through those doors, and it would be catalogued and then put out on the floor. i want to know what the debris is telling us, i want to know what the aerodynamics are telling us, and i want to know what the sensors are telling us. you follow the debris, what's it telling you? ♪

before we schedule the next launch." -in other words, again, they were thinking it was more of a turnaround issue. and so, it wasn't preventing shuttle flights from going forward. -the pressure on the management team to stay on schedule and the concept of, "it's just foam" is leading the charge through all of this. -so, it wasn't like they weren't talking about issues at all, but there certainly was a big focus on the -- on the schedule. -here's an e-mail, it's tuesday january 21st, this was sent six days into the columbia mission. this is a private exchange between linda ham and ron dittemore, two of the top managers in the program. "the rationale for flight for the sts-112 loss of foam

asking me to see if i could find out some more information. nasa does not own any military satellites, but at that time we had a close working relationship with the patrick air force base, so i put in a request with them. -there's a lot of work to get a photo. one would have to interrupt the mission to get the right lighting, to make sure you're over, the right satellite is in position. and then now you have an army of people on the ground. we have to reorient the shuttle for the proper exposure angles and all that. and to do that means they may have to terminate their science experiments. in a program manager's mind, that's responsible for getting shuttles up there on schedule, if you interrupt the science mission, you have the ire of all the people and the science objectives were now ruined. and that looks badly on nasa.

there's got to be another reason. -well, how can he say that? where is he getting that from? what a big denial. -to be certain it was foam is nonsense, right? but to be certain it wasn't foam is equally nonsense. right? and that's what they were saying. "it's not foam." well, how do you know? -i know from the accident investigation team's perspective, no one was gonna go public and say, "we know what didn't happen." -you get that shot right there? that's a nasa official. he's holding a piece of foam, which he is now saying could not have had enough impact 'cause it's too light to have damaged those tiles that we've been talking about. -i knew ron. i had respect for ron. ron was linda ham's boss and a good manager. but what's always the first step in grief? denial. -i called ron and i said,

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