After I made this post about the change in formulation of the foam that caused the Space Shuttle disaster, some people thought I was being paranoid by implying that NASA might remove potentially embarassing documents from its web site (“A 1999 NASA press release on the matter has been yanked off the web . . .”) It turned out that the press release in question had just been moved, but it also turns out that at least one NASA employee had the same thought I had.
According to the Associated Press,
NASA braced quickly for the intense investigation into the Columbia disaster, according to newly disclosed e-mails that include one proposal by a midlevel employee at headquarters for a “complete scrub” of the agency’s safety office Web site to remove outdated or wrong information.
. . .
“Has none done a complete scrub of the Code Q (safety division) Web pages to make sure they are current?” [NASA employee Wilson] Harkins wrote in a Feb. 6 e-mail. “Out-of-date or erroneous information is like chum in the water to reporters and congressmen. . . We wouldn’t want to be sucker punched by someone based on something we have posted.”
To its credit, NASA rejected such an obviously stupid suggestion.
As for whether or not the reformulation of the foam — done to comply with an EPA mandate for a foam that had fewer ozone-depleting chemicals — had anything to do with the accident, that remains an open question. As far as I can tell, the recently released report on the shuttle tragedy doesn’t address that matter at all, preferring a misguided focus on NASA’s internal culture (which is merely a symptom of the much larger problem of the way space exploration is mismanaged).
Source:
NASA worker proposed ‘scrub’ of web site. Ted Bridis, Associated Press, August 29, 2003.