Re: R U kidding?
"Fouteen astronauts have already died because NASA managers though keeping to schedules (Challenger) or not wanting to make a hustle (Columbia) was more important than crew safety."
Ehm... no. The Challenger disaster was due to Thiokol management deciding to deliberately ignore the warnings of their engineers and sign off on the mission regardless of the risk the engineering department had informed them on. Granted, NASA questioned their earlier decision not to sign off on it, but they should have listened to their engineers and given NASA the finger. They didn't.. When Challenger exploded the Thiokol engineers were actually surprised that it had made it that far. So in the end it was a matter of Thiokol management making a "management decision" on an engineering issue they were not qualified to have an opinion about. Yes, NASA questioned Thiokol's advise to halt the launch, which did have to do with their desire to keep schedules. But in order to make that decision they relied on their contractor, and Thiokol had the power to refuse a sign-off. Also, Thiokol was at the time pretty much the only supplier of SRBs, so it wasn't like their position as a preferred supplier was at stake. At the end Thiokol management talked management with NASA management and as per usual the board room members decided that engineers are just a PITA who know about running a business.
The Columbia re-entry heatshield failure was also not a case of trying to keep schedules. Bipod foam loss had occurred regularly (on at least a dozen STS flights starting with STS-1 - yes, the first flight) and while it had received considerable attention, based on available data it was not considered enough of a flight risk to halt the program (which, given that STS-1 was the first flight that experienced bipod foam loss, it would have amounted to). The debris strike caused by the STS-106 bipod foam loss was not noticed until the second day in orbit. It had not been registered clearly by any camera and hard data was not available. Therefore the Flight Risk Management team attempted to assess the potential damage on the basis of computer model data provided by Boing. (Yes, that Boing.) However, Boing had tried that before and come up with grossly inaccurate results (specifically, previous software modeling attempts had indicated damage far greater than was actually the case) so the modeling data didn't have enough of a good reputation to carry any weight. Obtaining imaging data by the DoD could have helped to provide clarity, but that request was botched in an administrative SNAFU between various government institutions. So in the end, based on the fact that debris impact from foam loss had occurred at least a dozen times before, as had the inaccuracies in Boing's software modeling on damage to the heat shield tiles. So Columbia was cleared for re-entry. If it hadn't, a rescue mission would have been difficult in any case.
Was NASA to blame? Certainly. Were budget constraints a factor? Absolutely. Was complacency a factor in the consistent underestimation of risks stemming from bipod foam loss? Without a doubt. Did the Columbia disaster highlight the fact that the entire Space Shuttle program didn't have many real backup options to rescue the crew in case of a damaged orbiter? Definitely. Yes, in this case the mission could have been extended until another shuttle could have been used as a life boat, but at the expense of rushing another Shuttle to the pad to the point where some pre-launch checks would have to be skipped. It's easy to see why this wasn't done given the available data at the time and the understanding of same.
Errors were made, absolutely. And NASA was not blameless by any stretch of the imagination. But it wasn't a matter of NASA choosing to keep a schedule at the expense of crew safety.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
