Even with Feynman's carefully reasoned essay, the next shuttle disaster was a mirror of the first: chunks of foam falling of each flight, careful monitoring but no serious action until the foam resulted in a loss of a vehicle.
The first loss was after careful monitoring of near-burn throughs of the SRB o-rings on many flights, but no decisive action.
It really astounded me when I learned no shuttle was inspected for damage while in orbit until after the loss of the Columbia.
The shuttle was an experimental vehicle. It was their job to gather as much data as possible on it. With that, the foam problem would have become evident long before the deaths of the Columbia crew.
> It really astounded me when I learned no shuttle was inspected for damage while in orbit until after the loss of the Columbia.
Atlantis was hit by tank insulation during launch of STS-27 (1988). While in space, the astronauts inspected the tiles using a camera mounted on the Canadarm. Hoot Gibson says that it "looked like it had been blasted by a shotgun." They were convinced that they were going to die on re-entry, and Gibson had even planned what he'd say to Houston in his final transmission before he died.
They got very, very lucky. There were 700 damaged tiles, but only one missing tile. And the one missing tile just happened to be over an antenna mounting bracket, which made the structure stronger than the rest of the wing. If the foam had hit just a couple of tiles over, then they would've died.
This was the second flight after the Challenger disaster. It might have ended the Shuttle program, right then and there.
Another account can be found in Mike Mullane's memoirs, Riding Rockets. Mullane was a mission specialist on STS-27, and operated the Canadarm during the tile inspection. He says that he kept thinking about the tiles, and had trouble sleeping. Hoot Gibson advised him: "No reason to die all tensed up."
Remember -- STS-27 was the second mission after the Challenger explosion. Not enough time yet for complacency to have set in. In addition, Mike Mullane had an it-was-absolutely-not-an-affair-we-were-just-friends relationship with Judy Resnick. So he knew very personally just how dangerous the Shuttle could be.
As I recall, part of the rationale, was that even if there was an issue, there was literally zero way for it to be fixed. So now you spend the next 2-3 days in the shuttle, "doing your job" knowing that you will not return alive. With that in mind, the though initially was, "let's just not check".
Not true, there would've been options available. After the loss of Columbia, engineers came up with two ways to save the crew: a rescue mission, and an emergency repair EVA.
The rescue mission would've been hazardous, but the expected loss of life would have been negative. (More likely to save seven astronauts on the Columbia than to lose two astronauts on the rescue mission.) The repair would've been jury-rigged and may not have worked, but it would have been better than reentering without attempting to repair the damage.
Once you'd inspected the Shuttle, you'd know that it was in pretty bad shape. And then you've have moved into Apollo 13 mode -- how do we come up with a way to save the crew? And maybe it would've worked. It's only because the Shuttle was not inspected that NASA proceeded as though nothing were wrong.
Incidentally, they had the STS-27 astronauts check for tile damage, back in 1988. The astronauts were convinced that they were going to die on re-entry, but they still did their jobs for the rest of the mission.
This also means that NASA had 15 years to develop in-orbit repair methods before Columbia needed them. But nothing was done in this area either.
While it may have made sense in the pre-Mir days, it made none whatsoever on missions that serviced space stations. Knowing the extent of damage possible during ascent would have changed the rules by which shuttles operated.
The first loss was after careful monitoring of near-burn throughs of the SRB o-rings on many flights, but no decisive action.