Long story in Sept. 25 NY Times talks about efforts by concerned technical staff at NASA to obtain images of the vehicle while in orbit - all rejected by various levels of management . Describes a series of questionable top-down decisions ranging from "launch fever" to "chicken little" to the rationale
for not gathering information to detect a worst-case situation: "Well, if it's that bad, there's not a damn thing we can do about it."
Fine safety culture, huh?
direct to story url does not seem to compat with pprune front-end: (but it works)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/na...=all&position=
NYT Gateway URL