When it was first mentioned at conference about landing gear door strike by foam, NASA refused to discuss it. Then they called it wheel well or recess.
Why not call a door a door?
Here's my best guess. There are some things that go wrong with a plane that can be fixed with minimum amount of problems and get back flying and there are some things that ground the plane just about forever.
The easy things are pilot error and weather. Blame the pilot or god and get back to work.
The middle things are one off problems like repair doublers or jackscrew grease or oxygen cannisters.
The hard things are those which mean the plane can't fly again without big design changes that make it impractical to fly again.
Wiring is one such problem with Boeing airliners. The wiring is known to be faulty and causes bad things to happen like autopilot disconnect, fires, and cargo doors to open. To replace faulty wiring is so expensive and disruptive to interior that the military just grounded the planes but the airlines didn't and keep on flying them...all the while trying as best they can to minimize the problem in their minds...by not going down any investigative path that leads to the identification of the problem which means something must be done...and that would be grounding them. It's not a conspiracy, it's just not working real hard to discover a terrible truth especially when working less leads to an easier answer, suicidal foreign pilot, or foreign bomber, or act of god with static electricity.
So, wiring goes unreported and always evaded as root cause of Boeing 747 accidents.
Now to the shuttle. The tiles have to be there or plane burns up. Shuttle is plane when landing, the first accident was in the rocket phase. The tiles have to stay. So the tiles can not be a problem because if they are, the plane gets grounded.
The landing gear doors have to be there or the plane can't land. So the doors can't be a problem.
So, any discussion about tiles and doors is played down, evaded, passed off, and dismissed.
The two real problems met with the shuttle crash. So, they have to be dismissed and replaced with an act of god meteorite. If accepted that tiles are vulnerable and landing gear doors can never be completely sealed because they have to open to get gear down to land, then the problem is so great the shuttles have to be grounded.
No shuttles flying, no jobs. No jobs, no high life, no status for the Shuttle Program Director. So, no problems with tiles and doors.
No conspiracy, just real interest in the problem being something else that lets everyone keep their jobs and status and the only ones losing their lives are the crew...once in a while, like passengers in airliners.
That's why when I heard the code phrase 'no stone unturned' I said, uh oh, denial mode is happening. The search for political easy satisfying explanation is on, and no stone unturned to find one.
They found one. For planes it's called re-entry thing as in Pan American World Airways Flight 103
1.17.4 Space debris Four items of space debris were known to have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on 21 December 1988. Three of these items were fragments of debris which would not have survived re-entry, although their burn up in the upper atmosphere might have been visible from the Earth's surface. The fourth item landed in the USSR at 09.50 hrs UTC.
So for shuttle, they are finding all sorts of things that could hit it and destroy it and make everyone blameless but god.
NASA>In his briefing Mr Dittemore said investigators had studied video of the launch and the moment the foam hit the wing and were now trying to improve the quality of the pictures. But he said from what they could see already, there were "no gross, large areas of damage" to the wing.
JBS>The problem is under the wing which can't be seen by any camera or person. Of course there was no visible damage to the top of visible wing, the foam/ice struck underneath it as shown by the camera footage.
Boeing 747s need cargo doors even though outward opening non plug type doors and poly X wiring are known to be faulty. To fix those known problems is to ground them and that is unacceptable.
So, we have investigations that lead to crazy pilots or bombers or static electricity or scratches and cracks. No conspiracy, just wishful thinking by all involved that the problems are one off type events, not fleet wide.
Barry