At one point, the tiles also fell victim to deliberate sabotage. NASA had once ensured that all contracted employees working on what it called “life-dependent systems” of the manned program—the failure of which would kill astronauts—were subject to full background checks. But budget cuts meant that the agency could no longer afford such thorough vetting. As a result, NASA did not know that Rockwell had begun running a small, part-time program employing formerly incarcerated men to glue the insulation tiles on the orbiter. To their horror, random quality-control inspection at the Rockwell plant
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