Once Columbia reached orbit, mid-level engineers in Houston made three requests to repeat the kind of remote inspection performed during John Young and Bob Crippen’s test flight in 1981, using Pentagon spy satellites to capture images of the suspect area of the left wing. But two of the requests were denied by senior managers, and the third never came to the attention of the correct officials due to a breakdown in communication. There were repeated email exchanges between concerned structural engineers in the various parts of NASA’s sprawling technical bureaucracy, but their worries were also
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