As Peter Norvig was pointing out in the Making of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation, sometimes it pays to break the rules. He was refering to the fact that had Abraham Lincoln made his Gettysburg address with Powerpoint (the traditional tool used to convey information these days) it may not have been as memorable. How many times has one gone through one of these powerpoint presentations which could never provide an adequate understanding of the subject at hand ?
For the Columbia, it was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. How easy was it for that presentation to NOT convey the fact that previous experiments had been performed with very small foam samples ? Hindsight is always 20/20 and as Feynman had done before (this is nicely narrated in What do you care what other people think ? ), one needed only one test to realize how bad the destruction on the wing was (such test was performed last July in San Antonio - one can see the leading edge of the wing before the test and after the test.)
Our Starnav 1 camera took pictures above that left wing for about five days. Because the camera was not designed to look for details too close to the spacecraft, we will never know if what we see in that first pictures ten hours into the flight had any relevance (for those interested, this is the photo of the beta series in this white paper.) What is for sure though is that even though we were at Mission Control, it sure did not look like to any of us that anything was amiss... Nobody broke the rule. Maybe we should have disappeared and talked more in the halls after the first coffee break.
