posted 07-20-2008 03:55 AM               

After Conrad's crew confirmed that one of the solar "wings" was ripped off was there any investigation to determine the exact cause?

posted 07-22-2008 12:09 PM               

Regarding the second, per Homesteading Space:

While the rescue effort was underway, an investigation was started into the causes of the failure. The Board of Investigation was chaired by Bruce T. Lundin, Director of NASA's Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center and presented its findings on 30 July.

The board determined that the most probable cause of the failure was pressurized air under the shield forcing the forward end of the shield away from the Workshop and into the supersonic air stream, which tore the meteoroid shield from the Workshop. The report stated that this was likely due to flaws in the way the shield was attached to the Workshop, which allowed in air.
...
In addition, testing focused on deployment, rather than performance during launch.

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posted 07-22-2008 12:39 PM               

As I recall, while JSC tends to run all its manned spacecraft hardware through the ringer during testing, supposedly MSC did not and Skylab was run out of their office with very little input from the JSC side except for the on orbit stuff. The turf war between the two centers revolves around the perception that JSC designs spacecraft while MSC designs rocket boosters.