I, the foam.scientist, struggle with the question, how to use this tragical story of science and endeavour. How to inject into the lab.drama the historical event of Columbia crashing. It feels like a very important little transition is missing: how to start this story and where does it come from?

Wings & foam have a complex relation: it’s the world turned on its head. The way foam flows, as compaired to usual fluids like gasses or liquids, is quite surprising. We’ll tell the story of the upside down wing.
(http://www.echobase.be/labOrint/index.php/foam/?title=foam-flows-versus-air-flows)

Wings are a poetic image for extacy, the permanent stage of us foam.scientists. Or are they? Muses don’t have wings. Our breath floats through the atmosphere in soap bubbles without wings. But perhaps the design approach can help. The shape of a wing as an example of thought figures?? As an example of how simple it can be: "turn it on its head and it works in a different context". I want to say how simple it is, just like switching your perception in the visual trick with figure and background: "is it a vase or two faces?".

The broken off bit of insulation foam of the fueltank hit and penetrated the insulation corbon/ceramics tile of the shuttle wing. The result is a dent in the heat shield of the wing, which eventualy is the cause of more heat when the wing cuts through the atmosphere. To be precice, the atmosphere at the dent will increase even more in temperature and turbulance, exceding the heat shield’s capacity . Thus the atmosphere will dig into the dent, to finally make a hole and the super-heated atmosphere will invade the interior space of the wing.

One can focus the story on the relation between the different walls: insulation foam, heat shield, atmosphere.

On the other hand, there’s the human tradegy and the response. The search for the cause, technical and strategical. The collection of the debris and tracing of responsabilities in a supposedly transparant organisation like NASA. Plus the global scale of the response, the frontpages announcing it all around the world!
Columbia = human factor / contamination in objective science <- versus -> foam as homo faciendo or factoris (the species is what it makes) But it’s no good to equate the human factor with a mistake, or even with the ungraspable.

And of course the whole Columbia tragedy is a hyperbole for the crush our two protagonists have for each other (or not). And my struggle is than focused on their relation to such a hyperbole. Humor, yes, but how to start the joke.

And in the margin of the story, there’s the saved hard disk with foam.data and the fire fighter turned black box hunter.