Perhaps I was a little too brief in my writeup. Nobody that I know (certainly not me) went to MAF and downdressed any of the workers. What happened was that the conclusion was reached in engineering and management meetings and the word filtered out to the workers that poor workmanship was the proximate cause of the loss of Columbia – as if there wasn’t enough blame to go around in many other areas. I really regret the erroneous conclusion, the impact it made on the workers, and the way the whole scenario played out at MAF. The people there were very hard working, dedicated, and proud of their involvement with America’s space program, many of them second or third generation workers at that location. Now, of course, they have all been laid off and the MAF plant is virtually a ghost town with very limited work going on there for other NASA or commercial projects.