They were hired right off the street just for this job, gluing foam ramps on a tank. None of the eight of them had any experience with work like this but they had four hours of training and some practice in a test area the day before. Now they were on scaffolding next to the actual tank with the equipment.

Jen and Mark were a team. Jen located the proper piece while Mark applied the adhesive with a sprayer let it dry for exactly a minute and then he and Jen pressed the foam into the spot. The inspector watched as they applied the first several pieces and moved on to the next team.

As he left the plant that evening he ran into another worker. They had burgers and a couple of beers together. Jeff laughed as they talked. The job was predicted to take two weeks when they were hired. There is no way they would be done in that time. Mark looked back at him. “Jen and I are right on schedule. Are you goofing off?”

“Actually we would be doing better but we spent over two hours refilling the sprayer. We asked if they could give us a bigger one.”

“How many times did you fill it?”

“Five. And it is empty now. It takes over twenty five minutes to refill it and get the nozzle clear.”

“You have refilled five times?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well, we refilled once just after noon.”

The next morning Mark approached the inspector with the information. “Gee. You should be using more adhesive. Let me look.” He took the sprayer and checked the setting on the nozzle. “Gee, this is set to one. It should be set to five. Did you turn it?”

“No. They told me it was set right.”

The inspector checked a document. “It should be at five. I’ll set it for you.”

“What about the ones we put on yesterday?”

“I will check with management on it.”

By the end of the day Jen and Mark were behind. Refilling the sprayer had taken over two hours a day. When the inspector came by Mark asked him about the foam they had installed the day before.

“It’s fine. They told me we are really putting on a lot more glue than is needed. It makes it simpler to get the foam to stick but it isn’t needed to keep it on.”

Jen and Mark finished the tank two days later and moved on to a second one. As they signed off the paperwork for the tank Jen pointed to something on the sheet. It said, “STS-107″. “Do you know what that means?”

“STS followed by a number is the shuttle flight designation. Challenger was something like STS-51. I remember that from school.”

Over a year later.

Mark and Jen were planning a wedding and today they would be picking rings. As they were headed for lunch they passed a TV display in the mall and saw the reports of the Columbia crashing. The bottom of the screen showed the designation, STS-107. Jen grabbed Mark’s hand. “Wasn’t that the number on the first tank we did, the one that the sprayer was set wrong?”

“Yes.”

“Could we have done something wrong?”

“It crashed on the way down, not on the way up. That tank fell into the ocean minutes after launch. If there was something wrong with it the shuttle would have been damaged on the launch.”

“Thank God we didn’t have anything to do with it.”

This story is completely fiction – but it could have happened this way.