Space Shuttle victim of Environmentalism?

Very interesting article about how Freon is no longer used to make the foam used on the external fuel tanks on the space shuttle and how it has caused problems since the change back in 1997, a more environmentally friendly shuttle.

According to NASA engineer Greg Katnik, the 1997 tile incident was traced to an important change in the shuttle foam. Prior to 1997, the foam was made using Freon. After Freon was banned because of concerns about its potential to deplete the ozone layer, NASA switched to a new kind of "environmentally safe" foam. A 1997 report by Katnik described photographs that showed massive amounts of foam missing from the fuel tank after launch. If the new foam helped protect the ozone layer, its impact would be so tiny as to be immeasurable. The possibility remains that its impact on Columbia could have brought down the shuttle. NASA hopes that recovering key fragments of the left wing will provide vital clues to what happened. Those fragments might be very difficult to find if they are what people saw separating from Columbia over California and Arizona.