Wow. I was just thinking about the Columbia disaster earlier today and how "they probably sabotaged it". When it happened in 2003 I remember hearing the narrative that the shuttle program and technology was old and out of date" etc.
So today I was thinking "What does it matter if it was an older program… Its the same SPACE. If it worked before it should still work the same.
And then it was easy to see that they used the disaster as a reason to shut down the shuttle program, diminish NASA role and begin steering programs to the new private companies like SPACEX. Private companies that can be owned by anyone with their own agendas.
A quick look at wikipedia shows that they took the freon out of the foam insulation, perhaps weakening it and also abandoned the white pain for the fuel tank leaving the insulation exposed. Assuming this was the actual cause of the disaster