[cynwoody]

Skynews website has a British scientist quoted as saying that NASA knew this ending was going to happen after finding out about the damaged tile, but couldn't do a damn thing about it.

Typical fourth estate BS. This crash occurred during the period of maximum dynamic stress on the ship. It will probably turn out to be structural failure caused by a heavy cargo load and spacecraft aging. The foam will likely turn out to be unrelated. Didn't early shuttle flights routinely come back with missing tiles?

If NASA had known the ship was in danger, they would have at least instructed the crew to dump the cargo and lighten the load. If they were convinced it wasn't coming back, they could have perhaps sent the Discovery up to rescue the crew and then made a probably futile attempt to auto pilot the Challenger back to Vandenberg (or some other destination where a breakup would occur over water).

[OReilly]

Typical fourth estate BS.

Typical NASA Group Think...

[aristeides]

Does anybody know why the load was so heavy? This was a flight to conduct scientific experiments, wasn't it? So was the load the gear needed for those experiments? If so, then, if the load was the problem, it would seem the plan was to conduct more experiments than was safe.

[OReilly]

All of your statements have been made by Non Auronautical Engineers, that were not on the NASA Defense team. Your only defense is that they didn't think there was a problem.

All the Defenders have said they couldn't lighten the load....etc.

[Mogger]

Is this the second time a school teacher was on a shuttle flight?

If I recall correctly, the FIRST schoolteacher in space was on the Challenger when it went down.

Now this perhaps the SECOND teacher in space?

Perhaps school teachers are just plain bad luck to have aboard.

[jlogajan]

This crash occurred during the period of maximum dynamic stress on the ship. It will probably turn out to be structural failure caused by a heavy cargo load and spacecraft aging.

Actually, the dynamic load is only about 1.5g. Engineers actually have a pretty good handle on aircraft structures under such modest loads. Also the initial sensor troubles happened 7 minutes before breakup.

Tiles are the great unknown. I'd suspect them first. Secondly, not knowing the systems, I'd wonder if there were any internal systems that could self-destruct with catastrophic results.