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What you do not seem to understand is that SPACE really is the ultimate frontier.

In fact it is far worse than any frontier here on Earth.

When our ancestors travelled beyond the bounds of civilization, they could only take with them that which they could carry, whether it be in a ship, a conestoga wagon, pack mule, or on their backs. If they didn't bring something produced by the technology of their civilization with them, they had to do without... or try to cobble a make-do out of natural products of the environment in which they found themselved. Thus, a needle might be made from a porcupine quill, a lamp out of clay, etc., to replace something not brought. They had it EASY compared to space pioneers!

Because of the very nature of space (Light years and light years of nothing but light years and light years), there ARE NO natural products available to be "cobbled" together into useful things. The Space Pioneers are TOTALLY LIMITED TO THE THINGS THEY BRING WITH THEM! Now add the fact that everything you bring had BETTER BE USEFUL AND NEEDED because it damn expensive to lift anything that isn't into orbit. It costs about $10,000 per pound of cargo to Low Earth Orbit. Very close planning is required because not only do you have limited cash, you have very limited storage for things you "WILL definately need" and adding things "just might need" has to be very carefully considered. Repair kits for certain things are categorized in a range from "definately need" to "totally useless."

The astronauts are also TIME limited when they are in orbit. They have a 16 day mission and certain things to accomplish in that time. They CANNOT spend 15 of those days merely checking things.

To avoid problems, the designers sacrifice some payload for redundancy... duplicate systems for absolutly critical equipment that MUST be operational for survival that CAN be duplicated. For other things, they pay top-dollar for the best that can be had. Some things are inherently non-redundantable (to coin an awkward word) and unrepairable. These, they design and build as best they can, and frankly, cross their collective fingers.

SOMEDAY, we will have repair stations, 911 rescues craft, and probably orbital Chevron stations in orbit... but not today.

You, OReilly, want modern civilization to exist on the frontier and it simply does not. Our brave astronauts have only what they carried with them to edge of space and far beyond civilization... and sometimes, it is not enough.

Don't give up you day job, Swordmaker...

Your retort gave not one scintilla of science, why that senario would not have worked if NASA was not been worried about their image, and decided to cross their fingers with 7 lives.

All they had to do was inspect the likely broken tiles... I know you said they could not do that either, but since you were wrong on the rendezvous, tell us your reason why they couldn't inspect the tiles.