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>Future missions (if ever continued) should include tile repair kits.

I saw the super slow mo video of the debris hitting the left wing. It hit really hard and created a huge cloud of pulverized heat tiles.

NASA said it was no problem and never looked at the tiles with satellites. BS. On the NASA news conference I heard some unusual statments. The first statement was that there was no possiblity of repairing the tiles. The second statement was strange- it was to the effect that the engineers had 'convinced' themselves that the tile damage was not a problem. They 'convinced' themselves because they had no alternative.

Dialup,

I think you have a very good point. One STS engineer I saw on the NASA channel said they thought it was ICE breaking off of the liquid fuel tank and that further the cloud of debris coming off of the left wing underside was pulverized ice.

However, this impact and cloud were more than one minute after take off... and most ice is shaken loose when the engines start vibrating the entire assembly... but even if it was ice, it was ice that was broken off in a HIGH apparent wind and with the Shuttle accelerating at 3 G's (96 feet per second per second) which means the ice mass (or insullation mass) would have an reletive anti-acceleration of the 3Gs + whatever drag the atmosphere added BEFORE HITTING the tiles. Incidentally, ICE would probably be more massy and denser than a similar volume of insullation foam implying more potential for damage to the fragile tiles.

Many years ago I had occasion to handle some rejected shuttle tiles... while their surfaces are very hard, the backing ceramic foam is very brittle and easily crushed into white dust by your hand pressure alone. What I saw on that video of the impact and cloud could have been ice dust... or ceramic dust.

I think the engineers evaluating the incident did take the least catastrophic conclusion... that it was the mass turning to dust rather than tiles. Reviewing the video shows that dust plume seems to rise from about 2/3rds of the wing... which might imply a gash in the tiles from the leading to the trailing edge!

Note my analysis of the decision tree in a previous post. If such a gash existed, then the ONLY chance the astronauts had was to de-orbit and attempt re-entry. The other choices led to certain death. If the engineers saw this and understood its implications, perhaps subconsciously, then they may have known the outcome... but the "stay in orbit" outcome was more certain.

Would they have told the astronauts? Should they? I don't know.