[Poohbah]

As astronaut just voiced his opinion (interviewed live on KFI-AM, Los Angeles) that because of the current state of preparation of Atlantis, it could have been launched to rescue the crew within a week and that the crew could have been passed from one spacecraft to the other in the "beachball" rescue suits.

Launching Atlantis 30 days early would have involved short-cutting a gazillion safety checks, and we PROBABLY would have lost Atlantis for our trouble.

The problem is that we had only four shuttles; to make the pace of missions that NASA wanted, we'd need about 40 of the suckers.

[ThinkingMan]

You seem to be rather knowledgable in the arena, and please forgive me if this question has been answered (I just can't bring myself to read 400+ posts asking why they didn't just go to the space station and have a cup of coffee while the shuttle was repaired)

The video shown on Fox looks like the shuttle went sideways, with the port side leading. IF the cracked tile was at fault, AND the wing heats rapidly, do you think the heating would cause the distortion of the leading edge of the wing? If this is the case, if the wing thins out slightly, the right wing would have more resistance, causing the shuttle to turn portside forward. If the distortion caused the leading edge to flatten out, the computer may have tried to overcompensate to the increased drag causing the portside slide.

Just wondering your opinion of the theory- I will wait for NASA's explanation of the physics.