[Fred Mertz]

If NASA's claiming the USAF doesn't have hi-res cameras that's plain BS! They had the AF specifically take ground based photos of an EARLY shuttle launch that was thought to have tile damage. They rolled the shuttle over to present a good target to the camera and saw enough to allay their fears. And that was in the early 1980's.

Poohbah had me convinced it would be nearly impossible to capture images with enough resolution to see the damage. I believed him.

[Poohbah]

If NASA's claiming the USAF doesn't have hi-res cameras that's plain BS! They had the AF specifically take ground based photos of an EARLY shuttle launch that was thought to have tile damage. They rolled the shuttle over to present a good target to the camera and saw enough to allay their fears. And that was in the early 1980's.

Poohbah had me convinced it would be nearly impossible to capture images with enough resolution to see the damage. I believed him.

IIRC from the mission in question (the first flight of Columbia), they were looking for gross discrepancies--namely, they were afraid that whole tiles MISSING--as opposed to simple tile damage, which could be significantly smaller and most likely below the camera's resolution limits.