[Lady Jag]

It would not have been impossible to repair some damage. Tiles routinely fall off and NASA said they viewed the takeoff and decided no damage was done. They wrote if off. Could it be pilot error? If the shuttle was just a little off attitude it would have devastating effects.

The issues are the anomalies were the left side on takeoff and left side on re-entry.

[Trust but Verify]

If the experts say there was zero they could have done to repair tile damage in space, I'll have to beleive them. My take was that they took a very close look at the situation from the standpoint of physics and determined there would be nothing significant. Even if there was something significant, there was nothing that could have been done.