[muffaletaman]

You are not thinking clearly about what you are observing. I am an engineer who have performed failure analysis, and would like to point out the following.

The video clips you see are taken at a time when the shuttle was at an altitude of 200,000+ feet - around 40 miles above ground level.

Furthermore, most of the videos shot from the Dallas area of the shuttle, show the shuttle at an angle above the horizon of about 40 degrees at the highest, and less as it departed, due to its groundpath being south of the Dallas area.

This means that the actual distance to the shuttle - straight line of sight - was no closer than 60 miles.

You CANNOT see the tail of the space shuttle at 60 miles in daylight. You can't even see the whole shuttle.

What you are seeing are plasma balls surrounding the various parts of the shuttle as they ionize the rarified air at that altitude, screaming through at 12,000 MPH.

To give an example - if one sees something which appears at arms length (36" in my case) to be 1/16" across - then at a distance of sixty miles, the actual object is 550 feet across.

You are seeing a flaming hot glowing ball of fire almost 600 feet across...

A contrail that appears 1/4" wide at arms length is actually 1/2 mile across at 60 miles - the point of closest approach.

And at 12000 MPH = 1200 Miles/6 minutes = 200 miles / minute = 20 miles / 6 seconds = 3.33 miles per second... it is very quickly more than 100 miles away.

Just think for a minute... do you REALLY think these video cameras are imaging the actual Tail of the shuttle at distances of 80 - 100 miles away?

The "markings" and structures you see are artifacts - a combination of brightness variations in the actual plasma ball, and the video imaging process.

The space shuttle is about 57 feet tall, so the tail is on the order of 25 - 30 feet tall itself... the whole tail and engine assy would be about 45 feet or so at its largest dimensions.

At sixty miles - this 45 foot assembly would appear the same size as .005" ( 1/200th of an inch) at three feet.

You didn't see what you thought you saw - sorry to disappoint.

[Justa]

The video clip in question was taken by a local news crew from an aircraft.

[sam_paine]

You didn't see what you thought you saw - sorry to disappoint.

It's frightening what things folks are "enabled" to see by the internet, even when just a little simple analysis would go a long way.

[WFTR]

I'm not disputing anything that you are saying, but as another engineer who has done failure analysis, I wonder what kind of failure analysis you have done. I watched some of the afternoon press conference, but I have avoided much of the coverage today specifically to keep myself from trying to analyze ahead of the facts. Do you have any experience with airplanes and their failures?

WFTR
Bill