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"Videotape showed a large piece of something coming off the orbiter immediately prior to its mid-air breakup over Texas Saturday morning."

It's the tail!

In many of the close-up frames you can see the orbiter and tail clearly depicted. The tail has broken off and is tumbling away to the lower-R. Approx. 2/5ths through there is a very good quality frame which clearly depicts the 3 main engines of the orbiter and shows the black rudder markings of the tail as it tumbles away from the shuttle! The shuttle is facing south, with it's left side being the leading edge along it's flight path. This accuratley correlates with the thermal telemetry data.

It's my opion that the tail broke off 1/3-up during a southerly S braking manuever with the broken piece taking the full length of rudder with it. Descending sideways to the slipstream the orbiter was doomed.

Approx. 2/5ths through there is a very good quality frame which clearly depicts the 3 main engines of the orbiter and shows the black rudder markings of the tail as it tumbles away from the shuttle!

You're kidding, right? There is no such frame. That "zoom" is an artifact...you can't resolve diddly squat from that clip. You could just as easily see the face of the devil as the tail or three engine bells.

Descending sideways to the slipstream the orbiter was doomed.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Do you mean the shuttle was "Descending sideways to the slipstream" BECAUSE the tail came off?
Or that the tail came off BECAUSE the shuttle was "Descending sideways to the slipstream"??

There was a lengthy discussion about this video on another thread. What you are seeing there is not the orbiter -- it's actually an image distortion inherent in that kind of video camera. FOX News said that this video was recorded by an amateur on the ground, and there's no way in hell they could get that kind of magnification from 200,000 feet away.

These tiles can be repaired in space.

I don't think the above statement is correct (from the original article).

The shuttle is facing south, with it's left side being the leading edge along it's flight path.

There were a few frames where the camera tried to zoom in close and there appeared to be forms suggestive of a shuttle but traveling transverse to the flight path, i.e., left side reentering forward. Then the camera zoomed back creating a smaller image. My first thought was that the auto-focus lost the image causing it to "bloom" large, so the photographer backed off to recover focus. The problem was that the image was not right for an out of focus image, it should have been circular but it included some elements of the wedge planform. I discounted what I saw because it meant that the Shuttle would have to have been going sideways! There did appear to be some shots where features of orbiter were discernible and I'm hoping somewhere we can find the breakup sequence.

This might have explained the left side instrumentation going bad first, except there was the last communication responding to Mission Control following their advisory on the left wheel pressure/temperture and the crew did not comment on their vehicle attitude.

I'm sorry but I just don't see what you're talking about. I've been seeing this on Fox all day and I thought it was pity that the tape contained what looks to me like a badly focused zoom.

I'm most definitely not an expert. And if one comes along and says that what we see here is the tail breaking off I won't be able to argue. But until then I just don't see it.