[William McKinley]

Spacewalks are not the piece of cake they appear to be in Bruce Willis movies. I find it completely plausible that a space walk would probably cause more damage to the tiles than any damage they would have been preparing.

[Magnum44]

I realize contingency space walks are risky (particularly untethored or outside the payload bay), but I heard the comment that inspection of the underside was not possible in the briefings yesterday as well. It seems like a major design/safety oversight that the robot arm (which has a camera) could not be manipulated to view the under belly, or provide a platfom for a crewmember to view the wing edge and underside from. IIRC the robot arm is even on the port (left) side of the orbiter.

Anybody familiar with shuttle robotic arm limitations? Maybe with the science lab you cant even use it? I don't know.

[clamboat]

Spacewalks are not the piece of cake they appear to be in Bruce Willis movies. I find it completely plausible that a space walk would probably cause more damage to the tiles than any damage they would have been preparing.

This mission was in no way prepared for a spacewalk anywhere outside of the cargo bay. I would guess that the necessary equipment was simply not available for them to get all the way around to the bottom of the shuttle.

Second point is, why would they want to? What could they have possibly done? Nothing, that's what. It's not like they have spare tiles they can just pop into place. If it was indeed a problem with damaged tiles, their fate was sealed as soon as they left the launch pad.