[Gracey]

There is NO way to repair it, and NO way to save the crew. The contingencies are done BEFORE liftoff.

Nothing in life is perfect, expecially space flight. Space flight is very state of the art stage. Very primitive.

It's no different than those people jumping out of windows during 9ll. Remember? Maybe some folk should have had safety nets below to catch them but there were none.

[Trust but Verify]

Unfortunately, there are a lot of Monday morning QB's around here who REFUSE to believe there was nothing that could be done. As if NASA was just being 'lazy' and not even thought about these things.

[Cboldt]

It's hard to ignore the ignoramuses, particularly as they are persistent. I have been taking note of certain screen names, and taken to read the name at the bottom of a post before I bother to read the post. Don't waste your energy trying to educate the folks who obviously don't take time to provide themselves with the basic education provided by the many threads already here.

You must feel simply awful, as a NASA insider -- more so that the rest of us. Prayers to you, and to the NASA family.

[Arthalion]

You are incorrect. I'm an avid reader, and a spaceflight fanatic, and I remember reading several years ago that some NASA engineers in the early days of the shuttle program had worked out an "alternate landing mode" and proposed it to the higher-ups.

The plan, if I remember correctly, basically involved using a much shallower rate of descent. The shuttles would have spent an extended period of time at the atmospheric interface (where atmospheric density is at its lowest) bleeding off most of its velocity before dropping into the atmosphere. The result for the shuttle was far less stress on re-entry, and a much lower amount of heating on the tiles. The administrators at NASA ended up rejecting the procedure, however, because it would have increased the length of the landing sequence fivefold (IIRC). The proposition was that this procedure be adopted as the standard landing sequence, and from that perspective I can understand why it was rejected, but there is NO reason something like this couldn't have been attempted in an emergency where tile damage was a possibility. Even reducing the outside temperature by a few hundred degrees might have made the difference and saved those men and women. Of course, maybe it wouldn't have...but at least THEN they could have claimed to have tried everything.

I've spent a bit of time today digging and calling around trying to find the original source of that article, but I do recall that it was written by one of the original shuttle designers in 1979. What it reveals, though, is that there WERE things that could have been done if NASA had been aware of tile damage. This "we didn't check because we couldn't have done anything" nonsense is counterintuitive and goes against every engineering rule NASA has ever espoused. The result of all of this, I'm sure we'll discover later, is that someone didn't want to be bothered, and seven people lost their lives because of it.