[Mark Felton]

"How soon did the engineers notice that piece of foam coming off the tank?"

This wan't noticed until launch videos were being screened the day after the launch. The shuttle was already in orbit and beginning experiments.

[Ramtek57]

Just think, if the astronauts were notified that a lot of damage MAY HAVE occured and that it MAY NOT be safe to use Columbia to return to earth, they would have want to try to do something other than burning up in the atmosphere. NASA didn't give them a choice. They probably would have tried to do a spacewalk and determine the damage. They would have liked to had somebody rescue them or head over to the space station and throw a rope over since they couldn't dock and use space suits to get to the station. Hell, anything is better than dying.