[Kozak]

One fragile tile snaps off and that all she wrote for crew and ship.

Thats NOT the case. EVERY mission some tiles get damaged on launch or reentry. There is a certain amount of robustness in the system. Evidently THIS time some critical limit was exceeded.

[SarahW]

That's not what I've been reading - loss of leading edge tiles have always put the ship at risk of catastophic failure, and they had no way to fix it, and no plan b to work around it, and didn't even want to see it, because there was nothing to be done about it.

Reminds me of something I read in an unrelated piece recently = if you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.

I'm not ashamed to Monday-morning quarterback. If I had understood that "give up" and "no point in looking" was the plan in this sort of event, I would have been friday afternoon quarterbacking, too.

And for ***sakes, why don't they have a maneuverable tethered webcam to visualize all areas of the ship? It's 2003, not 1983. Robot arm, smobot arm. There were low weight, lower tech solutions to in-slight ship inspection.

The heat shield has always had an unacceptable high risk level. It was an achilles heel and everyone at NASA knew that, if I didn't.

And it is going to have to be redesigned and reengineered.