[stripes1776]

Who would have had the foresight to see that if the tiles were damaged the crew was doomed..."

Who? A scientist and technician who had done his job with competence.

[Doohickey]

That's quite an indictment. I hope none of those guys are FReepers who will see you impugn their character.

I've never flown a shuttle mission and I've never slept at a Holiday Inn Express, but I did do 7 1/2 years of sea duty on submarines; another job that has a meticulous QA process and demands attention to detail.

And you know what? Despite all the checks and balances, all the policies and procedures; stuff leaked. A worn ball valve here, a leaky flange there. Drips and dribbles of seawater, hydraulic oil and DFM all over the place. Air leaks from reducers and needle valves.

Point is; you take each individual drip, dripple and hiss, fix the ones that are saftety of ship issues and deal with the rest. Sometimes it's a guessing game. I was lucky - most of the time we guessed right and when we guessed wrong nobody died. The guys on USS Bonefish guessed wrong and I lost a close friend and two other shipmates. It always comes down to the human factor. We're all imperfect, like our inventions. We just do the absolute best we can.

Give these guys a break.

[bonesmccoy]

Easy for you to say with 20/20 hindsight.

The reality is that there was no photographic data on the impact.

If the orbiter TPS was significantly damaged and stripped away due to the ET insulation hit, the orbiter temperature sensors might have detected fluctuations on orbit. JSC MOCR would have had that kind of data, but I doubt the data actually shows such a fluctuation.

The original essay suggested that NASA could have performed a TAL abort trajectory upon realizing that the vehicle had been damaged at T+80. The reality is that the heating may be GREATER on the vehicle during a TAL trajectory because the vehicle pancakes through a greater amount of the atmosphere in flying across the Atlantic rather than punching up and out of the atmosphere on an Abort-to-orbit or Abort-once-around trajectory.