And, just like a decision to abort to Spain would not have been obviously correct, I bet that if they did an EVA the results would have been equivocal, not enough to risk the Atlantis crew.
I suspect the damage (if any were visible) was of a kind previously survived. There was an unexpected synergy between the location (near or on the gear door) and the damage which was not revealed until stress tested.
If there were a huge tile defect, so big that the reentry clearly had to be scrubbed, I think we would have seen burn-through and wing loss earlier.
What we saw instead was an initially subtle aerodynamic change which worsened throughout the terminal sequence in association with shedding of burning material (presumably tiles). When the stabilization program went beyond previously tested limits, the shuttle ceased to be aerodynamic and was pulverized in a second by the force of air at 12.5K mph.
I think vehicle loss was unexpected by the passengers. I don't know anything about it, but I suspect that wing loss or tail loss as some have speculated would have produced severe, severe buffeting and been reported to JSC by the crew.
I bet the shuttle turned or flipped in a second, and a second later it was gone.
Thanks, bones, for your fantastic work on this thread. I predicted on Saturday that we would have a very high quality failure analysis thread, but this has surpassed my expectations.
I don't think the vehicle in its present form is usable.
The videos that NASA has are much clearer. What they posted are MPEGs that have much detail lost due to the compression scheme. They know the rocket's velocity relative to the air and an essential cross section of the object. They can get a very close estimate of the object's mass by it's deceleration in the airstream. If the object was very low density like foam, it would pick up a tremendous velocity in that ~1000mph airstream, because there is only a small mass and a very large cross sectional area to pick up momentum from the airstream.
The object in the film resists picking up velocity in that ~1000mph wind, that means it's massive. Also the explosive disintegration when the object impacted the wing manifests very high velocity dust particles extending out to a great distance. That means the dust particles themselves are quite massive. Very fine, light particle would never maintain that kind of velocity in air. They don't have the momentum to maintain significant relative velocity for any appreciable distance.
"The NASA engineers may have underestimated the size of the object."
They should have picked up on the essential features of what they were looking at right away. Seems that didn't have a hands on, or practicle appreciation, for what they were looking at.
" there is no way they could have repaired the damage or rescued the crew"
I don't believe that...
"unless the next flight was rushed to the pad and risked to save the crew"
and I don't think you do either.