At 200k feet, aerodynamic forces are a tiny fraction of what they are at sea level, or even at 40k feet. The Shuttle could have been sideways for a fairly long time. If that is the case, it may be being kept quiet because the crew would have certainly known things were very badly wrong.
That is my hunch, in view of how they treated the Challenger data. However, while the aero forces may have been far less than at sealevel, they were not insignificant at 40 miles up...at those speeds (12,000+ mph). There has to be a lot of frictional 'pressure' for the atmosphere to superheat to a plasma far above the surface temperature of the sun.
The loss of the stabilizer of course would have been all she wrote. Even as it was, if the fuselage's overall control system integrity had been maintained, with the drag forces encountered, I wonder if they were looking at a real possibility of landing far, far short of Kennedy Space Center...