On Monday, February 3, 2003, at 03:01 PM, Harmon Seaver wrote:
That's what they _reported_ later that they did in the past...there certainly was no public announcement that Keyhole satellites were being tasked to look at the shuttle tiles.
The biggest question there is why didn't they inspect it? Seems very
bizarre, since that's what they did in the past.
One might assume that they did in fact look at the tiles this time around, noted the damage, reported to Admiral Poindexter the "toast" conclusion, and that was that.
Had the landing gone OK, we would have been hearing about how NASA had verified that little damage had occurred.
Now, it's "we didn't have a chance to look, but even if we had, there was nothing anyone could do, so we didn't look."
(Of course, there is _much_ they could have done, including coming in at a more westerly landing site, either Edwards or White Sands. Or, with about 10 days of advance notice, Atlantis could have been ready for launch and rendezvous to take the crew off, and perhaps even to transfer fuel to let Columbia go into a higher parking orbit until repairs could be arranged.)
But the ostrich was strutting and now NASA is dying.
--Tim May
"Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11
