It gets well over 200 degrees and cares a great deal when enough of those tiles come off. The tiles were a neat concept but someone should have been given a moment of pause when they saw how easily a pencil can go through them. Ablative shielding may have been old school, but it worked, was durable and didn't cost a fortune.
The shuttle should have been a stepping stone that they there should have only been two of. Once they saw that the costs and turn around time was so high they should have said "Okay, we leaned a lot from this, now lets take what we've learned move on to the next level."
The shuttle was a good concept that the agency and politicians clung to for way too long.
towards the end of the last century!
(Triumph the insult comedy dog style delivery)
I'm sorry, but you just don't get it. There IS no next level with today's technology.
Don't you remember the X-33 welfare program for aerospace engineers? They never could make that SSTO concept work, as Werner von Braun could have told them before they pissed away billions of dollars.
If the Shuttle goes, that's the end of the US manned space program - probably forever. We, as a country, don't have the money, we don't have the committment, and more seriously, we don't have the expertise any more. Is the "Beavis and Butthead" generation going to design and build the next generation spacecraft? I don't think so...