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At the risk of drawing more fire -

Let me start by saying I love manned space and strongly advocate the US space program, manned and unmanned. I've worked with and for two of the astronaut crews over the last 10 years on various payloads. I also knew personnally one of 7 from the Naval Academy.

Having said that, being devil's adocate, if I were representing NASA right now I would be getting ready to answer some hard questions (I know the answer to some of these, but they will be asked anyway):

1) NASA admittd concern over possible damage on launch. NASA has said they had no way to inspect or repair on orbit. Lets start with 'inspect'. Had this contingency ever been considered before? If not, NASA has a problem. If so, what did you do to justify that inspection capability was not required. Could the robot arm have done the inspection if it was loaded? If so, could it have been loaded? If not, why? If so, NASA has a problem.

2) If we had known about a problem before reentry, what alternatives to reentry were possible? Would an immediate abort and return to Earth scenario have changed anything? Did we further the damage by staying on orbit? Could we have gone to ISS and waited out a rescue? (In this case I know the answer is no). If not, why not? Could such a contingency have been built into the mission, so that rendezvous was possible? If so, NASA has a problem. If not, how long would it take to ready a rescue shuttle? Or a rescue soyuz?

3) Columbia was the oldest and heaviest vehicle in the fleet. If a different vehicle with more capability had been used, could the mission have been flown so that a rendezvous with ISS was possible? If so why wasn't it? (And again NASA may have a problem)

4) What decisions in design and ops led us to be in the situation that resulted in the failure? Would a crew escape vehicle have even worked in that regime of flight? Should all flights be capable of aborting to ISS in case of emergency? This was not an abort option until recent years, was it considered? Is ISS in the best orbit to support a shuttle abort? Consider the same for a soyuz abort.

Being on the recieving end of these questions will not be easy. The fact that they and many others will be asked will anger many here, but you best get prepared to hear them asked. I fear we can guess the answer to many of them already, and its going to make some NASA supporters (myself included) and personnel uncomfortable.

Once again, I strongly support manned space, but the senator or congressman who has constituents pestering him/her why they can't get funds for their hometown history museum or other pork project will be all over this as a poor use of national treasury. They may not say it that way, but the end result may be reduced support/funding or cutting of programs, effectively killing the future for manned space. And the sad truth is that NASA, in part, along with the early ISS decision makers at the executive level, may have done this to themselves.

One of the hardest actions for a manager to take is to say "We must shut down. At the current level of funding (or other resource scarcity) safety can no longer be assured."

A can-do attitude can have the hardest time with that kind of executive decision. Nearly everything in the "can-do" mindset and attitude works towards saying "We can do it, anyway!"

Takes the most uncommonest of people to make that decision -- as rare to find someone who came to that mind because of experience. Why? Because that kind of experience was of hard failure, and in technocracies and bureaucracies hard failure is a career ender -- or a ticket to some backwater.

Great post. Very good questions to ask. I just wish they had been asked and properly answered a long time ago.

Whatever the faults of the space program, I think a lot of blame can be placed on unimaginative, visionless leadership in Congress, and in past Administrations (regardless of party). Some think (I offer some of the posts on this thread as an example) that a space program should be pursued only if we can do it in the most penny-pinching way possible. I'm sure NASA has done what it can to keep the shuttle fleet as safe as possible, but in all honesty, we probably should have had alternative manned transportation systems by now.