[TaRaRaBoomDeAyGoreLostToday!]

Did you miss this sentence?

THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO.

There is no rightious, questionable, debate of thoughts even, when...

THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO.

[DoughtyOne]

If you would like to discuss a point of contention, raise an issue and I'll address it. We could just as easily have said there was nothing we could do for Apollo 13 either. We didn't take that stance then. We shouldn't buy off on it today without asking questions and getting answers.

[Karsus]

NO. THEY DID NOTHING. That is different that "THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO" do you know why it is different? Because NASA DID NOT EVEN TRY.

[LenS]

Where's the proper contingency planning?

Why doesn't every mission have the equipment for a space walk? Does a long enough tether take up that much room? Or a suit? With some proper planning, they'd have the equipment to at least physically inspect possible problems.

Then they'd have had time to either crash prepare another shuttle. Or shoot up another rocket (heck, the Russians had one on the pad as all this happened) with say more fuel -- so it could get to the ISS -- or more supplies to buy more orbit time -- and giving more time to get another shuttle ready -- or even sending up a Soyuz capsule for them to cram into and return to Earth.

Yes, there was nothing they could do after it reentered orbit. But before?

NASA's in full bureaucratic cover your butt mode. They'll trot out the families and other astronauts to distract. And those people will do it because they truly want to keep man in space and they believe that the Space Shuttle is their only option. So they'll give NASA the cover it needs.

If Apollo 13 had happened today, there'd be three dead astronauts as NASA said "There was nothing we could do!"

[leadhead]

THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO

Could have tried to reprogram the re-entry sequences so the impacted area took less heat.

[Clean_Sweep]

"THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO."

I think this statement is asburd. I'm positive that the 7 people on board would have been full of ideas had they known of their predicament.

[Shanty Shaker]

Anybody who answers there is nothing they could do should not be close to any program labeled experimental. They lack the vision neccesary to be involved with such programs.

[Vinomori]

THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO

This is one of the 17 Lies, in the book 17 Lies, this is one of them. They are lies we tell when our emotions are outweighing our brains.

[Arkinsaw]

Give it up, people are in the anger stage now and not up for rationality.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Your emphasized sentence highlights the attitude of a bureaucrat at the DMV, not a NASA Engineer. Perhaps there has been some confusion at NASA over what being an Engineer means.

[Ford Fairlane]

"There was nothing they could do"

This is BS

I have done a lot of contract engineering in industry, including work on dust collection systems. We used to coat the inside of dust collection cyclones (the big ice cream cone shaped things on top of factories) with a mixture of ceramic pellets & epoxy.

This product was originally designed to patch the Space Shuttle if tiles fell off during launch.

NASA quit carrying the patch material on board because it took up weight & they thought spacewalks were too dangerous.