I agree with this. The coverage of the shuttle flight has been a bit morbid. I never really felt that the whole thing might break apart on reentry, mostly because they did an inspection of the tiles up there and everything looked fine. Sure, the last one didn't survive reentry, but all the ones previously launched that made orbit (over 100, I believe) returned safely (Challenger was lost just after launch due to a problem with one of the SRBs).
What surprised me most about all this is that last week's space walk to inspect the bottom of the shuttle was the first time anyone has done that -- the press was acting like a spacewalk to the bottom of the shuttle was akin to a trip to Pluto. It is also hard to believe that no tile repair kit had been deployed until this flight.
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I was convinced it would torch in the air. I didn't buy the weather delays - I suspected they were deciding how long they could drag this out before torchdown.
Glad I was wrong, but this piece of crap should never fly again. They had two years to fix it, and failed. What are they gonna do in another month, six months, year, etc. Nothing.
I say turn the low-orbit shuttle component over to private enterprise (who can do it faster, safer, and cheaper in the long run) and focus on deep space.
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