Comment by 1970-01-01
14 hours ago
So the new heat shield works just fine, and NASA still knows things better than arm-chair aerospace engineers? Safety third.
14 hours ago
So the new heat shield works just fine, and NASA still knows things better than arm-chair aerospace engineers? Safety third.
It's hard to know who was right. All of these things can be true: it made it back ok; it had a high chance of making it back ok; it should've had a much higher chance of making it back ok. Most of the concerned people were stressing this last point, that it should've been safer than it was. They still thought it had a quite high chance of making it back ok. It took a lot of shuttle missions before Columbia failed.
While I agree with your main point (it's hard to know who was right), the people who agreed to proceed were NASA engineers/astronauts who had actual numbers to analyze, while the doubters (even Camarda) only had theories.
We'll need a post mortem to know what the margin of failure was. This said they had made changes since the first flight so we'd expect less to no damage this time.