Jenn put it best:

"I think when we go to bed at night, we make an unspoken deal with the universe that everything will be more or less the same when we wake up the next morning.

The universe is not holding up its end of the bargain."


From what I have read, if it was damage to the wing suffered during lift-off that caused the problem, there was nothing that could have been done about it.

Apparently, even if they knew the shuttle had been damaged significantly there's no way that the people aboard could have fixed the problem. And there was no spare shuttle to send up to rescue them in time before limited resources aboard ran out. I'm not sure whether they could have docked with or space-walked to the International Space Station, but doubt it either way.

It had to have been terrible to go through that crash. Would it have been worse to be circling the Earth in a doomed shuttle knowing the situation was hopeless? Maybe it wasn't, maybe there would have been some way to rescue them. At least they could have said good-bye I suppose.


Ad astra per aspera.