Originally posted by: SirChadwick
They say that it is very unlikely that this was an act of terrorism...I think otherwise. What are the chances of this happening? I'm thinking they don't want to panic everyone in the US thinking that we've let them get away w/ another act.
Wally Schirra (I think) was asked by a reporter what he was thinking in the final few moments before liftoff. His response was, "I was thinking that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder."
The chances of an accident of this scope happening are extremely high, in my opinion. The shuttle is an extraordinarily complex system of interrelated systems. It was travelling at an outrageous speed, taking tremendous physical and thermal stresses just from the normal re-entry. A small error in, say, attitude of the ship, would change the forces on the ship enormously.
I think it's hard for us to truly appreciate the environment that the shuttle is in during reentry. The shuttle is not "just screaming through the air." It's
screaming through the air. I can't begin to imagine the forces that air resistance alone impose on the shuttle's structure.
If anything goes wrong during reentry, what we saw today is probably the most likely scenario. I can't imagine many "small" failures. If I'm flying my airplane and the engine quits, I can coast to a field or a nearby airport. Or if I have a control failure, I can hope to compenstate with the other flight controls. At 17,000 miles per hour at 200,000 feet, the shuttle doesn't have these luxuries.
Meanwhile, it would be incredibly difficult for a terrorist to do this. 200,000 feet is a long, long way up, and 17,000 miles per hour is really, really fast. I doubt any kind of surface-to-air weapon could achieve both that altitude and that velocity. (What would the use of such a weapon be?) Sabotage is a more probable scenario in my mind, but the lauch was extremely closely guarded due to the presence of an Isralei astronaut, and I'm not sure that a saboteur would choose this moment to cause damage.
Anyway.... the summary of my rant is that I believe that a mechanical failure is probably the most likely scenario. But this is pure speculation on my part.