/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11893502
Yup this is right. The flight two missions before had foam break off and it was even recorded by the brand new external cam. It hit something non mission critical.

Here's some stuff from STS-27
>One report describes the crew as "infuriated" that Mission Control seemed unconcerned.[10][11] When Commander Gibson saw the damage he thought to himself, "We are going to die",[2] and did not believe that the shuttle would survive reentry; if instruments indicated that the shuttle was disintegrating, he planned to "tell mission control what I thought of their analysis" in the remaining seconds before his death.[1] Upon landing, the magnitude of the damage to the shuttle astonished NASA; over 700 damaged tiles were noted, and one tile was missing altogether. The missing tile had been located over the steel mounting plate for the L-band antenna, perhaps preventing a burn-through of the sort that would ultimately doom Columbia in 2003.[8] There was almost no damage present on the orbiter's left side. STS-27 Atlantis was the most damaged launch-entry vehicle to return to Earth successfully.

Also sad doppler radar of columbia breaking up.