"Brian Gaff" wrote in message
news
vortexes can easily cause tunneling, I'd have thought they ought to fix
it. The point is made that the Shuttle will survive, but do they really
want to have to strip off loads of tiles and maybe repair what is
underneath?

Seems to me that there is always going to be uncertainty. They have
returned with worse holes, but they have had to do a lot of repair work to
fix it afterwards.

Brian


One cited factor against repair on spaceflightnow.com was "astronauts have
never applied STA-54 in the vacuum of space".

Didn't they do an EVA test a while back of the repair putty? And if not
isn't that something they should have tried?