Herb Schaltegger wrote:



Well, that's all she wrote.

Pat



Pat, please - don't be even more of a fatalist.



I was in a hurry, and should have phrased that better. What I meant was
that this ups the possibility that the Shuttle will be permanently
grounded; not that it's going to have any problems on reentry.
In fact, that little ding on the tile up by the nose gear would be a
perfect one to test their orbital repair capability out on- it's too
small to present a real problem, so if the repair didn't work- no big
deal. At the same time you could get some great real world data on how
the repair patch technology works on an actual reentry.
Jeffrey Bell has weighed in on the Shuttle. Surprisingly, he wants to
permanently ground it ;-) :
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-05zq.html
I've still got to check up on that B-17 math of his.

Pat