Images of Endeavour's Damaged Tiles

Roland Piquepaille writes "Neptec Design Group, a Canadian company and a NASA prime contractor for 25 space missions, was kind enough to send me exclusive images of Endeavour's damaged tiles during its last take-off. So here are some of these pictures" The pictures are pretty amazing and make the urgency of this whole thing much more amazing.

Comments

Re:Err on the side of caution...don't you think?

[couchslug]

"it will be the end of NASA."

Good. Space exploration is more important than a few casualties. If we must lose a Shuttle to dump that idiotic program, than that's what it takes. It's time we got rid of the desire to shove humans out in front of unmanned systems, but people are stupid so it may take a bloody nose.

NASA can turn into something else, because the people running it have the wrong priorities.
We don't need meat in space right now because it is a drag on techno-evolution.
Manned systems must have slow development cycles which cripples their ability to evolve quickly. We can RAPIDLY improve unmanned systems, evolve technology quickly, then entertain ourselves with meat in space at leisure.
If we were results-oriented instead of entertainment-oriented we'd go slower and as a result, get there with quality systems.