The CAIB found evidence that more than one NASA manager actively squelched plans
that could have saved the orbiter.
I'm sorry Strip. Nothing could have saved the Columbia after SRB ignition. They could have prepped Discovery/Atlantis(?) for a very unsafe crew rescue attempt in orbit, (by all accounts they could have done an abbreviated 3 week countdown on the other shuttle on the second pad) but Columbia was doomed as a craft after the boosters ignited. That also puts another crew and orbiter at risk for an issue that no one quite understood.
The main cause for concern, to me, was so many smart people so unconcerned about
anything hitting a spacecraft on ascent, especially after Discovery came back a year earlier from a hop to the station looking like someone had taken a shotgun to her belly from a foam/ice strike at about the same time off the pad that Columbia took her fatal strike. (the only thing that saved Discovery then was the location of the loss of tiles... it did not allow plasma to enter the structural supports of the orbiter...but did melt some of the orbiter's actual skin)
If you are speaking about that failure, then I agree. But, as it stood, Colombia was a dead bird the second the boosters went off, only no one knew it until a week and a half later.
Reading what happened behind the scenes during Columbia is sobering. Junior officers and Engineers going behind the backs of superiors because the superiors wouldn't listen to their concerns. Space Command getting ready to take a photo of the orbiter on orbit from spy satellites (moved the birds and tasked the mission)..... and being stopped by the flight director at the last second when she found out the request didn't follow the proper chain of submission (it simply hadn't gone through her). Radar echoes showing the missing panel, dislodged, and floating along beside Columbia every day for the length of the flight. Really sad. Watching the last 10 minutes of that mission is just unreal.
