Comment Re:The Plan That Could Have Doomed Atlantis (Score 1) 247
A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks on this one. Yes, they might have been able to cut lots of corners and gotten Atlantis up, at a significant risk to the Atlantis crew. What then? Do we have the Columbia crew spacewalk over to Atlantis with instructions for the last astronaut to turn off the lights? Aim Columbia at the ocean and hope for the best?
If they had had such a plan in place and executed it, and some other loss of life had happened because of the increased risk, everyone likely would have been up in arms about how NASA had cavalierly risked additional crew when they could have just reentered Columbia.