Re:Off-scale and zero readings are still useful (Score 1)

Most likely the tire did blow, but why? NASA has said over and over that the heat inside the left wing was not indicative of a hull breach. This email, posted on NASA's web site, details the scenario of a tire rupturing in the wheel well. Essentially what happens is it blows the hatch off (the overpressure inside the wheel well puts a quarter million pounds of load on the hatch), the hatch flies into the slipstream, then the orbiter is no longer a craft, it's just debris.

NASA has said for two weeks straight that the foam was not the cause of this orbiter breakup, this isn't a guess, they have done the math using a model that overpredicts the damage then overpredicts the effects of that damage and it was deemed NOT A SAFETY CONCERN, and that it would NOT affect the flight properties of the vehicle.

Rich Garcia of the Directed Energy Directorate told the media they had "high-resolution" images of the orbiter taken from Hawaii and from the New Mexico labs. The Directed Energy Directorate makes beamed energy weapons, they've already created and are producing the world's first laser attack aircraft for the Air Force. They use dynamic optics and reflected laser light to compensate for the refraction of the atmosphere in real time. Their dynamic optics have hundreds of actuators and are able to self-adjust to compensate for this refraction due to the atmosphere, enabling them to literally subtract out the interference caused by the atmosphere. What this means is that the atmosphere is not translucent to them, it is transparent (about ninety-five percent more transparent than it is to "normal" optics).

This process not only "takes the twinkle out of stars," it also allows them to use the telescopes to propagate lasers

UP THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE.

It's long past time we stopped trying to blame NASA and point the finger where it belongs, at the US Air Force/Directed Energy Directorate.