I watched a documentary last night on this and what is sad is that a lot of engineers were extremely worried about the damage to the shuttles wing from the foam piece hitting it during take off, and even though they tried to tell the people in charge, it was ignored.
Nobody believed a small piece of foam could put a hole in it until they replicated it after the fact.
If those astronauts were to do a space walk to check the damage of the wing, they could've attempted to dock with the next shuttle up and came back alive, but some people at NASA got lazy.
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