> One report describes the crew as "infuriated" that Mission Control Center seemed unconcerned. When Gibson saw the damage he thought to himself, "We are going

> One report describes the crew as "infuriated" that Mission Control Center seemed unconcerned. When Gibson saw the damage he thought to himself, "We are going to die"; he and others did not believe that the shuttle would survive reentry. Gibson advised the crew to relax because "No use dying all tensed-up", he said, but if instruments indicated that the shuttle was disintegrating, Gibson planned to "tell mission control what I thought of their analysis" in the remaining seconds before his death. > Mullane recalled that while filming the reentry through the upper deck's overhead windows, "I had visions of molten aluminum being smeared backwards, like rain on a windshield". Although the shuttle landed safely, "The damage was much worse than any of us had expected", he wrote. Upon landing, the magnitude of the damage to the shuttle astonished NASA; over 700 damaged tiles were noted, and one tile was missing altogether. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27#Tile_damage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27#Tile_damage