At 06:21 PM 2/3/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:

Had the landing gone OK, we would have been hearing about how NASA had verified that little damage had occurred.

Now, it's "we didn't have a chance to look, but even if we had, there was nothing anyone could do, so we didn't look."

One wonders whether various large-aperature terrestrial 'scopes could have / did any surveillance / inspection. (However, I don't even know which side of the bird normally faces Earth ---black side or cargo side.) NASA's inability to change a flat on a roadtrip is really remarkable.