I thouht it rather spooky that it took off at 1:13 (13:13) and the tank exploded on the 13th....touch wood I am not superstitious!
I wonder if anyone has tried with todays technology to perform the same calculations to see how long they would take to perform and if they would be able to do the same sorts of things at such short notice? It wouldn't surprise me if every shuttle mission had to carry a roll of duct tape! I for one would be carrying a Swiss army pocketknife.
I think it was pretty dumb to have the two different types of carbon dioxide scrubbers....mind you, they STILL have problems where one half is talking metric and the other half is talking imperial....will they ever learn that one? Let's hope the current Mars mission is either metric or imperial all the way through.