I remember when the Columbia went down, my English class had a free write about it during school, and I wrote this whole long thing (a couple pages, if I remember correctly), about how absurdly dangerous the whole process seemed, about how stupid it was that, should astronauts in the shuttle experience a problem on reentry, they couldn't even turn around and return to space to try again. I know very little honest facts about how our space travel technology works, but I feel like with all the advances I see in tech we use every day, that it shouldn't be too hard to bring space travel into the twenty-first centruy proper.
I must admit I don't know much myself, but I do know some things - enough to say that there was simply no way the Columbia could ever have turned around and tried again. One, doing something like that would require a complete redesign of the shuttles as they exist now. Two, it takes a ton of fuel to get even our current shuttles out of atmosphere to begin with. Stopping re-entry and getting the ship back out into space to try again (which wouldn't have saved the Columbia anyway, given the manner of the damage)... at the very, very least, that would require the shuttle carry more fuel. This in turn requires that there be more fuel at initial launch (to combat the extra weight
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I've been hearing for a while now from science magazines and the like that the shuttle is just horrendously outdated and really needs to be thrown out and replaced wholesale. Of course, right now the whole point is moot because the national climate just doesn't really give a shit about space travel.
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