And you thought tiling the bathroom was hard - try tiling a space shuttle

This morning (AEST), NASA launched their latest human flight space mission from Cape Canaveral, the first since the disastrous Columbia mission that resulted in the ship burning up in the atmosphere. The cause of that disaster was damage sustained to the heat tiles which occurred during take off. In response to this, NASA is reported to have spent up to 1 billion dollars in safety upgrades for this latest mission. I find it amazing that despite this huge amount of money, debris, suspected to be a small piece of heat tile, still managed to come off during take-off. Clearly the 1 billion dollars didn't go towards stickier glue ! This should make for some incredibly anxious moments when Discovery goes out of radio contact during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere in 12 days time.