From a pilot's bulletin board:

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The first, or early theories, concern the break-off of foam from a fuel tank hitting the left wing during take-off. They apparently knew that the piece of the debris striking the orbiter airframe structure may have knocked off some ceramic tiles from the underside of the vehicle.

Early reports indicated that NASA knew that those tiles had been knocked off and even recovered them after the launch but didn't release the information. They should have known that that would have caused a potential problem. But there was nothing they could have done to prevent the predestined disaster. Bringing the vehicle home early would not have mattered. In fact, bringing it home early would mean a larger fuel load to worry about.

It would be a stretch to blame it on a terrorist act.

It would be idiotic to blame it on the current Whitehouse administration.

It was a technical, structure/airframe, failure of a "High Tech" vehicle.

Remember that safe air travel was a slowly gained process of four or five decades.

Rumors are that early ships sank in prehistoric times.

Nasa engineers estimated a loss of one of every 75 shuttle missions. This and Challenger makes the record one in 63. This is to be expected.