No, that’s not what the articles say.
Also, WHAT tremendous atmospheric forces? If there were tremendous atmospheric forces, then EVERY astronaut would die on reentry, always.
During the hot part of reentry, the air is near vacuum. It’s NOT like a hurricane. It’s more like being hit with an extremely hot, silent, low-density blowtorch: a hot plasma beam. It can eventually vaporize solid objects, but it takes many seconds (minutes?) before the solid objects heat up enough. Ever try cooking somthing with a blowtorch? It takes forever, and the outside chars while the inside stays totally cold.
The wing wasn’t torn off. Once the carbon insulation was breached, the wing was essentially cut off as the “blowtorch” slowly burned through the metal struts. I assume the same thing happened to the rest of the craft once it was no longer oriented correctly. Also, the extra friction caused by the wrong spacecraft orientation would make the shuttle descend faster than planned, so it might heat up more than normal.
As I understand it, the white “styrofoam” heat shield tiles are not designed to withstand reentry temperatures, only the heavy black tiles on the bottom of the shuttle and on the leading edges are designed for that. I assume that an incorrect shuttle orientation would be a Very Bad Thing, and the craft couldn’t survive that way for very long.
http://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/tps.html
“Very high-temperature areas of the orbiter—the nose cap and wing leading edges—would use a reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) material originally developed by LTV for the Dyna-Soar program. The RCC would provide protection above 2,700 °F, yet it would keep the aluminum structure of the orbiter comfortably below its 350 °F maximum. Tiles were used for the entire underside of the vehicle and for most of the fuselage sides and vertical stabilizer. Black tiles could protect up to 2,300 °F, while white tiles protected up to 1,200 °F. Flexible reusable surface insulation (FRSI) protected areas not expected to exceed 750 °F.”
Go read the second-by-second timeline in the URL posted in the second message above (from Broomstick.) It says nothing about a quick “poof” type of disaster.
Other articles state flat-out that the crew compartment survived the breakup, and that the g-forces during the breakup were not even large enough to cause injury, much less causing death. Those crew members without helmets would pass out rapidly from anoxia, but only one lacked a helmet.
And as I said before, it looks to me like the disaster took quite a while to unfold, since most of the crew had time to don their helmets and gloves. (Or do they all wear helmets during reentry now? I’d seen several news stories long ago that showed that they did not.)