BBC The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth - Turkish Subtitle

it's almost over Sacramento now don't see anything yet nothing nothing nothing see oh is that it there it is right there there it is there it is yeah I see it I saw it there it is oh it's cool yeah that is cool oh check that out man that's going really fast what the heck is that I don't know wow look at the chunks coming off of it yeah I see what you're saying my thing looks like it's flipping all over the place oh yeah I can still see it but I'm losing it I can't I've got to still got it in the

camera where is it over right now dad 650 they're in Texas right now it was a Saturday morning I Was preparing to come to work it was a beautiful day beautiful drive and as I turned onto Park Street I heard a loud boom all of a sudden our house just shook we you know looked at each other we said what is that when I looked up I saw a bright white [Music] ball what's going on it appears that we have had an explosion in this area an explosion phones were ringing off the hook much more than our dis

patch staff could handle okay you're telling me a piece of metal fell out of fell out of SK I didn't know if we were being attacked the search and rescue teams are warning people not to touch any debris should they come across it there are some disturbing pictures that are coming up from the broadcasters we're waiting for more details as to how this happened maybe the beginnings of why it happened NASA has declared a state of emergency Over Texas there is something a Miss we are are watching Mis

sion Control Nassau have gone through this before 17 years ago with space shuttle Challengers you can see in their eyes it is hectic and it is tense if you work in human space FL this is the worst possible thing that could ever [Music] happen the shuttle is the most complicated space machine ever [Music] built the world's greatest electric flying [Music] machine it has been a bad day for NASA a sense of tragedy in the space program and as word spreads Across the [Music] Nation there are no simpl

e and easy answers we are doing everything we possibly can to find out what caused this [Music] accident all the warning signs were there this didn't have to happen we let it happen lean in Puna arms punch in there all right here we go all right very good okay don't move too far who's first okay here we go grins again ready one two thank you I was a astronaut crew secretary I would see the crew daily the glass that'll be easier I'm not Star Struck kind of person right but you fly 12,500 M an hou

r I was like yeah I like you baby when they got selected as a crew I went and got their astronaut bio and I read what they did what they liked I went over it I'm like ah doctor H Dr Dave BR surgeon Dr cop Nala PhD Laurel Laurel was a submarine doctor I thought that was so cool um mik he's Air Force pilot and then Willie he was like a uh test pilot he already been to space and then there was a lawn you know he was already a hero in his country so I was like wow we have the juice here this will [M

usic] works let's do it they came together to start training welcome aboard good morning you ready for us to pull down these window shades and uh get going here this is your sleeping liner and this is the sleeping pad post flight if you can provide us some comments we'd really appreciate if this worked for you camera four of us are flying for the first time uh and that could be seen as a disadvantage in some ways it's an incredible Advantage because uh we have a wealth of enthusiasm and exciteme

nt that other more seasoned Crews may not have when you put the helmet on the Emu it interferes was married to Floral Clark who was on the Columbia Mission we met in Navy dive school she beat us in swimming the guys and that was kind of irritating she was just tenacious she always had a smile on her face no matter what happened it was really beautiful I feel very fortunate to be assigned to this Mission I'm expecting it to be an experience of my lifetime so far if you're a rookie astronaut and y

ou've never flown before the first mission is the best Mission it could have been a hauling garbage to some planet and she would have loved it ready ready Mark we were so excited I remember going into NASA taking a series of photos with my mom and dad after school I was seven she had her orange jumpsuit on with the helmet I was worried I was like thinking like how is her hair going to fit in there she made everything joyful all the time she was my whole world I remember the Columbia Mission bein

g announced I mean I knew them all in my class was Dave Brown Willie mcool and Laurel Clark we're all there at the same time you get your Blue flight suit that's pretty exciting I mean you're like yes yeah it's a it's a big deal this is like the lifelong dream for all of [Music] us I've spent uh 54 days in Space over four missions yeah I mean it's uh it's most fun thing ever ever done by far there's a lot of risk involved I really believe that the humans are explorers you want to see what's over

the next Hill you want to see what's across the ocean you want to see what's on the surface of the Moon almost like it's in our DNA and in this country I mean especially the United States of America I mean we're really good at this stuff NASA is a very popular government agency I mean think about this for a second when we sent people to the moon in the 1960s think about how hard that was Americans like that we're a country that does hard things and NASA does some hard stuff we've got the best s

cientists and the best Engineers oh it's beautiful Mike really is they' got the flag up now it's about what it means for us as a nation to lead in space and lead in this kind of Technology you know we've have a record of [Music] success [Music] feel is a once in A- lifetime happening the maiden voyage of the space shuttle Columbia will open a new chapter in American space travel you come here to watch the space shuttle going off yeah we come a long way to see it the shuttle is the most complicat

ed space machine ever built it cost $1 billion to develop and here at the cape it will show whether or not it can fly I had an emotional feeling with with Colombia because she was the number one she was Paving the way to the utilization of space in a more practical way cheaper better previously Rockets Were Expendable onetime use but the space shuttle was reusable in its design up to 100 times it was a Quantum Leap Forward in space travel first flight of Columbia there's cars all over the place

and there people outside and I'd been sleeping in the Clover by the car cuz we didn't have a hotel room I have binoculars and I have camera we're 3 miles away 10 9 8 7 6 [Music] and it's up and away all of us have been said go go Colombia [Music] go people had had seen Apollo launches exploring the Moon the Space Shuttle reignited that interest it it was the pride of the United States Columbia houst I still think it's one of the most complex machines ever built by the human race the spacecraft h

as worked as advertised all the way along I think we've got something that's really going to mean something to the country and the world history will be made today when the space shuttle Columbia comes down for the first time from space you can see the faint Speck in the middle of the dark spot this was a grand experiment because no one had ever had to land the spacecraft like a glider before this is the single most critical time for the spacecraft uh to see whether the heat the wings hold up th

e heat tiles stay on the structure takes it as the shuttle was entering the earth atmosphere it would get to about 3,000 de at the highest heating points most metallic structures uh without protection start losing their properties and may even start melting colia you're really looking good right on the money so they devised the heat shield which was made of tiles to protect the shuttle from breaking up during entry welcome home colia beautiful beautiful you can assume their re-entry through the

atmosphere worked like a charm the reusable space truck will be given a free ride back to the Kennedy Space Center where a second launch is planned perhaps as early as [Music] August in the beginning there were four operating shuttles Colombia Challenger Atlantis and Discovery one of the goals was to fly 20 missions a year sometimes there were sending satellites quite a few classified missions for the Department of Defense eventually they were used for assembling and building the International S

pace Station but reusability puts demand hands on the design that it has to be robust and resilient and come back intact and fully operational that's a huge [Music] demand the mission aboard the orbit of Columbia is a 247 science Marathon working in a 2,000 cubic foot lab attached to the cargo hold the crew will study fires moss growth human prostate cancer cells and how rats adapt to weightlessness in all there are more than 59 experiments my husband Rick was the commander of the space shuttle

Columbia they were my wildest dreams that I think I'd ever meet an astronaut much less marry one my mother always told me when you go out with someone to ask them about themselves because guys really like that so that's what I did and so he told me he said that he wanted since he was 4 years old he wanted to be an astronaut I'm my name is Rick husman I'm the commander of SCS 107 we're going to be flying a 16-day science Mission I was I think probably 10 or 11 I knew it was a big in charge positi

on and that he would be the leader of the team you think of some something like Buzz Lightyear Star Command be like wow dad's the commander of a shuttle okay let's do like this you know yeah while they were in training Dave Brown one of the astronauts came to Rick and asked if it was okay if he recorded footage of of the crew throughout the mission what are you guys doing here we're just watching our trying to ignore me we're we're trying to ignore our best pal Dave was busy doting our journey t

oward space he was an amateur videographer but not that amateur he was really good at it Dr Dave man this is above and beyond I know 630 Dave your camera is affecting me it is you know Rick just he wanted to make sure that the crew was comfortable with it chicken and rice Italian vegetables all in a tortilla Which they were they trusted Dave they felt comfortable with him doing that okay you're on rolling take three Dave and Laurel action we're here in the Wind River mountains with the crew of S

TS 107 brought to you by the national outdoor Leadership School well Laurel are you ready Dave my palms are sweaty my knees are weak I'm ready for an outdoor adventure [Applause] W the crew went on an outdoor team building trip in Wyoming now Will's not safe so we're all safe right it was I think close to 2 weeks long and it comes around right down in this Valley my dad had come up with the idea to help them Bond and Dave filmed the crew while they were doing that this is such a nightmare I'm tr

ying to make these stupid brownies because everybody wanted brownies for breakfast you're not hungry I'm not that hungry but I would love to have some breakfast brownies that would be delicious well there's some right here wow looks kind of like Bearcat but you know on the trip in Wyoming had to work together as a [Music] team when you're off the space shuttle you really have to have a high level of what they call Behavioral Health and what do you think will well you're not just technically comp

etent but you're low maintenance some good cockpit Behavior there cuz you are inherently in a confined space you can't say uh I'm just going to take a timeout and go outside and not deal with your you know BS anymore you would not believe the things that have happened up there there have been fights there was a cosmina who talked about how he was going to kill his fellow cosmina so NASA had started to realize we got to get a handle on this and it's really [Music] important next stop over the Ear

th's atmosphere when they came back it was like their bond was forever they walked in sink with each other it was like left right left right they were the Columbia crew they were STS 107 they were a unit 1 2 3 excellent yeah well here we are here we are the Eva team for STS 107 Michael Anderson was my husband we got to go watch him to look at part of the training a underwater experience to simulate zero gravity he was excited but if you looked at him you would think C and collected but he was ex

cited he would tease the kids we were going to go to Mars as a family halfway he was joking but halfway he was thinking hm this would be kind of cool check O2 actuator is an Eva he loved it it was his dream complete read to but he thought about it I mean he thought about the safety issues and he knew he was in a dangerous career field I'm I'm probably different than most astronauts I really don't enjoy launches you know I think a launch is a terrible way to get to space when you launch in a rock

et you you're not really flying that rocket you're just sort of hanging on even though we've gone the great pains to to make it as safe as we can there's always the potential for something going wrong you know so we try not to think about those things we train and try to prepare for the things that may go wrong but there's always that unknown and and I guess it's that unknown that that I don't like I went with Michael to Florida for the first time and actually saw the shuttle then when I saw it

I was like you really want to get up in this you really really really want to do I remember saying to him because somehow it didn't look as glamorous as it did on television I was like wow that's you know the oldest one in the fleet I don't know about this it looked smaller to me you know it looked little older I was like okay this is getting really real and then I I remember thinking about what happened to [Music] Challenger Space Shuttle Challenger is just a few seconds away from blasting off

from the Kennedy Space Center near Cape canaval Florida let's take a look right [Music] now lift off confirmed lift off engines throttling up three engines now 104% Challenger go with throttle up go throttle [Music] up vehicle has exploded and we hear from launch control the vehicle has exploded that's the Orbiter itself the shuttle Challenger has exploded we must assume that the crew is not alive this is unheralded in the history of the Space Program ladies and gentlemen I have covered space sh

uttle launches since the very first launch since before the first launch itself uh going way back and nothing like this has ever happened it was a sad day for all Americans this was our space program this was our National Space Program and here they lost their lives doing it for our country when I thought about Challenger I talked to Michael I said you know what you're doing what you're doing I'm glad you're loving it and liking it but you got a wife and two little kids here if something happens

we prayed a lot about it um he talked to us about his faith and he's like hey God has got me like if something happens like God is going to take care of me he's going to take care of you know you guys as a family you'll be okay there are risks to this like I chose a profession that you know is dangerous sometimes um he was like but we don't want to be fearful about it do you remember in the conversation did you nearly say I'm not sure like maybe don't how do you stop somebody from doing somethi

ng that they've worked so hard to do and achieved and was so dedicated and committed to I I wouldn't have stopped him I was working at Nasa then I had done this threat assessment any commercial airliner your chances of a bad outcome or one in a a million probably closer to one in 10 million scuba diving and flying in general Aviation military flying is one in 100,000 and flying in a space shule one in 100 your chances of and a bad outcome or one in a 100 doing okay ma'am I'm okay great I told La

urel and she she said to me she goes well if it really is that risky why doesn't Nasa say tell that to me and I said well I don't know but I'm at Nasa and this is the analysis I've done you know if somebody told me hey you can go on this roller coaster ride and there's one in a 100 chance that you'll die well there's no chance in the world no chance in hell I would do do that uh flying on the space shut the benefit we get for our country is enormous you know I think a lot of us feel that this is

uh tremendous amount of risk and you know there will be you know accidents and people will lose their lives but I also think that people generally think it's not going to be them NASA has grounded its four shuttles until at least September because of small cracks that have been found in the fuel lines the concern is the cracks could grow and Splinter into hazardous chunks of metal they got a bunch of us like a dozen Engineers to go fly down to Kennedy Space Center to go look at cracks there was

copious amounts of engineering discussion and testing going on if a main engine were to explode that would destroy the vehicle it' be out of control we'd lose the vehicle and the crew it's too dangerous to fly any shuttle until we get a handle on this it grounded the entire fleet including Columbia they found a crack in one of our our older vehicles undergoing um some rehab work and so there's concern you know obviously if if there's maybe cracks in some of the other vehicles it was like delaye

d and delayed and delayed you're kind of glad that they're dealing with whatever the issue is and you're hoping that everything's okay and you know it makes it a little bit more nerve-wracking [Music] there were many many meetings and many thousands of hours spent on this but NASA management and engineering came up with Solutions once these propulsion cracks were fixed and repaired we can resume flight but I had oversight into all the missions and there were numerous problems uh well the other s

huttle Fleet there were just one after another it with just wooden end of Damages and things that were out of whack the thermal protection system the tiles with being damaged every flight one time a large piece of foam from the gigantic fuel tank dented the solid rocket boosters on liftoff another time a vulture hit the tank if it hit the windows catastrophe this is a complex vehicle that always needs a lot of caretaking [Music] I'm Shan O'Keefe I was the administrator of the National Aeronautic

s and Space Administration the leader of the agency at that time every single mission that I was there for was scrubbed rescheduled um delayed because something wasn't exactly right what did catch my attention in terms of the shovel from the very first time I saw them up close was this was 1970s technology this was a lot of moving Parts a lot of mechanical moving parts and anytime you have that happen it's um challenging to keep it for I have you already done the Miss chamberling bleed we don't

have too much time cuz launch is coming 36 or 37 days to launch and uh it's starting to get exciting why is it exciting what do I mean why is it exciting to go to space well for the first time at least for us for me it's exciting 3 weeks from the launch we were flying from Houston to Albuquerque for Christmas Ian and Laurel and I it was my dad flying the plane and me and our dog in the back seat and we start hitting some of this turbulence and all of a sudden the plane gets into this like down w

ash it's going down like this well I mean we just crashed was just you know bam slapped down and the fact that we survived is to this day something I cannot explain I think it messed Ian up because the closer we got to the flight itself he kept saying I don't want you to leave Mom I want you to stay here on Earth basically he said I don't want you to go I um begged her pretty desperately not to go I was I was very emotional and I was crying to stop try try to stop her from leaving how hard do yo

u think it was lurel uh deeply uh difficult I think that you couldn't quantify the magnitude of their love motherhood's been incredible and I tell my son all the time that my most important job is being his mother I relied on my mom for so much so much how much did she love being a mom well I I think she loved that more than being an astronaut I think that she loved that more than anything else in her life and if she had pulled out at that point how would that have impacted the miss oh it would

have been it would have canel it or delayed it at at the very least because the crew members are so specifically trained there is no backups I can't even imagine the quandry that she would have faced having to decide that but she was committed and determined to get the job done these guys have trained you know forever for this Mission and the last thing they want is for them to catch something and be sick that just would be catastrophic for the for the mission so they they put him in quarantine

a a week prior the children weren't allowed to be around them I had to say goodbye to him before he went to quarantine and I remember hugging his waist cuz that's where I came to him when when I was 12 that moment actually right here in the kitchen um I remember crying and just knowing how much I would miss him we drove him to quarantine and we all said goodbye and like had hugs and kisses and it was a really sweet moment and it was just us and that was it he was off be good line just walks into

the kitchen starts looking and cover starts grabbing stuff and it just miraculously happened he transformed it cheers we're almost there the last time Ian saw his mom was in Houston in the crew quarters and actually they're supposed to not see their kids for seven days and We snuck him into crew quarters but not unbeknown to anybody else for him to get a hug from his mom and this would have been probably 3 days before the launch she was just reassuring me that it was going to be okay and I'll m

iss you too but you know I'll be back it was a very long hug you know oh maybe it I don't know if they knew it was the last one or not who could deprive a child of that from his mom [Applause] absolutely thrilled to be here thrilled to go do a lot of work see some incredible things and spend some more time with this great group of people I'm with today I left Washington head down to Florida to witness the launch had an opportunity to visit with the crew launch of the Columbia had occurred a year

and a half after 911 at that time I was in briefings in the White House to identify what are the high value targets what are the things that would be an attraction for terrorists to just get the attention of the American people one of them was this shuttle but this one I looked at more carefully because of the presence of Alan Ramone Elon Ramon says he is uncomfortable in the spotlight but none of his six subtle crew Mates is the first astronaut from Israel the fact that he was on board that fl

ight was considered to be a higher security concern given the nature of the Middle East um relations and tensions and all the other things that go with this anybody you know from Al-Qaeda from is you know you know the the extremists would love to make a statement about why don't we take that out as a way to make a statement across the globe of what we're capable of doing uh I'm not uh thinking myself or my family as targets but as human beings and uh and and this flight especially is going to ta

ke care of a better life on Earth I was 12 years old I remember before the launch there was uh a lot of security we were taken from place to place but and being escorted with uh different cop cars security following the bus my dad didn't want us to be worried about anything but we knew it was risky the post 911 regimen remains in place a huge no fly zone around the launch pad patrolled by Fighters enhanced Radars surfac to air missiles and the launch time kept secret until the day before there w

ere gunboats out there there is uh you know frog men in the water they had snipers on the roof of the hotel as well as Mounted Police all up and down the beach you could easily hide a sniper in a swamp out there with a high power rifle and a couple of hits in the wrong spot on the shuttle in bad day this shut launch control and everything is going well and as planned with the countdown for the launch of Columbia shuttle mission STS 107 today's launch represents the 28th Flight of the shuttle Col

umbia and the 113th shuttle flight overall in NASA space shuttle program first one the second one good morning how are you doing all right so we all ready this morning I think uh we are how about you oh I'm ready I'm ready I got the easy part ready for the big day okay hey bab dreaming of sleeping in space me the yeah take a picture ofor in 2003 I was responsible for uh all the astronauts but he's got to lose I was here supporting I was an astrona myself every time you get suited up there is ant

icipation I don't know anxiety excitement yeah launch launch day is pretty special good sir yeah okay go ahead and uh close your visor and turn your off okay all right here we go every launch we do this really strange thing where we play this card game this poker game because it was been done since Neil Armstrong you win you win know that's good it's good it's good to win one step closer to lunch thinking you know when I was a little kid Neil Armstrong was standing here in this room before he we

nt to the moon it's incredibly exciting there's nothing I can think of that's more exciting all right everything is timed very specifically and they actually have a you know it was an old analog clock with a a marker on it and you just got to wait you want to go you know the risk and you know what you're getting ready to do you know if you don't you probably shouldn't be in that business Rick husman got the whole crew together inside the suit room before they went out the door into the hallway a

nd they all got together arms around each other head bowed and uh and set a prayer Lord please be with our cre on this Mission thank you for bringing us to this point amen am amen Christian Hindu Jew all together as one as they walked out uh out of the suit [Music] room [Music] [Applause] all right and our astronauts coming out now as they are making their way to the astronaut band Commander Rick Husband Halo specialist Dilan Ramone pilot William M and Mission specialist Michael Anderson David B

rown Laurel Clark col MAA morning Ronnie morning how you doing doing great filing I'm filming all right we're going to go today there's our helicopter there it [Music] is [Music] you have a good one sir thank care all over okay everybody on yep 195 here we come okay everybody high five here we [Music] go all right morning gentlemen welcome to the 195 we're going to have a wonderful day today when you're up there at the 195 ft level and you're getting ready to get in the vehicle it it's pretty am

azing I mean you're all suited up and this is for real and the vehicle it's venting it's creaking it's like it's [Music] alive you just can't believe in a couple hours you're going to be inside this thing blasting off into into space this thing is Big this thing it's really big for me if there was any apprehension it it was then I mean but you can't say no I don't think I want to do this you know you're pretty much you're going how you do good to see you thank you see you the final folks to spea

k to him that's the uh astronaut support personnel and The Crew That's strapping them into the vehicle and the NASA test director Jeff Spalding has given approval for the crew to begin entry into the vehicle once they're in their seat they will be basically laying on their backs husband climbing in uh somewhat difficult uh cramped quarters there the next to enter the vehicle will be Yan Ramon and he is currently taking his seat on the mid deck thank you very much good morning Jeff they help get

their harnesses on get them strapped in and uh you know when they close the hatch that's uh that's it yes sir do I have a go to close the hatch do I have a go to close the hatch copy that here at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida a lot of concern about security with the first Israeli astronaut on board Columbia for this 16-day science Mission I'm there to cover that launch uh like we always were I'm 3 miles away which is as close as they let anybody 28th launch for Columbia the 113th shuttle m

ission launch I'm always thinking about what I would say if things go really wrong uh and uh because that that's my responsibility to be that person one of the experiments on board the shut columb so you sort of have to go down the list of threats if you will you know 911 Elon Ramone did they really fix those cracks and then it's up to you know a million movable Parts all working in synchronicity which is kind of the fact that it never worked at all is pretty amazing back here in the space shutt

le flight control room the Asen team of flight controllers who have been on Console since about 3:30 this morning monitoring Columbia systems in preparation for the first shuttle launch of the year the ASN team is led by flight director Leroy Kane for today's launch uh it was going one 20 launch day is unique whether it's in the launch control center in Florida or in Michigan control in Houston you could commit to launch or you could scrub and and have to come back and try again another day is a

flight controller in Mission Control STS 107 was my second mission for me it was always when you got uh at the T-minus 10 minute hold and you give the final go no go for launch that is that is kind of the moment where you realize that this is about to get real go no go for guidance gcx for me personally I could feel my adrenaline gland just go and then my heart rate pick up a little bit and and mentally uh would just have to use a breathing technique you ready for a G1 launch Target there's a l

ot of responsibility you're getting ready to launch a space shuttle with humans on board it is not an easy business Houston flight is by then it's too late to figure out whether you're ready to do it or not you're committed at that point so now it's it's focus on what's what's ahead of you yeah Lun director the launch team is ready to proceed at this time launch director verify launch team is only person who was authorized to launch the the shuttle itself was the launch director of the Kennedy S

pace Center on the moment in which everything lined up and the launch director was convinced they were ready to go for launch that's when he said go for launch press the button and now was it Columbia launch director go ahead okay Rick if there was ever a time to use the phrase all good things come to people who wait this is one time and uh for you and your crew best of luck on this mission and some of many many people put this Mission together good luck and God's peace oh we appreciate it Mike

the Lord has blessed us with a beautiful day here and uh we're going to have a great Mission we appreciate all the great hard work everybody's put into this and we're ready to go copy that clear to launch the countown clock will resume on my Mark 3 2 1 Mark tus 9 Minutes in couny so does everybody stand up as soon as it launches we had three or 400 invited guests to the launch and so each family had that amount it is a huge event the strongest emotion is just excitement I mean we're just it's ju

st a it's there's a huge Buzz I mean it's just it's really amazing we were in this big building and they had us standing on the roof to watch everything so we were just kind of waiting all together and you know all the kids were kind of talking and playing until things kind of started counting down go for orbit Access Army check T-minus 5 minutes and Counting and we have a go for Apu start the auxiliary power unit activation has been reported I do remember being outside and looking at the shuttl

e getting ready to take off he was Adam and he did now to me that he didn't want his mom to go and then he started crying the whole the whole launch was him crying it was awful T minus 3 minutes 25 seconds and counting and final Aeros surface checks of the orbiters wing elevons and Rudder are being completed at this time I remember for a brief second looking at the Orbiter on the Launchpad and just thought I have absolutely no control over how this is going to go there's just such a mixture of e

motion there's Pride um excitement fear I remember my mom stroking my hair like and I think that was like sort of a comfort for her and for me and the gasas oxygen vent Hood will be slowly retracted away from the top of the external tank you feel it and it's my husband's in that with all that fuel and all that power so you trust everybody's done their jobs that they're supposed to do you trust the shell works well you trust the Lord over and above everything you trust the Lord colia for the flig

ht crew Andis and initiate for the first two plus minutes of the mission with the solid rocket boosters attached there's no option for aort you have to wait till they're done and burned out and cut away that is a blackout Zone that's a death zone no matter what happens in that scenario you cannot do anything that was where when this Challenger went down was in that blackout Zone T-minus 1 minute and Counting and we're coming up on a go for our Auto sequence start and then the moment came you kno

w the moment where the launch was coming each family came together and kind of were uh hugging and holding each other you know just really getting emotional about this and then the lunch sequence starts happen 11 the weird thing is that uh you see that flash and you see that smoke coming up and it's like well well that sucks there's no sound and so you're like what the and then it's boom you don't quite expect it to be as powerful you feel your insid shaking and vibrating from this huge sound ev

erybody is just so emotional and um it's hard not to not to cry [Music] for me it's like the star spangle Banner playing it's incredibly visceral and uh emotive and inspirational the international research Mission finally underway colia you sent your go at throttle up we probably go at throttle up you sit there and you look at that that trail of fire and you think God there's seven people on top of that every time that kind of gets me Columbia traveling at 18800 mph and you're watching seven of

your closest friends on this ball of flame going off into space my heart's going like this tears running down my I mean it's very emotional Columbia's three main engines draining a half a ton of fuel per second heading towards space on the first shuttle mission of the year you know how on TV it looks like you're going up really smoothly no not at all it's kind it's kind of a wild [Music] ride and there's a lot of vibration and on my first flight it was so much I thought to myself there's somethi

ng wrong here I like this does not feel right to me cannot possibly feel like this solid rocket booster separation confirmed guidance now converging Columbia's onboard computers commanding the main engine nozzles to gently swivel aiming the shuttle for a precise Target and space for main engine cut off I was like more nervous you know you see the plumes of smoke and the fire and you kind of know what's going on but you're just kind of like in the back here is supposed to do that is that correct

okay like there they go W that's so high you know just all these thoughts and then all of a sudden they're just gone and you're just still hearing it when I lost sight of the shuttle going up that's when I kind of felt like a little Sting from it you know just like a feeling of man how could she just leave like that Colombia in its preliminary orbit a fantastic ride all the way up the vehicle just flew beautifully people have said that Columbia they have to do a lot of work on it on the ground b

ut when it gets in face it just goes wonderful when we think that because she just loves being space remember looking at the planet for the first time I mean I still have the whole image burned into my brain where you look over and you see this big round blue ball and it's just incredible see the planet as what it is you know for the very first time yeah globe and that is uh just a wild thing to Wild Thing to see everything in great shape as uh the Orbiter is now settled into an orbit uh about 1

43 nautical miles above the Earth standing by uh for further activity on board space Auto Colombia is safe in orbit and here at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida NASA the US Air Force breathing a collective side of relief the perfect launch for Columbia a perfect climb to orbit they're in orbit and that's when you're you know you're you're home free so it was like Sor relief when they when they were you know up in space and it was like they made it let's take it the look at the view from orbit

this is 225 km above us I stayed in place until they were uh they had main engine cut off because that anything can happen till then and once they turn off those main engines and they're in orbit you know you're in a relatively safe situation you can safely walk away from the camera and uh they started quickly playing the launch replays and and that was when we saw it this is Mission Control Houston continuing to watch replays of Colombia's launch which occurred on time and flawlessly just 28 m

inutes ago from the Kennedy Space Center Launchpad 39a I was in our truck producer called me in said you got to look at this it was kind of a grainy image but you see this this poof like a like you dropped a bag of flour on the ground and it all floated into the air didn't take much of a telephoto to show this kind of explosion but it did not look good at all it looked bad for all episodes in the series press red to watch now on I player here for the people who made history the story of the spac

e flight first in 13 minutes the moon on sounds and drama documentary brings to life the story of the Apollo 11 Mission 8 days to the moon and back on BBC 4 now okay good morning and welcome to the first uh SCS 107 mmt um great launch yesterday and I'm sure everyone's real excited about getting on orbit here and finally getting underway with this um science Mission we just want to report everybody's all smiles here that's good the second day I drive in to work kind of euphoric because you anothe

r launch another successful launch you know the flight director director's office and in in the Mission Control Center in Houston is working with them they everything's good this is the first mission in a while that is completely dedicated to science it's the first one in several years it's a 16-day flight with the Dual shift we have a crew of seven four will be up on one shift and three will be up on the other shift so that we can work 24 hours a day I walked into the analysis lab to start revi

ewing film from the launch I love film analysis I love sitting in there doing that work in 2003 my team was in charge of the neighborhood of 130 cameras there's cameras on the mobile launcher there's cameras on the Launchpad there's layers of cameras to give you different distances you want your imagery to be able to show you what is going on on the exterior of the vehicle so we started the film at the beginning we're watching this liftoff you see the roll Maneuvers beautiful blue sky we do the

normal review and we start pointing out all the things that we normally see you use the Shadows from the projector behind you so you see these fingers you know it's like shadow puppets and we got 81 seconds and then we see this object come off of the external tank area it moves down and then strike the vehicle then explode into a white cloud what was your reaction uh inside your hand my reaction was oh the shuttle is the most complicated space machine ever [Music] built the world's greatest elec

tric flying [Music] machine it has been a bad day for NASA a sense of tragedy in the space program and as word spreads Across the Nation there are no simple and easy answers we are doing everything we possibly can to find out what caused this [Music] [Applause] accident all the warning signs were there this didn't have to happen we let it happen [Music] houon a very good morning to the red team R Laurel that music Was Kung Fu Fighting selected especially for you by your dedicated training team t

urn good morning uh to all and special good morning to my wife R the love of my life I remember myself going to sleep and imagining where he is right now I wonder where he is right now he's somewhere over us maybe going around in the circles around around the Earth [Music] it's surreal these seven people who are you know living in space eating and working and I'm going to the bathroom and and seeing Earth from space [Music] Commander husband let's talk first of all about how everything's going w

ell actually things are going really well and uh uh things have been working well Colombia is in great shape and working absolutely perfectly we had a great ride to orbit after the launch we came home for the next 16 days we knew that the crew was going to be in Space by that point I mean I turned on NASA TV here and just started watch watching the [Music] mission next up for the blue shift was a blood drop experiment Laurel is telling Mike that this isn't going to hurt her a bit I think God has

put a desire of pioneering in us and exploring and just to see someone to be able to follow through with that to that level is so admirable but more than anything I just loved listening to Rick's voice i l listening to him taught back and forth with Mission Control for me ass setup complete andri we [Music] copy looking at that film we were all discussing how big are we talking about a problem how much damage are we talking about worst case would have been damaged all the way down to the skin o

f the vehicle that would have given us a problem during the landing and what does that in in human terms what does that mean well that probably would have been loss of vehicle and loss of [Music] crew so I went to see wayne my [Music] boss based on my 20 plus years of experience I can tell you every shuttle flight that flew had issues people came to me as a flight director as manager every day in this case Bob Paige knocked on my door came to my office and said we've got a problem this is the la

rgest strike of the vehicle that we have ever seen he's a a little bit of a high energy guy so it wasn't unusual I didn't think but he had um a little video clip that he showed me it's really hard to tell if anything bad had happened I mean this is insulating foam it's lightweight so the orange thing um is the external tank it's carrying cryogenically cold liquid oxygen and hydrogen and it's going to set out on the launch pad in the sunshine you don't want that to start boiling off so over the o

utside of the tank there is the spray on insulating foam similar to what you have if you have a leak and you get the stuff from the hardware store and you spray it around the window seill cheap very effective but it's got this property that as you go through supersonic flight in the atmosphere bits of it come off so phone falling off during launch was something that had happened before yes it happened all the time uh maybe not in these big chunks but it did happen all the time the question is ho

w bad of shape is the Orbiter in and Bob said I really wish there was some way to get more information I knew this Mission passed over places where there were some high altitude telescopes these are looking at stars so if you want to look at the Orbiter you could probably get the entire Orbiter fit in the field of few and have extremely good resolution and I said well I don't really know much about that Bob we'll have to check and so I got the Assurance from Wayne that um he would make some call

s and he would see what what could be done and um things were put into motion did the crew know this point no do you don't want to alarm the crew that early they had just gotten onto orbit they have a job to do when we have the complete story then that's when we pass it on to them mom mom thank you I miss you hi we talked using the early Tel video conferencing capability and super low Tech bandwidth it it's ratty C but it's a very special [Applause] time it was a it was a huge relief being able

to see her again but I really couldn't comprehend that she was in space like it it didn't make sense to me at all you want to see my ha when it [Applause] yeah I miss you a lot lot lot I'm going to be seeing rock all the rest of the time I know what you mean and I you one because you always one lot [Music] more it felt like counting down to Christmas waiting for her to get back can I give you another a kiss [Applause] in the NASA world people don't talk in terms of it's life or death you use the

terms threat to the vehicle and crew or risk to the vehicle and crew it might have more power or more punch if we talk life and death but we don't there's an old saying in the space business the first story is never right right so you get the story something happened it could be the end of the world it could be nothing so we were all concerned it wasn't like we were going to do anything immediately other than get the data and we will hand it over to the engineers that are standing ready to do t

hose sort of analysis the second day of the mission was just an ordinary day for me I was ready to go home about 5:00 on a Friday evening and then I got a call from my manager she said Rodney do you know that large piece of foam hit the left wing and I think I gasp and I said oo or ah I made some expl no I did not hear that and she said they have just released a video every time I watch the video I'm looking at portions of the video or a sector of it just to see if I can glean one more piece of

detail out of it and the question I had what is that cloud of expanding white stuff one can't help but ask is that part of the wing coming apart [Applause] columia Houston good morning to the red team good morning Linda we are up and awake and I guess we'll continue face tring today too and that sounds like a good [Applause] plan I was thinking about this foam strike all the weekend and I thought can't we get the astronauts to look through this side hatch window there's a little window right her

e this little dark circle could they have looked back to this area in here to see if there's any damage debris residue anything what I was expecting is you first look with your eyes just look and then if they had seen something unusual they would have probably used binoculars they have binoculars on board and they have telephoto lenses in cameras they would have probably photo documented this whole thing and sent it down to the ground once the crew has reported something the ground response must

respond it was a very easy thing to do and the crew would have done it happily uh so let's see Rodney sent me an email we know that the the remote manipulator system arm and cameras are not available but what about the left side hatch window uh he's he's questioning whether there's been any action uh to ask the crew to look for damage okay well good morning or good evening as the case goes for all you guys working around the clock there in Houston you have to understand NASA works on procedures

we have a mission plan Le Shi is just finishing up their day any deviation needs to be evaluated and assessed on how it will impact everything Laurel just to be advis you have about 2 minutes of video left to deviate from the processes and the procedures you need to have a reason and the reason needs data it's not just I have a bad feeling about this and I got no reply my email my request was never answered Columbia this is CNN how do you read me hey CNN we've got you loud and clear stand by an

d we'll have you on the Telly here very shortly say hello to the crew of the Space Shuttle Colombia now traveling above the Pacific at 17,300 miles an hour 150 mil above us waving to us let's give you an idea of Who's Who I remember interviewing the crew in space Rick Husband the commander second mission Laurel Clark prepping for that interview I thought about the foam strike and how to handle it but on launch day when I saw that footage I wasn't sure what to think about it I'm not a rocket scie

ntist so I called to uh somebody who I know knew very well at Nasa I said help me understand how worried I should be for this he said ah it's foam it's very light material probably doesn't cause any damage D telling you there's nothing to worry about but did you still have a little conent that was it nagged me the whole mission colon Ramone um I'm curious was the launch what you expected the launch was uh lot of uh noise shaking but uh after a minute or so got used to it and it went pretty smoot

hly I was thinking about the foil I just didn't know how to in a 5-minute interview set that up are all these experiments working they couldn't all be working as planned well things are going very smoothly as expected there's some minor glitches I had gone through this process of convincing myself that it was going to be okay all right we're going to have to leave it at that goodness look at that little chalice going by there but I had this sinking feeling I just I just didn't feel right we spen

t the weekend analyzing this film we estimated the size of the foam 16 in across 18 in Long suitcase size so it's a big chunk of foam moving at 750 mph but in the end what we did not know was the condition of the vehicle Post strike how much thermal protection system would be left returning from space a craft that is going 17,500 mph heats up gases and very hot gases become something we call plasma the shuttle is enveloped in this Inferno and it is kind of beautiful but obviously you want to be

protected from it well they they came to the conclusion that the the best way to deal with that was to arrange a system of tiles to cover the shuttle all of the black here shown is all tiles and these tiles are made of a silica fiber material which is very heat resistant I can show you this is a a test tile there are about 31,000 of them Al together and we hope those tiles will stay on when the orbit comes back into the atmosphere because otherwise the craft itself could be damaged what happens

if you have a serious tile problem well if you don't have any tiles on the bottom the vehicle's going to burn up if you have a lot of tiles on the bottom the vehicle won't burn up but if something should happen to the tile is there anything at all that you can do during the development of the Space Shuttle and 1970s there was quite an effort to develop a way to repair damage tiles on orbit it was a huge effort and it was an utter failure they could not develop anything and that was one of the ac

cepted risks of flying in space I knew the one tool we had was changing the way entry is done you can change the the the angle of attack coming in so you can lessen the heat in certain areas but you know the calendar is ticking down okay uh good morning we're ready for [Music] roll everyone in a more location connected we're here thank you weather office weather office here the biggest misimpression I see in movies and whatnot is that there's a few guys sitting around a table making decisions it

's not like that in a meeting there's 20 30 people in the room there's people joining from Kennedy there's people from Huntington Beach California representative from engineering a representative from the crew the crew getting a good sleep feeling good the chairman of the meeting was Linda ham she basically ran this Mission she was effectively the deputy to Ron Dore the uh program manager in those days Linda has excellent judgment can grasp complicated problems very quickly she was the first wom

an to be certified as a flight director all right I know you guys are looking at that debris yeah um as everybody knows you know we took the hit somewhere on the leftwing Leading Edge and uh um hey just a comment I was thinking that our flight rationale from ss112 was that this material properties and density of the foam wouldn't do any damage Linda was recalling sts12 a flight two flights before both Man start two 1 got booster ignition and lift off of the Space Shuttle Atlantis wus 112 had a v

ery similar piece of foam come off from the almost the same location but in that case the foam hit solid rocket booster and put a dent in it the foam traveled traveled down it struck right here these three lines but of course solid rocket boosters disconnect they splash down in the ocean it didn't hit the Orbiter so it was no effect to the flight the manager team they analyzed it and came up with the conclusion that no safety of flight issue existed welcome back to Earth Atlantis and congratulat

ions on a truly spectacular Mission but we dodged the bullet on that one the difference with Colombia is that the foam hit the Orbiter but you can't see where on the wing it hits and how big the damage to the Orbiter may be so we are you know talking about doing some sort of parametric type analysis and also we're talking about looking at what you can do um in the event we really have some damage there a special team was forming and I was told that I would be on it the mission management wanted

to know how bad is it no damage minimal damage or grave [Music] damage in that room on the first meeting there were probably 12 to 15 people they were the best experts in different fields but um all we knew was this was foam and it hit the left wing but where on the left wing we did not know this is why we naturally came to the conclusion we cannot initiate a credible analysis until we know damage location and extent of damage there's nothing credible we can initiate we must have another piece o

f data another image we knew that performing a space walk would have been very dangerous space walks are always highly choreographed they always go to places where they have handrails where they've had a chance to practice in this case pit would have been just kind of going out there and hanging a metal ladder off the side of the vehicle where it's going to bang around while somebody climbs down there to see if there's something there to see you're talking about doing something that could very w

ell have caused damage to an Orbiter that might be undamaged I knew that the military satellites at that time were extreme good there were stories like they could read license plates from space we have quite a fleet of spy satellites out there and most there trying to at that time chase down terrorists in Afghanistan Iraq or whatever aiming it at the shuttle was a possibility that's why the whole group thought it was a good idea let's ask for military assets the meeting participants all agreed w

e will always have big uncertainties until we get definitive better clearer photos of the wing and body Underside so in boldface I put can we petition beg for Outside Agency assistance but even with the satellite images what were you hoping would be achieved once you have this proof if there were damage then you have experts just flowing in next thing you tell the crew by informing the crew they're now part of the solution they had tools they had cutting instruments you take the available materi

als take the space Hab apart you improvise you stuff the hole if there was a hole with materials that will delay Peak heating then you can talk about altering the entry trajectory or if this had been publicized the Russians might have sent up an empty so we did the Apollo 13 scenario we would have tried something but first you need the [Music] images um and I thought Rodney was asking for something that was out of my ability to obtain so I went to my boss I said some Engineers want photographs y

ou know there's uncertainty I gave her the facts uh and she just said well they're still doing their analysis when they come back with their answer we'll see what it is and then we'll ask so she didn't say no what she said was let's get the analysis and then make a further decision if necessary wor for the rest of your it's [Music] problem good morning blue that was Hakuna Matata by the Baja men going out to Mike and it was picked especially for dad by the kids good morning Houston what a wonder

ful song and I'd really like to thank my kids for that one both Sydney and Casey and it's a really good day to wake up today and nothing to worry about and blue ship is ready to start another good day of science on you know as a kid your imagination just like runs wild I'm like do they just float and sleep or you know does he get to go out in actual space did he see aliens mostly just thought like he was an Explorer kind of like a I don't know like a space andiana Jones you know we making a poin

t to get out and go to schools and talk to kids all the time and when I do that I really try to let them know what it was like for me when I was a kid growing up and how I had this dream of one day becoming an astronaut and that really if you work hard and you're always persistent you can really make those dreams come true so I always try to give that message to the kids when I talk to them he wanted to always be involved in something that was kind of bigger than him that contributed to to socie

ty that had a purpose it was fun to watch him he looked like he was enjoying himself the crew looked like they were doing what they needed to be doing and everything was going off really well and I didn't know at the time that anything concerning had happened there were people that did though but I wasn't one of [Music] them I was in my office in Florida and and I got a phone call from the head of what we call systems Integrations he's an engineer who I respect very highly but he said hey we rea

lly don't have all the information we'd like to have on this the Bri trke do you know of anybody that's got a way to get better pictures now I had this engineer as well as Bob asking me to see if I could find out some more information NASA does not own any military satellites but at that time we had a close working relationship with the Elric Air Force Base so I put in a request with them how hard can it be to take a few photographs I'm not going to pretend that it's easy I do appreciate the pre

paration that would have to go into it one would have to interrupt the mission to get the right lighting to make sure you're over the right satellite is in position then now you have an army of people on the ground we we have to reorient the shuttle for the proper exposure angles and all that and to do that means they may have to terminate their science experiments in a program manager's mind that's responsible for getting shuttles up there on schedule if you interrupt the science Mission you ha

ve the eye of all the people in the science objectives were now ruined and that looks badly on NASA I think that weighed on them too a little bit later in that day in the afternoon I got a call from Linda and she said hey I heard that you were trying to get some pictures and I've checked around and nobody has a requirement for us to get any more information the engineers have all they need what she was telling me is that none of the managers was willing to stand up and say we really need to have

more information and and at that time I took that as well she was in Houston the engineers that are doing the analysis are there she's probably been over but um she said I want you to turn this off because we don't need to bother those other people okay how did you feel when she said that I was mad because I don't like to be overruled I've been you know trying to act within my authority and I've been countermanded by my boss Lindam knew that NASA's history with the Department of Defense in usin

g spy satellites was a little bit checkered there had been a previous mission where the landing parachute door came off on launch so the Orbiter was flying with the parachute without its door NASA made a request to get some imagery however the photos didn't help much okay so even if you can get photographs it doesn't doesn't mean they'll necessarily show anything I think they were a little bit embarrassed in the end about asking and NASA never wants to look stupid NASA wants to be the agency wit

h the answers but if you'd have said Linda two different people need this information their departments are both asking are you aware that may have changed a course of events could I have argued with her maybe but did I get the impression that her mind was made up and you know that was the end of that that's kind of where I was is it not worth it when the seven people who could be that's easy for you to say in retrospect then I wasn't really concerned about it I was going to be a good soldier so

I called Air Force Base and said I know I made this request um turns out we don't need it forget I ask about it I was told that we would not be getting images I got angry and confused what does this mean so I emailed Paul Shaq why did you do anything about it no reply no reply so I called him and I got him he was shouting at me can't call it an argument because an argument takes two people shouting and just one was shouting in this case I asked him why are you ignoring you didn't reply to my em

ail why I was asking why you didn't respond now I have you well I got it sarcastic I said don't be a chicken little here is Chicken Little a little shy on brains but uh a good egg as chickens go I knew that story in the American folkl hurry hurry this guy is falling I've seen the cartoon he is portrayed as easily frightened just like I told you hit me on the head and the lesson is Chicken Little is not to be trusted Chicken Little always gets excited Paul Shack treated me as if I were the well-i

ntentioned but silly chicken I was very upset and angry and disappointed with my engineering organizations's top to bottom there's a ticking clock we were losing time this is an email I drafted in my humble technical opinion this is the wrong and bordering on irresponsible answer not to request additional Imaging help from any outside Source remember this NASA safety posters everywhere around stating if it's not safe say so yes it's that serious I felt the need to draft that email with that stro

ng language and the strongest word in there is accusatory irresponsible but I struggled on sending it or not sending it I thought the astronauts trust us they're in the mission we're protecting their lives they want to believe that we're doing the very best for them but I would be going against all of my Engineering Management and I was afraid about my future career I was married and we had a child had a home had a mortgage and I did not send it in the end I remember that Wednesday night when I

came home from work he showed me the email that he had not sent he was very agitated very frustrated because he he wasn't sure what to do the thrust was finish the anoun analysis even though you have no information on which to base your analysis he said it's like being asked to analyze a car accident that has just happened outside but you're not allowed to look out the window but the photo denial forced us into the Rock in a hard place we have to produce an analysis anyway without a photo all ri

ght trash we have dry trash and wet trash this is a dry trash got to make it into a little pretty ball star to run low on tapes now we play volleyball and football bicycle kick onboard operations Are all uh going real well cruising great spirits and happy with the ground support and the way the mission's going and we set up to the crew a video clip of the strike just so that they're armed if they get any questions press conferen or but we made it veryy clear to them concerns you guys are doing a

fantastic job staying on timeline and accomplishing great science there is one item that I would like to make you aware of this item is not even worth mentioning other than wanting to make sure that you are not surprised by it and a question from a reporter during ASD approximately 80 Seconds some debris came loose and subsequently impacted the Orbiter left wing experts have reviewed the high-speed photography and there is absolutely no concern for entry that is all for now is a pleasure workin

g with you every day how are you Shing does that seem to be oh okay so they saw something they they're taking care of it this email was too short too too sweet too easy I really love seeing a team come together and the bigger team who uh makes this entire Mission possible is the team on the ground and all the folks who work in mission control and all the folks who work at the different NASA centers it's just such a a great feeling for me to to see everybody working together as a team like that o

kay good morning and welcome to the mmt Friday morning Rodney's team presented their analysis okay good morning Linda um we we've been looking at a couple different things over the last couple of days doing some analyses assessing the U the impact of the damage that we might have sustained on the port wing I wasn't presenting the results of our analysis the protocol was that a senior engineer would present on our behalf okay go ahead we've received uh you know the data of the um potential ranges

of sizes and and impact angles and the guys have gone off and done an analysis to determine the potential size of the the damage we all knew that if the engineers find out that that this is bad there is nothing we can do if you your heat shield was lost that was just the end game the presentation showed five scenarios that we were analyzing over the past few days Rodney's concern was uncertainty in where the damage was the way they compensated for that was to analyze multiple possible locations

instead of analyzing this area we're going to analyze this area jumping into the conclusion of all that you know obviously there's a potential for significant tile damage here but thermal analysis does not indicate that there's a potential for a burn through it would cause localized heating but no burn through I believe were the words that they used burn through means no catastrophic damage when we completed the analysis none of the scenarios showed a fatal outcome [Music] I felt some relief I

thought we were in good shape I believed him I mean you know that that's what you want to hear you you don't want to hear we're going to lose the vehicle what's missing in that is we should have had in boldface at the very beginning these are engineering assumption cases we do not know without extra data whether these are actual representations of reality we do not see any kind of um you know safety of flight issue and anything that we've looked at no safety flight no issue for this Mission noth

ing that going to do different it would be a turnaround issue only right a turnaround issue what they meant was some level of repair so when Columbia comes back when it comes back but nothing really bad that bad is just local repair patch it up and let's go again and that's what was being communicated to lindham everything was okay yes yes even though you all sat there and thought it wasn't okay what you didn't you didn't she was in the room with you she was in the room with us so what what what

prevented you from going to to the the chain of command protocol you don't approach managers directly you're you know you're a grown man and you're in the room of only 12 I'm a grown man with grown men telling me not to do that there are other grown men with power and authority saying don't do that what would have been the repercussions of talking to her in the that room I don't know if um I don't [Music] know all right any questions on [Music] that thanks for your support done an excellent job

so far have a good weekend thanks my thoughts at the time of I'm I I I feared the worst but I hope for the best um most people I think the psychology is avoid even thinking about the worst you don't want to face that fear that that issue that is the worst we've got uh an announcement that we'd like to make it is today that we remember and honor the cruise of Apollo 1 and Challenger they made the ultimate sacrifice giving their lives and service to their country and For All Mankind their dedicat

ion and Devotion to the exploration of space was an inspiration to each of us and still motivates people around the world world to achieve great things in service to others as we orbit the earth we will join the entire NASA family for a moment of silence in their memory our thoughts and prayers go to their families as [Music] well one day during the mission I worked mission control and it was like 2 a.m. you know the the graveyard shift why wasn't there reviewing the notes of the mission and the

n here's this foam issue you and my uh colleague we were reading that and I remember saying that's unusual and we actually had this discussion of hey you can use a family conference to talk to Laurel and find out what they knew and you got to remember the Hat you're wearing it's your flight surgeon hat not your family hat what did he mean by that in this case you found out this information in the context of not being a family member but being a Nas employee on the mission it actually would have

broken protocol for me to bring up an issue to a crew member like even though it's my wife without going through the official [Music] channels where's Ian I don't see him he must have left the room I think he had to go he had to go pee he's gone well you can talk to the chair thiser and when you spoke to Laurel on the video conference did it cross your mind to bring it up then no you know why because that conference was for Ian and Laurel and I was a bystander I remember um a certain sense of re

lief like it's almost over she's almost back kind of yeah you're gone I'm going to be home soon you g to come down to Florida and struggle with me when I right when I get off the spaceship uh no I completely forgot yeah I don't think we're going down you forgot we're going to stay here we're going to wait till you get how to I knew she was going to come back you know I never had a question in my mind so I just want to kiss you okay well I'm going to kiss at you like you're looking at me okay so

look up at the camera for a [Music] [Music] minute [Music] Mia Houston good morning and we're looking forward to uh our last day on orbit with you well thank you Houston and it's kind of mixed the Motions that we get ready to come home but we have enough memor classes for a lifetime think Mike we've all enjoyed the mission down here and I think that music woke up the control center too you know it's been a long 16 days and so we're all just super excited to see our loved ones again and just be b

ack to normal whatever that looks like the kids decorated the house for his homecoming and our neighbors put out Flags given the fact that you may have lost a little bit of tiw um during liftoff I'm wondering if there's going to be anything different about the entry profile taking that into regard um no there isn't we uh the engineers and analysts took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever all of the analysis says that uh we have

plenty of margin and that the impact could not have been from this particular material significant enough um and uh therefore we haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design so nothing nothing different it'll be nominal standard trajectory and as we said Columbia coming back it's been 16 days now since she left the Kennedy Space Center this is the route I remember getting up that day we were staying right next to Banana River we got up and there were a dolphin in the water and

looking at the Dolphin thinking oh what a and it looked like a picture perfect day I mean it was so pretty and everything was so pleasant we show P a15 complete and Rick we cop I just remember standing out on the balcony with Lura and um watching the sunrise and just saying to her this is a day you'll never forget we're about 42 minutes away from an engine firing that would begin Columbia's descent the crew in the final stages of their preparations now are taking their seats at the commander sea

t Rick Husband pilot Willie mol okay now I was desperately waiting for my mom to come back the thing I was most excited about was just holding her again and talking to her they put bleachers close to the runway and you're driven down there with your friends and family that you have invited for the landing they had speakers and you could hear talking Houston colia here comes the maneuver and Rick we're ready for the maneuver I did not usually come in for a landing to me those were so routine usua

lly the Orbiter has been working well they have a good weather call but I had this Wing concern because of the in Impact so I said I will go in I realized that most of those people at those consols they don't know anything that's been going on for 2 weeks they've been looking at the condition of this system this is but they don't know any other history I was the lead entry ground controller for the STS 107 Mission my primary thing is getting the spacecraft up onto arbit and getting it back down

safely that morning the atmosphere was upbeat there's no issues we work with the crew to go through checkouts of the Arbiter systems ready comes we' got all of our systems ready all the sensors ready and we prepared for the deorbit preparation which is you convert the the space shuttle from a spacecraft to a re-entry vehicle everything was proceeding proceeding normally that day the big thing that I remember um really paying attention to shortly before landing was the weather flight controllers

are currently monitoring the fog that has limited visibility but is dissipating because obviously it's just critical to have decent visibility and no big weather issues when you're Landing flight director uh Leroy Kane discussing weather conditions at present with forecasters here Leroy was the person in charge so everybody on their consoles are monitoring their own systems and they're all reporting into Leroy what they're seeing Max GC ready ma ready Jam C's go okay Columbia Houston go ahead Ho

uston hey Rick I guess you've been wondering but you are go for the deorbit burn we are happy with the weather at KSC you are go for the burn deorbit burn is a major decision in the process once that deorbit burn is made you were committed to Landing they're coming home uh one way or the other they're coming home Columbia Houston good burn no trim required we copy and concur Houston than and we'll meet you in postburn Columbia's altitude now 71 statute miles as it enters Earth's atmosphere above

the Pacific Ocean it's speed 17,000 [Music] mph some plasma now we see it out the front also B go ahead and make sure you check your suit pressure look at that this is amazing it's really getting uh fairly bright out there yep yeah you definitely don't want to be outside now like we did before [Music] [Music] col be approaching the coast of California now Wings level nose angled up 40° to control Heating FL Max go ahead Max FYI I've just lost four separate uh temperature transducers on the left

side of the vehicle hydraulic return temperatures as time goes on we start seeing anomalies sensors are starting to fail when you're telling me you lost them all at exactly the same time no not exactly they were within probably four or 5 Seconds of each other there was something that we didn't understand going on and I remember asking my team you know just take double Shore let's double check all of our data okay where is that instrumentation located they're all four of them are located in the

half part of the left wing something has gone very wrong and it is the left wing that's the stomach punch right there in Columbia Houston we see your tire pressure messages and we did not cop your La at some point we lost Cal with the crew but that's actually common I mean you don't have communications all the way through entry um so that didn't initially get my attention Columbia Houston Com Che we've also lost the uh nose gear down talk back and the right main gear down talk back everybody sta

rted to lose sensors they were getting no Telemetry whatsoever the screens were just going blank reading nothing just turning off Columbia Houston UHF comp check there was a tenseness coming into the room my focus was forward you know trying to get something to report to flight that was useful but there wasn't anything Columbia Houston UHF com check oh it was it was painful he makes the call we hear nothing you can look at the screen and the tracking head moved from the Dallas area pH do you hav

e any tracking no sir it's at the console that I was at we had an off duty flight director who called our console and said hey I'm watching the landing on TV and uh they're showing this debris in the [Music] sky [Music] that's when we realized it really was [Music] bad [Music] yo we are waiting space shuttle Columbia as we promised about ready to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida it's supposed to happen in about 15 more minutes at the runway there was just a lot of energy in the air an

d so as a kid you kind of just kind of ride that energy but all of the waiting just felt like an eternity here we go there's this big countdown clock I just remember staring at that clock like watching every second go down I'm like is it now is it now I don't know what I expected when when I saw that clock like for them to just magically arrive when it reached zero Ian was very excited mom's coming home and you know he's he's going to get mom hugs uh great meals you know life will be back to nor

mal it is now 9:00 a.m. on the East Coast take a look outside if you hear a boom boom it's a space shuttle somebody from NASA said you'll see the big kind of parachute that pops out of the back and I think that's probably what I was most excited about was watching the parachute come out but then the clock started counting back up it went 0ga 1 -2 where's the double Sonic Boom no Sonic Boom I'm kind of looking at all the other families but no one was really saying anything you can kind of feel th

e air shift a little bit there's no space shuttle I just got this incredible pit in my stomach of uh fear and of anxiety um Rush of adrenaline that you just you know something's wrong something's [Music] wrong [Music] the shuttle is the most complicated space machine ever [Music] built the world's greatest electric flying [Music] machine it has been a bad day for NASA a sense of tragedy in the space program and as word spreads Across the [Music] Nation there are know simple and easy answers we a

re doing everything we possibly can to find out what caused this [Music] accident all the warning signs were there this didn't have to happen we let it happen Houston UHF com check's not reporting any RF at this time fin when you expecting tracking 1 minute AG go flight you see no C band yet copy C band's a radar that sits on the ground and literally it sends out a signal and it bounces it off of the spacecraft to tell us where it is but we were getting nothing you know the room was just silent

all right miles back over to you all right um got a little problem on the space Auto Columbia it has been out of communication now for the past uh 12 minutes uh let's take a look at a live picture of Mission Control in Houston I was live on morning TV I was dialing into NASA on a cell phone I had there was a secret phone number you could dial into and hear Mission the mission audio the people in the control room are going are you are you hearing this no further Communications with the spacecraft

about 8 a.m. Central Time hang on let's listen in and no further tracking data from the spacecraft was gained from cand tracking radar at the merid island tracking station in Florida my team was in the control room and they were like this is serious we need to get miles off that couch and as I uh was making my way across The Newsroom to this other set I literally started heaving the last communications with the shuttle Columbia during its descent from orbit where at about 8:00 a.m. Central Time

as it standing on the side of the runway realizing that my biggest fear is coming true I just dropped my head and turn around shaking my head just walked away wasn't anything else you could do we are a minute and a half past the scheduled Landing time the space shuttle is not here this has never happened before all of a sudden the astronaut family escorts all of their cell phones start simultaneously ringing we realized Uh something's uh seriously wrong and uh I said uh let's get the families l

et's get them back to crew quarters wow oh my goodness uh it looks like we've got a van probably full of family members of the the astronauts being driven away that's not good I remember grabbing Mom's arm and saying mom is Daddy okay and I was just kind of staring out of the window trying to figure out what was happening I could just hear my mom and the driver just kind of whispering in a hush tone like what does this mean from wfaatv Channel 8 the spirit of Texas we're going going to suspend o

ur normal format right now because we've got some breaking news this is videotape of the space shuttle Columbia on its way to a scheduled Landing this morning but then we began to see this it looks like you can see pieces of the shuttle coming off there you can see numerous streams leading some kind of Trail over the Skies of [Music] Texas the space shuttle over Nacadoches what is what is happening we had just gone through 91 and my at first I thought did somebody blow it up it was probably a re

asonable thought that a lot of people had that it could be something terrorist related even in the small rural area because you never know where that might take place what's going on it appears that we have had an explosion in this area an explosion phones were ringing off the hook much more than our dispatch staff could handle you're telling me a piece of metal fell out of Sky fell out of Sky there was mass confusion we can only hope that what we're seeing is not the worst but we don't have any

confirmation well they were reporting what they knew on TV but here we knew that it was following all over our County and so immediately I picked up my cam order this was something that was going to be big oh my goodness I wonder what that is a large piece of debris right in the middle of their parking lot behind the bank you see this this is uh parts of it that's where it hit that's where it hit bounc bounc well py thought some P of tree over here it must have come right through there gol it w

as just chaos y'all didn't touch it or anything did you don't SM you don't understand you don't comprehend the massiveness of what's Happening it became pretty obvious that uh the worst it [Music] happened it's just shocking people waking up to this horrible news quite frankly I turned and looked across a big open ploud field and there in fact is a piece of smoking W this black material letting out White Hot Smoke there's some rubber burning in our P they're reporting a piece of wreckage came th

rough an apartment roof and started a fire catastrophe striking the space shuttle Columbia it's crew of Seven astronauts right now NASA will be trying to make sense of what happened in the skies Over Texas GC flight flly you see lock the doors copy I was starting to see the beginning of the process for shut down preserve your data because it's going to be needed later for investigation no no phone calls offsite outside of this room our discussions are on these loops on the recorded Divas Loops o

nly no data no phone calls no Transmissions anywhere into or out I remember turning around and seeing Leroy and and he had he had a tear going down his cheek that was that was a heart moment I glanced up and I saw an engineer I remember her eyes and cheeks were wet she was sobbing and crying and she looked at at me and she said there's nothing we could have done and all my pent up frustration anger just came out I said I've been hearing that damn stuff all week and I'm sick and tired of it I thi

nk I was more Angry than sad thinking um this didn't have to happen didn't have to [Music] happen we were told we're going to take you to crew quarters and so we were just kind of taken to this huge boardroom this big long table mini chairs and all of these TV screens and all of the screens were off everything was off we're all together wait in this room but as a kid I was just looking around to see if I could kind of figure out what was going down I remember going in the conference room and uh

it was my job to tell the [Music] families I can't remember exactly how I said it that uh that the crew was lost that they were not coming home don't I didn't want them to have any kind of false hope and uh I just did it in the most uh caring compassionate way that I could it's almost like from what I remember there's like a ringing in my ear like I don't know what was being being said or what like and you know I just you can't even process that this is not happening there's no way this is happe

ning in my mind thinking kind of like the spaceship is like like a cruise ship they're lifeboats surely they got on a Lifeboat you know and you know somebody's just got to like go get them cuz they you know I'm thinking of like you know all of the science fiction movies where they get into the little pods and they Zoom away from from the danger somehow they had survived the crash in the ocean somewhere and they were all out living on an [Music] island there was explosive crying if you've ever he

ard an animal scream in agony or it was it was Primal it was was horrific it everything just fell apart the shuttle wasn't coming home Dad wasn't coming home sorry these were husbands and fathers and wives gone fair amount of rookies on this particular one and so somehow I just got my act together and I just started talking the uh Mission appeared to go well there was one thing that Engineers were looking at at launch I'm going to try to get you some tape of it there was a piece of debris which

uh came off the shuttle I'm I'm going to bring in a model here I felt like it was my responsibility to talk about the foam strike to get it out there in the public so I talked to the folks in the control room and I said you know can you queue up the launch replays all right let's take a look at this launch if we could run that through the telestrator that would be very helpful look what happened a minute after launch got this very very slow look at that piece right there what what was that there

was a piece of debris which struck the shuttle as it came off was it a piece of foam was it a piece of ice question was what did it do I still didn't know for sure I still was the armchair analyst but Challenger was deep in our memory and this was a similar scenario in the wake of Challenger NASA management just tried to shut everything down and it created a huge amount of Bad Blood between the media it made NASA look guilty as hell how will they respond to this what is this going to do to the

Space Program the second shuttlecraft lost it was my worst nightmare [Music] painful such a searing memory of Challenger and how much it had to find Nasa this is the very last thing I had thought that I would be reporting to the president on this day or any other day called the White House told him that we don't know a lot but we have just lost Shadow Columbia it was my duty to be responsible for this accident my fellow Americans this day has brought terrible news and great sadness to our countr

y the Colombia's lost there are no survivors all Americans today are thinking as well of the families of these men and women who have been given this sudden shock and grief they gave their lives for us and we want everybody to know how much we appreciate that especially their families because it's the most precious gift they could give when we drove up in front of our house our whole street all of our neighbors were standing outside of our house to welcome us just hugged and cried in the street

we walk into the house that my brother and I had decorated to welcome my dad home and now we have to take this down like this is he's not here we were home but it wasn't the same the solution for the first day was drink alcohol and talk I mean drinking a lot until I'm just passed out going home you go through it all over again you realize she's not going to come back so it's kind of hopeless nothing really matters anymore I mean honestly the only goal I had was simply just to keep him alive I me

an literally it's like I don't want him to get to that despondent stage where he just says you know I'm going to check out and join mom now this happened under my watch but I didn't have the answers in every public forum I'm going to have to be in How I going to explain this to anybody we're going to find out we hope in a few minutes what NASA knows NASA as an agency will have a lot of tough pointed questions asking specifics at this time we have no indication that the mishap was caused by anyth

ing or anyone on the ground welcome to the Johnson Space Center to my left is Ron Dore is a space shuttle program manager we're devastated and because of the events that unfolded this morning do you have any idea how much of a damage area may have been left on the left wing and how big that piece of foam was that came off tell me who's leading this investigation we had heard some reports that during launch there had been some concerns that some debris hit the wing uh is that true and is that any

cause of concern that that could have caused today's problems uh it is true it was judged that um that event did not represent a safety concern we have appointed a mishap investigation board an external group people who are independent from NASA to assertain the causes and circumstances under which the tragedy occurred my thoughts are on what we missed what I missed to allow this to happen but I guarantee you we're going to fix it I was playing tennis in mlan Virginia I received a phone call sa

ying that I would be flown immediately to Markdale Air Force Base After challinger NASA had a contingency plan in case there was a shuttle accident as I never really imagined that it would happen with Colombia we had people who had experience with accident investigation from the military Navy and Air Force on the team I came to the investigation as a helicopter pilot who knew something about doing accident investigations I did not come to the investigation as a space shuttle expert I I literally

knew nothing about how the shuttle was put together we needed NASA's help because by definition everybody who came in as an external part of the investigation team is not a space shuttle expert there was years of shuttle program knowledge that we needed to learn very quickly from what we understand a piece of foam insulation came off during liftoff this piece hit part of the left side of the shuttle and they don't know if there was any damage or not very early on NASA told us that they knew abo

ut a foam a debris event but we didn't even know enough about the shuttle to understand that there was foam on the tanks the Press wants to know what happened and it's like yep so do we the recovery effort is massive involving dozens of agencies covering many hundreds of square miles it's the largest recovery effort that has ever attempted in this country as an investor investigator I wanted as Ironclad a case as we could possibly have for the sequence of events leading to the cause of the crash

of space shuttle Columbia but if we were going to do that we needed to collect all the debris and reconstruct the shuttle 1,200 sites have been identified all those pieces will be brought to the Kennedy Space Center where Columbia will be assembled in a manner of speaking Lally thousands of pieces of debris are now pieces to a puzzle they've already made hundreds of finds from Tiny scraps of metal to whole panels and the tragic but inevitable discovery of human [Music] remains a spacecraft brea

king up at 190,000 FT feet and something you couldn't like get out of your mind and i' been in space before this is something I was about to do again and then this horrific thing happens to my classmates my co-workers [Music] friends so I called a constable and I said hey I need a helicopter I've got to get to East Texas on the way you can see there are pieces of space shuttle thousands and thousands of pieces all over the [Music] place so we land on the high school was a high school football fi

eld and uh police officer said to me he says hey we uh we have a uh report of one of the crew members spotting I was the first person there from NASA this was not something I was trained for we just try to do the best job we can to handle this as respectfully as possible for decades the American space program has been a source of great technological innovation but that hard one reputation is looking badly knocked for many of the thousands who work at the lyen Johnson Space Center in Houston toda

y was the first day back at work since the disaster they'd apparently been encouraged not to talk to the press the investigators rented a building right outside the gate I felt okay I felt this is a good thing this has to happen I hope they're thorough inside the internal conflict was building getting angry at management and and it was very public argument it wasn't just one-on-one it was out in the hallways it was so accusatory there was so much anger and frustration on the first day that we we

nt into Johnson Space Center there were people who received us very well there were people who were not happy that we were here I was one of the first people to be interviewed and interrogated they had access to everything all videos all data all emails people had to comply in some cases we're asking for data and they'd be like I can't give you that information right now you're going to have to go up through a very formal NASA chain of command to be approved generally speaking who were the ones

who would less Keen for your help or less pleased you're there perhaps I I think the folks that were probably less interested in our help were more at the management level in NASA I call it the manager's Club it's a type of a culture where there are rules of behavior and ways of talking you don't jump the chain of command don't and that's insulting to go up to someone higher and ask directly supposed to coordinate all your questions especially harsh or strong questions to managers you don't do t

hat directly you use the intermediaries to do that you don't talk bluntly or pose questions like that to a NASA manager are you going to risk your career in NASA by standing up and arguing with a chain of command because that can be very career limiting and you find yourself shuffled off into a windowless room and you know just going through paperwork I want the system I want the NASA manager culture confronted good afternoon everybody and welcome to the Johnson Space Center for today's briefing

again joining me is uh shuttle program manager Ron Dore today I brought with me a piece of foam and I think we've made some foam available to you so that you can get an understanding of the composition of this material it's very lightweight which is logical you would want it to be lightweight because the more weight you put on the tank the less upass you could launch into an orbit and so it's difficult for us to believe as Engineers as management and as a team that this particular piece of foam

debris shedding from the tank represented a safety of flight issue I caught some segment that run got into in which he said in a declarative voice right now it just does not make sense to us that a piece of debris would be the root cause for the loss of Colombia and its crew there's got to be another reason how can he say that where is he getting that from what a big denial to be certain it was foam is nonsense right but to be certain it wasn't foam is equally nonsense right and that's what the

y were saying it's not foam well how do you know I know from the accident investigation team's perspective no one was going to go publicans say we know what didn't happen you get that shot right there that's a NASA official he's holding a piece of foam which he is now saying could not have had enough impact cuz it's too light to have damaged those tiles that we've been talking about I knew Ron I had respect for Ron Ron was ly Ham's boss and a good manager but what's always the first step in in g

rief then [Music] I I called run and we had a very brief conversation said Ron let me just remind you okay we had a clear understanding that we are not going to eliminate anything until the data has come in to definitively eliminate it to bring that out and dismiss it you know preemptively I think speaks volumes at the very least they had to acknowledge it but it was acknowledging their own mistakes and that's hard to do [Music] each week there was a new trailer load of debris showed up came rig

ht in this hanger through those doors and it would be cataloged and then put out on the floor I want to know what the debris is telling us I want to know what the aerodynamics are telling us and I want to know what the sensors are telling us you follow the debris what's it telling you and if you follow the logic you begin to see pieces that are telling you a story as we were progressing through the left wi reconstruction you can see these burn tiles this reinforced carbon carbon looks like it's

been burned in a way that's very different than everything else all of that data pointed to a problem at RCC panel 8 something very different happened in this location on the Orbiter and so let's go see if we can understand what that was okay so as the as the vehicle is entering the atmosphere these black tiles are protecting the structure the aluminum of the vehicle in high heat areas and the gray is the wing Leading Edge reinforced carbon carbon RCC panels those protect the vehicle from the hi

ghest level of heat those 3000° temperatures so that you don't get metal melting but we had never had any experience in breaking a panel what was starting to join up was you've got video analysis that says the strike on the Orbiter created a hole in the wing and you can see that there had been some sort of penetration against the RCC panel Hot Gas had entered and the shuttle had lost ergodynamic control and crashed but I think the challenge for a lot of folks at Nasa was believing that foam had

done that they would say foam can't break reinforce carbon carbon there were a lot of people that said there's something else that explains this are dramatic new details tonight from NASA on what scientists knew and when they knew it about possible trouble that could put the Columbia shuttle astronaut's lives in danger The Observer moves story forward saying that there have been repeated warnings about safety at Nasa in the past couple of years we decided to ask NASA about the history of foam st

rikes which had never been done I was asked by the accident investigation team to help find that type of information I went through a database and I was shocked to find that there were over a half dozen occurrences we turned that into the investigation board and I said you're not going to believe this take a look at this 1983 was the first bipod ramp foam loss 1990 1992 92 again 1994 as well as those bigger pieces we saw small pieces of foam fall away all the the time what we call popcorning thi

nk of popcorn when popcorn pops it pops up and comes out and so that's what we call it popcorn they weren't very big so you're not talking about much damage to the tiles and so it become the norm at Nasa this Mantra it's only foam it's only foam hey we see foam loss all the time and it never Dam any damage to the vehicle and we don't have to worry about it it's only foam two missions before Colombia it happened on STDs 112 Atlantis a significant strike hit the skirt of the solid rocket booster a

nd actually about a dent in [Music] it prior to the launch of Colombia in a couple of the meetings the topic of phone coming off 112 came up there's probably 15 to 20 people around the table and then there's a lot of other people at Nasa in the room we talked about starting to look into this a little bit more because we've seen it come off on you know more than one flight now it could certainly be an issue and we should understand if there's a way to prevent it late October of 2002 after SS 12 A

tlantis I went to a meeting about that flight I had put together a report about the foam loss and the damage to the solid rocket booster and I presented the case that said that amount of foam that mass in one chunk coming off shuttle Atlantis this was the vehicle telling us something is wrong here's your warning at risk of being insubordinate I said to the heads of the shuttle program sitting around the center table I was adamant at that meeting either fix the problem or don't fly an external ta

nk on the next launch which is impossible from that meeting I never heard any discussion of let's wait and see if we can Sol some of this let's get a better understanding of this before we schedule the next launch none of that ever I ever heard in other words again they were thinking it was more of a turnaround issue and so it wasn't preventing uh shuttle flights from from going forward the pressure on the management team to stay on schedule and the concept of it's just foam is leading the charg

e through all of this so it wasn't like they weren't talking about issues at all but there certainly was a big focus on the on the schedule here's an email it's Tuesday January 21st this was sent six days into the Columbia Mission this is a private exchange between Linda ham Ron Dore two of the top uh managers in the program the external tank rationale for FL for the sts12 loss of foone was lousy rationale States we haven't changed anything we haven't experienced any safety of flight damage in 1

12 flights the concluding sentence the rational was lousy then and it still is what what I take that to mean is that lyham is raising a concern but they appeared to rely on the fact that previous flights which had suffered this foam loss had returned safely in other words we've gotten away with this this is a failure to learn from past a similar events simply because those flights did not have catastrophic consequences the classic the classic normalization of deviant you have to make sure that e

very incident is Thoroughly investigated and properly assessed and that wasn't done for the 112 phone laws people were saying they were willing to accept the risk what they didn't understand is how much risk they were accepting after the 112 loss people were starting to say maybe were accepting too much risk yeah I was concerned you know as I said the the uh the sense that the risk was greater than we should be expecting was was starting to surface we were moving in the right direction we just d

idn't get there in time we should have never launched Colombia until we fixed that [Music] problem Lisa Stark with ABC News when you realized that you had this debris that had struck the shuttle and you started your analysis what was discussion about trying to take a look either through satellites or these large telescopes that the military has and why was the decision made not to try that we certainly had that discussion we believe that taking a picture looking for a tile damage it does not sho

w us the depth of tile that may have been shaved off we cannot make a determination conclusively whether that represents a concern or not uh L reading through the trans SCP in hindsight were you sufficiently open to the idea that this was a really serious problem you're asking the 2020 Hinds side or what what my I thought was well it sounds like you were just kind of seeking reassurance that everything was okay as opposed to digging in and saying how do we know this I didn't have a preconceived

notion on the damage or the possible consequences and I needed to wait for them to complete their work the best experts at our disposal concluded that it was a minor problem not a significant problem they had done the engineering assessment and evaluated it said worst case on RCC would be a coding damage which would not be a flight safety issue and when you added all that up there was no need to take pictures to document any evidence because we believed it to be superficial and it to be a turnar

ound issue and not a safety issue and so we we didn't take any pictures had we known that there was a catastrophic situation on orbit we certainly would have done everything we could [Music] ABS did you know other people at Nasa other departments were also requesting Imes during the mission I did not know at the time I did not know I I'm not aware of anybody else during the mission saying that I only learned later that there really were people outside of our team that were trying to do something

about it I had no idea what was happening because there was no communication I'm not in the loop I'm not in the no nobody's talking to each other until nobody knows what's going on um that's just kind of the way it [Music] was NASA is a series of Thoms 10 separate centers each of them have their own responsibilities but there isn't necessarily a lot of exchange of knowledge across those silos you know frankly the system is not not designed for good communication but that's not an excuse because

this phone problem is not a new problem it was ignored right up until an opportunity to intervene presented itself and then that opportunity to get a spy satellite to take a look was dismissed to sort of stick to your guns of convincing yourself that it's okay that just made matters worse why would you not just get the pictures that could show the damage and then work the problem [Music] I I can I could only deal with the data that was presented to me the whole situation was a case of people do

ing their jobs as they understood them but I think everybody was operating with good faith there was no uh I wouldn't say malfeasance but negligent there there may have been I don't even think there was NE I just think that the actions we took were inadequate for the problem we were facing I think there was um a mindset and sort of a hope that we've seen uh foam strikes before and it's never caused a safety flight issue so we're assuming that's the case here but not a sure thing [Music] it seeme

d like by saying ignorant of the degree of damage the mission management team perhaps didn't want to know about the worst case scenario at this point from our work in the hangar I think we have enough information to say that we found the physical cause of the shuttle crash but there were still people at Nasa who didn't believe that foam could break reinforce carbon carbon at that point the only question that was really left to tie the whole chain of events together was does foam break reinforce

carbon carbon we're here at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio Texas to conduct a test designed to show whether foam that fell off the external tank of the Columbia Orbiter could create a hole big enough to destroy the vehicle how does NASA move forward if we don't do the foam test we need to do [Music] this everything came down to whether or not the foam shot was going to break an RCC panel but if our investigative analysis is wrong then what 5 4 3 2 1 okay phone will break reinforce c

arbon carbon I mean there was no doubt at that point right case closed there's no denying it you know there was F there was foam falling from day one I should have had that test on day two this was a known failure but I think the failure to imagine being wrong the failure to imagine the consequences of failure are catastrophic and I think it's this whole notion of the failure to imagine [Music] failure NASA is trying to move forward after Tuesday's blistering report blaming it for failing to pre

vent the shuttle Columbia tragedy NASA stands accused of complacency of a flawed safety culture of major management failure failures this stinging Report with its 29 recommendations is not just about technical failures but also about a human failure NASA had conflicting goals of cost schedule and safety it's our view that clearly there is still evidence of a silent safety program where that goes a challenger they knew about the phone they could take pictures and people chose not to pure grief an

d sadness turned into more of like anger and disgust NASA was something that I was so proud of because my dad loved it and felt almost like they had betrayed him it kind of became this inner struggle in me of how can I hate this thing that like my Dad loved so much why why those those are the questions that you can't answer the only the only reason was because of the way they made decisions within that culture if there was damage could it have been detected in space and some rescue plan conceive

d we'll never know astronauts learn of the foam hit they are sent this grainy video and an email that dismisses the foam hit is quote not even worth mentioning knowing the concerns had been downplayed to the crew I felt angry I mean I just was extremely disappointed I think that Rick would have wanted to have known that something was very wrong with the vehicle one of the things that I thought was was such an indictment was that the astronauts were expected to successfully fly this multi million

doll Mission and we given that responsibility but they had no Authority in terms of a hypothetic and I think other people in senior levels that probably felt the same way if we knew that the crew wasn't going to survive why would we tell them why wouldn't we let him just carry out their mission and feel like they were successful I regret that I didn't do more but given what we know now it's unlikely anything I could have done would have made a difference I feel ashamed so who's guilty I'm not j

ust going to say the M program managers are we're all guilty if you don't speak up for your own system and you're the victims of this environment we're guilty too yes there were individuals who made very poor decisions you need to embrace desending opinion and if somebody says hey let's get a better data to make a decision what why is getting better data a a problem but I mean I was in Mission Control I was a NASA employee I knew about the foam strike when there's blame that's laid out I am righ

t up there saying I knew and and I wish I could done something differently but I I can't undo that and it you can just make it better for those that follow I fought but I share some of the blame that says maybe I could have fought harder but the thing I can't get past is if we knew entry was going to cause loss of the vehicle and loss of the crew there are things we can do as human beings and that is for the families the chance to be able to say goodbye that wasn't afforded to anyone and that's

always haunted me sorry during the mission I could have easily done a story because I saw the phone come off while NASA is saying it's nothing some Engineers believe there might be some concern what if I had done that I was the one who could have you know should have and could have own that story in a way that potentially even might have changed the course of events I didn't stay on that story in order to go be the person explaining all the clever ways we were going to kill people in Iraq and ma

ybe I was doing what NASA was doing I was sweeping it all under the rug and so I'm part of the problem you know I'm complicit if you could say anything to those individuals the managers the engineers the um hot buses at Nasa who made those decisions what would you say now yeah um I never really thought about it um but I guess I would want them to know that I forgive them that my family forgives them and that I can't imagine what they went through having to make those decisions like that breaks m

y heart thinking about it um but just that I'm not angry about it anymore and it happened but I don't don't blame them I don't think that they're bad people in the end after I go down that journey of wh iing and if someone had done this if someone had not done that in the end it all comes out in the same that the crew perished that everyone died and so for me I had to very um purposely make a decision that this was not going to be something that was going to Define me for the rest of my life tha

t I was going to be on a mission to fix that or on a mission to be angry about that or make people pay for I mean none of that was a path I wanted to go on at all and God has been very merciful to to help me with that just to be able to keep moving forward you know I just prayed and hoped that NASA learned from this that the lessons that they learned will carry on to Future space flights so that they won't forget that people are on the end of whatever they're doing that people's lives are at sta

ke Rick was an astronaut it was something that we always called a calculated risk but it was the risk that Rick decided to to take and I'm okay with that if she had listened to me you know things would have been okay and she wouldn't have been up there and I had told her not to go I was angry that she chose to take that risk instead of staying with me hi oh my gosh it's crazy over here right you need your sunglasses TR on this is Laurel and she's my daughter she has a lot of my mom's Spirit the

same enthusiasm and positivity okay I [Music] imagine it would be harder if she wasn't such a great kid so I got pretty lucky [Music] there NASA has released video footage taken inside the cockpit of the Space Shuttle Colombia it was recorded in the final moments before the shuttle broke up the last part of the tape was burnt up in the the AC 2 minutes can at the camera for second look at [Music] me I'm trying to see if I can get another over window view yet that's going pretty good now bright o

range yellow out over the nose all around the nose wow [Music] [Music] oh