Original subtitles

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.

Yeah, I see it. I saw it. There it is.

Oh, it's cool.

That is cool!

Oh, check that out, man!

It's going really fast.

What the heck is that?! I don't know.

Wow!

Look at the chunks coming off of it! Yeah. I saw it. Yeah.

I see what you're saying.

That 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 it... Still got it in the camera.

Where's it over right now, Dad? 6.50...

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 and we said, "What is that?"

When I looked up, I saw a bright white ball.

SIREN WAILS

Phones were ringing off the hook,

much more than our dispatch staff could handle.

I didn't know if we were being attacked.

REPORTER: Search and rescue teams are warning people

not to touch any debris should they come across it.

REPORTER: There are some disturbing pictures

that are coming up from the broadcasters.

NEWSREADER: 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.

REPORTER: There is something amiss. We are watching Mission Control.

Nasa has gone through this before, 17 years ago,

with the space shuttle Challenger.

You can see in their eyes that it is hectic and it is tense.

If you work in human space flight,

this is the worst possible thing that can ever happen.

The shuttle is the most complicated space machine ever built.

The world's greatest electric flying machine.

It has been a bad day for Nasa.

A sense of tragedy in the space programme,

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 accident.

All the warning signs were there.

This didn't have to happen. We let it happen.

Lean in. Bunch up. Arms.

Hug up. Bunch up. Bunch up.

Lean in there, everyone. LAUGHTER, CHATTER

All right!

Here we go! CAMERA FLICKERS

All right, very good.

OK, don't move too far.

Who's first? OK, here we go.

Grins again. Ready, one, two... CAMERA FLICKERS

OK, thank you...

I was an astronaut crew secretary.

All right... Cheese! LAUGHTER

I would see the crew daily.

Hold on, let me take the glasses off.

That would be easier.

I'm not a starstruck kind of person, right?

But you fly 12,500 miles an hour?

I was like, "Yeah! I like you."

SHE LAUGHS

Woohoo, baby! LAUGHTER

When they got selected as a crew, I went and got their astronaut bio

and I read what they did with their lives.

I went over, and I'm like, "Oh, doctor!"

Dr Dave Brown, surgeon.

Dr Kalpana Chawla, PhD.

Laurel... Laurel was a submarine doctor.

I thought that was so cool.

Mike, he was an Air Force pilot.

And then Willie, he was like a test pilot.

Rick, he'd already been up to space.

And then there was Ilan -

you know, he was already a hero in his country.

So, I was like, "Wow, we have the juice here! This will work."

They came together to start training.

Welcome aboard.

Good morning. You ready for us to pull down these window shades

and 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.

Laurel, do you want camera?

Four of us are flying for the first time,

and that could be seen as a disadvantage.

In some ways, it's an incredible advantage

because we have a wealth of enthusiasm and excitement

that other, more seasoned crews may not have.

When you put the helmet on the EMU, it interferes...

I was married to Laurel Clark, who was on the Columbia mission.

We met in Navy dive school.

She beat us in the 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.

THEY LAUGH

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 you've never flown before,

the first mission is the best mission.

It could have been 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 being announced.

I mean, I knew them all.

In my class was Dave Brown, Willie McCool and Laurel Clark.

We were all there at the same time.

You get your blue flight suit... HE CHUCKLES

..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 us.

I've spent 54 days in space over four missions.

Yeah, I mean, it's the most fun thing I've ever done, by far.

There's a lot of risk involved.

But I really believe that 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 -

we sent people to the moon in the 1960s.

Americans like that we're a country that does hard things.

APPLAUSE

And Nasa does some hard stuff.

We've got the best scientists and the best engineers.

Aw, it's beautiful, Mike. It really is.

They've 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 have a record of success.

MUSIC: Kids in America by Kim Wilde

# Friday night and everyone's moving

# I can feel the heat, but it's soothing, heading down

# I search for... #

This is a once-in-a-lifetime happening.

The maiden voyage of the space shuttle...

Columbia will open a new chapter in American space travel.

# We're the kids in America Whoa... #

Did you come here to watch the space shuttle going off?

Yeah. Ooh! We've come a long way to see it.

The shuttle is the most complicated space machine ever built.

It cost $10 billion to develop, and here at the Cape,

it will show whether or not it can fly.

I had an emotional feeling with Columbia

because she was the number one.

She was paving the way to the utilisation of space

in a more practical way - cheaper, better.

Previously, rockets were expendable, one-time use.

But the space shuttle was reusable in its design,

up to 100 times.

It was a quantum leap forward in space travel.

The first flight of Columbia...

..there's cars all over the place and there are people outside.

And I'd been sleeping in the clover by the car

cos we didn't have a hotel room.

I have binoculars and I have a camera.

We're three miles away.

MISSION CONTROL: T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven,

six, five, four...

We've gone for main engine start... SPECTATORS EXCLAIM

WHISTLING AND CHEERING

And it's up and away.

All of us had been saying, "Go, go, Columbia, go!"

People had seen Apollo launches exploring the moon.

The space shuttle reignited that interest.

It was the pride of the United States.

I still think it's one of the most complex machines

ever built by the human race.

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 a spacecraft like a glider before.

This is the single most critical time for the spacecraft

to see whether...the wings hold up, the heat tiles stay on,

the structure takes it.

As the shuttle was entering the Earth's atmosphere,

it would get to about 3,000 degrees at the highest heating point.

Most metallic structures without protection

start losing their properties and may even start melting...

Columbia, 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.

CHEERING Welcome home, Columbia.

Beautiful, beautiful!

We can assume their re-entry through the atmosphere worked like a charm.

CHEERING

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 August.

In the beginning, there were four operating shuttles -

Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis and Discovery.

One of the goals was to fly 20 missions a year.

Sometimes, they were sending satellites.

Quite a few classified missions for the Department of Defense.

Eventually, they were used for assembling and building

the International Space Station.

But reusability puts demands on the design -

that it has to be robust and resilient

and come back intact and fully operational.

That's a huge demand.

The mission aboard the orbiter Columbia is a 24/7 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.

Howdy! LAUGHTER

Never in my wildest dreams did 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.

SHE LAUGHS So that's what I did.

And so he told me, he said that he wanted,

since he was four years old, that he wanted to be an astronaut.

Hi, my name is Rick Husband. I'm the commander of STS-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 position

and that he would be the leader of the team.

You think of something like Buzz Lightyear in Star Command.

You're like, "Wow, Dad's the commander of a shuttle!"

OK, let's do like this, you know?

While they were in training, Dave Brown, one of the astronauts,

came to Rick and asked if it was OK if he recorded footage of the crew

throughout the mission.

We're just watching our...

No! We're just trying to ignore our best pal Dave,

who is busy documenting our journey toward space.

He was an amateur videographer, but not that amateur.

He was really good at it.

Dr Dave! Man! This is really above and beyond.

I know. 6.30.

Dave, your camera is affecting me. SHE LAUGHS

It is? Yeah. Why?

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.

OK, you're on.

Rolling. Take three, Dave and Laurel.

Action!

We're here in the Wind River mountains with the crew of STS-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.

CHEERING, APPLAUSE

The crew went on an outdoor team-building trip in Wyoming.

Now, Willie's not safe until we're all safe.

It was, I think, close to two weeks long.

And it comes around.

Right down into this valley.

My dad had come up with the idea to help them bond,

and Dave filmed the crew while they were doing that.

LAUGHTER

This is such a nightmare.

I'm trying to make these stupid brownies

because everybody wanted brownies for breakfast.

You're not hungry?

I'm not that hungry.

No? But I would love to have some breakfast brownies.

That would be delicious. Well, there's some right here.

SHE LAUGHS

Wow!

Looks kind of like bear scat.

THEY LAUGH

But...you know.

On the trip in Wyoming, they had to work together as a team.

Mmm! LAUGHTER

When you're on the space shuttle, you really have to have a high level

of what they call behavioural health...

And what do you think, Willie?

..where you're not just technically competent,

but you're low-maintenance...

..cos you are inherently in a confined space.

You can't say, "I'm just going to take a time out and go outside

"and not deal with your, you know, BS any more."

You would not believe the things that have happened up there.

There have been fights.

There was a cosmonaut who talked about

how he was going to kill his fellow cosmonaut.

So Nasa had started to realise, "We got to get a handle on this.

"And it's really important."

CHEERING

When they came back, it was like their bond...

..was forever.

They walked in sync with each other.

It was like, "Left, right, left, right."

They were the Columbia crew. They were STS-107.

They were a unit.

ALL: One, two, three!

Excellent!

Woohoo!

Well... Here we are. Here we are.

The EVA team for STS-107. That's right.

Michael Anderson was my husband.

We got to go watch him, to look at part of the training,

the underwater experience to simulate zero gravity.

He was excited.

But if you looked at him, you would think calm and collected.

But he was excited.

He would tease the kids we were going to go to Mars as a family.

Halfway he was joking, but halfway he was thinking,

"Hmm! This would be kind of cool."

Check O2 actuator is in EVA.

He loved it. It was his dream.

Complete VD2.

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 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 rocket, you're not really flying that rocket.

You're just sort of hanging on.

Even though we've gone to great pains 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 I guess it's that unknown that I don't like.

I went with Michael to Florida for the first time

and actually saw the shuttle.

And when I saw it, I was like, "You really want to get up in this?"

"You really, really, really want to do this?", 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,

"and I don't know about this."

It looked smaller to me.

You know, it looked a little older.

I was like, "OK, this is getting really real."

And then I remember thinking about what happened to Challenger.

Space Shuttle Challenger is just a few seconds away

from blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center

near Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Let's take a look right now.

CROWD: Five, four, three, two one... Wooooh!

RADIO: Lift off confirmed. Lift off.

Engines throttling up, three engines now at 104%.

Challenger go at throttle up.

Roger, go at throttle up.

CROWD SCREAMS

The vehicle has exploded.

We hear from Launch Control the vehicle has exploded.

That's the orbiter itself. The shuttle Challenger has exploded.

We must assume... Contingency. ..that the crew is not alive.

This is unheralded in the history of the space programme.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have covered the space shuttle launches

since the very first launch, since before the first launch itself,

going way back, and nothing like this has ever happened.

WAILING

It was a sad day for all Americans.

This was our space programme.

This was our national space programme.

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 do what you're doing,

"I'm glad you're loving and liking it,

"but you got a wife and two little kids here if something happens.'

We prayed a lot about it.

He talked to us about his faith, things like, "Hey, God has got me.

"Like, if something happens, 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 OK. There are risks to this. Like, I chose

"a profession that, you know, is dangerous sometimes."

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,"

or, like, maybe, "Don't"?

How do you stop somebody from doing something that they've worked

so hard to do and achieve, and was so dedicated and committed to?

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

are one in 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 shuttle?

One in 100. Your chances of a bad outcome are one in 100.

Doing OK, ma'am? I'm OK. Great.

I told Laurel and she said to me, she goes,

"Well, if it really is that risky, what doesn't Nasa 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 100 chance that you'll die,"

well, there's no chance in the world,

no chance in hell, I would do that.

Flying on the space shuttle,

the benefit we get for our country is enormous.

You know, I think a lot of us feel

that this is a tremendous amount of risk...

..and 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'd 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 older vehicles

that are undergoing some rehab work,

and so there's concern, you know obviously, if there's maybe cracks

in some of the other vehicles.

It was, like, delayed 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 OK.

And, you know, it makes it a little bit more nerve-racking.

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 with the other shuttle fleet.

They were just, one after another, it just wouldn't end -

the damages and things that were out of whack.

The thermal protection system, the tiles,

were 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.

I'm Sean O'Keefe. I was the administrator

of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration -

the leader of the agency at that time.

Every single mission that I was there for

was scrubbed, rescheduled,

delayed because something wasn't exactly right.

What did catch my attention in terms of the shuttle,

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 any time you have that happen,

it's...challenging to keep it flying.

We don't have too much time because launch is coming.

36, 37 days to launch

and it's starting to get exciting.

Why is it exciting?

What do you mean, why is it exciting? To go to space.

For the first time at least, for us, for me, it's exciting.

Three weeks from the launch, we were flying from Houston

to Albuquerque for Christmas,

Iain 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, downwash.

It's going down like this.

Well, I mean, we just crashed.

It was just, you know, bam, slap down!

And the fact that we survived is, to this day,

something I cannot explain.

I think it messed Iain 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 begged her pretty desperately not to go.

I was... I was very emotional,

and I was crying to her.

Stop... Tried to stop her from leaving.

How hard do you think it was for Laurel?

Oh, deeply 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 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'd pulled out at that point,

how would that have impacted the mission?

Oh, it would have cancelled it,

or delayed it at the very least.

Because the crew members are so specifically trained,

there's no backups.

I can't even imagine the quandary 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 put them in quarantine 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

because that's where I came to him when I was 12.

That moment, actually right here in the kitchen,

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.

This is going to be good.

Ilan just walks into the kitchen,

starts looking in cupboards, starts grabbing stuff,

and it just miraculously happened. He transformed it.

Cheers.

We're almost there!

The last time Iain 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,

unbeknownst to anybody else,

for him to get a hug from his mom,

and this would have been probably three days before the launch.

She was just reassuring me that it was going to be OK.

And I'll miss you, too. But, you know, I'll be back.

It was a very long hug.

You know, maybe...

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 to head down to Florida to witness the launch.

Had an opportunity to visit with the crew.

The launch of the Columbia occurred a year and a half after 9/11.

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 a shuttle.

But this one I looked at more carefully

because of the presence of the Ilan Ramon.

Ilan Ramon says he is uncomfortable in the spotlight,

but none of his six shuttle crewmates

is the first astronaut from Israel.

The fact that he was on board that flight was considered to be

a higher security concern given the nature of the Middle East

relations and tensions and all the other things that go with this.

Anybody from Al-Qaeda, from Isis, you know, 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?

I'm not thinking myself or my family as targets, but as human beings,

and this flight especially is going to take care

of a better life on Earth.

I was 12 years old.

I remember, before the launch, there was a lot of security.

We were taken from place to place

and being escorted with 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-9/11 regimen remains in place.

A huge no-fly zone around the launchpad, patrolled by fighters,

enhanced radars, surface-to-air missiles

and the launch time kept secret until the day before.

There were gunboats out there.

There's, you know, frogmen 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-powered rifle, and a couple of hits

in the wrong spot on the shuttle and...bad day.

This is shuttle launch control

and everything is going well

and as planned with the countdown for the launch of Columbia

and shuttle mission STS-107.

Today's launch represents the 28th flight of the shuttle Columbia and

the 113th shuttle flight overall in Nasa's space shuttle programme.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

Good morning. Morning, Ilan.

How are you doing?

All right. We all ready this morning? I think I am, we are.

How about you? Are you ready?

I'm ready. I've got the easy part.

Shalom. Ready for the big day?

Pliers...tethers...

Hey, Dave... Dreaming of sleeping in space.

..give me the camera a little bit.

Yeah, I want to take a picture with Laurel.

In 2003, I was responsible for all the astronauts.

I was here supporting. I was an astronaut myself.

Every time you get suited up, there is anticipation.

I don't know, anxiety, excitement.

Yeah, launch day is pretty special.

HELMET CLICKS

Good sound. Yeah.

OK. Go ahead and close your visor...

OK. All right. Here we go.

Every launch, we do this really strange thing where we play this

card game, this poker game,

because it's been done since Neil Armstrong.

You win. You win. No, that's good. It's good. It's good to win.

One step closer to launch here.

Thinking, you know, when I was a little kid, Neil Armstrong

was standing here in this room before he went to the moon.

it's incredibly exciting.

There's nothing I can think of that's more exciting.

All right. And the time is...

Everything is timed very specifically and they actually

have a...you know, it was an old analogue clock with 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 Husband got the whole crew together inside the suit room

before they went out the door into the hallway.

And they all got together, arms around each other, head bowed

and said a prayer.

Lord, please be with our crew and take us safely on this mission.

Thank you for bringing us to this point. ALL: Amen.

Christian, Hindu, Jew, all together as one,

as they walked out of the suit room.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

CHEERING AND WHISTLING

All right! You can do it!

All right!

And our astronauts coming out now

as they're making their way to the astronaut van.

Commander Rick Husband, payload specialist Ilan Ramon,

pilot William McCool and mission specialists Michael Anderson,

David Brown, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla.

Morning, Ronnie. Morning. How you doing? Doing great.

LAUGHTER

All right, we're going to go today. There's our helicopter.

There it is.

You have a good one, sir. Thank you. Take care.

OK, everybody on? Yep. 195, here we come.

OK, everybody, high five. Here we go. Whoo!

Hut, hut, hut, hut, hut, hut... Woohoo! 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-foot level

and you're getting ready to get in the vehicle, it's pretty amazing.

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 alive.

You just can't believe in a couple of hours you're going to be

inside this thing blasting off into space.

This thing is big.

It's big. It's really big.

For me, if there was any apprehension, 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 are you? How you doing?

Ilan. Good to see you.

Thank you. Good to see you.

The final folks to speak to them,

that's the astronaut support personnel and the crew

that's strapping them into the vehicle.

And the Nasa test director, Jeff Spaulding,

has given approval for the crew to begin entry into the vehicle.

Once they're in their seats, they will be, basically,

laying on their backs.

Husband climbing in somewhat difficult, cramped quarters there.

Next to enter the vehicle will be Ilan Ramon,

and he is currently taking his seat on the mid-deck.

They help get their harnesses on,

get them strapped in and, you know,

when they close the hatch, that's it.

ON RADIO: Yes, sir. Do I have a go to close the hatch?

You have a go to close the hatch. Copy that.

Here at the Kennedy Space Centre 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, like we always were.

I'm three miles away, which is as close as they let anybody.

28th launch for Columbia, the 113th shuttle mission launch.

I'm always thinking about what I would say if things go really wrong,

and... Because that's my responsibility, to be that person.

One of the experiments on board the shuttle...

So you sort of have to go down the list of threats, if you will.

You know, 9/11, Ilan Ramon, 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

ever worked at all is pretty amazing.

Back here in the space shuttle flight control room,

the ascent team of flight controllers, who have been

on console since about 3:30 this morning, monitoring Columbia's

systems in preparation for the first shuttle launch of the year.

The ascent team is led by flight director

LeRoy Cain for today's launch.

OK, folks.

Going to ops one, count from 20.

The launch day's unique, whether it's in

the Launch Control Center in Florida or in Mission Control in Houston.

You could commit to launch or you could scrub

and have to come back and try again another day.

As a flight controller in Mission Control,

STS-107 was my second mission.

For me, it was always when you got at the T-minus ten-minute hold

and you give the final go/no go for launch,

that is kind of the moment where you realise

that this is about to get real.

Go/no go for launch. FIDO? Go.

Guidance? Go. GC? Go. Prop? Go.

GNC? Go. MMACS? Go. EGIL? Go.

EECOM? Go. FAO? Go. Payloads? Go.

For me, personally, I could feel my adrenaline gland

just go and then my heart rate pick up a little bit,

and, mentally, I would just have to use a breathing technique.

Get ready for a G1 launch target.

There's a lot of responsibility.

You're getting ready to launch a space shuttle with humans on board.

It is not an easy business.

Houston, flight is go.

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 focus on what's ahead of you.

The only person who was authorised to launch

the shuttle itself was the launch director

at the Kennedy Space Center.

On the moment on 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,"

pressed the button and that was it.

The countdown clock will resume on my mark.

Three, two, one. Mark.

T-minus nine minutes and counting.

So, does everybody stand up as soon as it launches?

We had 300 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...

There's a huge buzz. I mean, 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 orbiter access arm retract.

T-minus five minutes and counting.

And we have a go for APU start.

The auxiliary power unit activation has been recorded.

I do remember being outside and looking

at the shuttle getting ready to take off.

He was adamant now to me that he didn't want his mum to go

and then he started crying.

The whole launch was him crying. It was awful.

T-minus three minutes, 25 seconds and counting.

And final aerial surface checks of the orbiter's wing elevons

and rudder are being completed at this time.

I remember, for a brief second, looking at the orbiter

on the launchpad and I just thought,

"I have absolutely no control over how this is going to go."

There's just such a mixture of emotion.

There's pride, excitement, fear.

I remember my mum stroking my hair, like...

And I think that was, like, sort of a comfort for her and for me.

And the gaseous 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 has done their jobs

that they're supposed to do. You trust the shuttle works well,

you trust the Lord over and above everything. You trust the Lord.

Columbia, for the flight crew, close and lock your visors

and initiate O2 flow.

For the first two-plus minutes of the mission,

with the solid rocket boosters attached,

there's no option for abort.

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 when the Challenger went down, was in that blackout zone.

T-minus one minute and counting.

And we're coming up on a go for our auto sequence start.

And then the moment came, you know,

the moment where the launch was coming.

Each family came together and kind of were hugging

and holding each other, you know, just really getting emotional

about this, and then the launch sequence starts to happen.

Whoo!

11, ten, nine, eight,

seven, six, five, four, three,

two, one. CHEERING

The weird thing is that you see that flash

and you see that smoke coming up and it's like,

"Whoa! Well, that sucks. There's no sound."

And so you're like, "What the..."

And then it's "Ba-boom!"

LOUD BANG

CHEERING

You don't quite expect it to be as powerful.

107! 107!

You feel your insides shaking and vibrating from this huge sound.

Everybody is just so emotional and it's...

..it's hard not to, not to cry.

ALL CHEER

For me, it's like The Star-Spangled Banner playing.

It's incredibly visceral and emotive and inspirational.

The international research mission finally under way.

You sit there and you look at that trail of fire and you think,

"God, there's seven people on top of that."

Every time that kind of gets me.

Columbia travelling at 1,800 miles an hour.

You're watching seven of your closest friends on this

ball of flame going off into space.

My heart's going like this and I had tears running down.

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 of... It's kind of a wild ride.

And there's a lot of vibration.

You know, my first flight, it was so much, I thought to myself,

"There's something wrong here."

I was 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

in space for main engine cutoff.

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 of your head, "Is it supposed to do that? Is that correct? OK."

Like, "There they go. Oh, that's so high." You know, it 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?"

Columbia in its preliminary orbit.

I 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 to see the planet as what it is,

you know, for the very first time. You know, a globe.

And that is just a wild thing, a wild thing to see.

Everything in great shape as the orbiter is now

settled into an orbit about 143 nautical miles above the earth.

Standing by for further activity on board.

Space shuttle Columbia is safe in orbit

and here at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida,

Nasa and the US Air Force breathing a collective sigh 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 home free.

So it was like...a sigh of relief when they,

when they were, you know,

up in space and it feels like, "Phew! They've made it."

Let's take a look at the view from orbit.

This is 225km above us.

I stayed in place until they were...the main engine cut off,

because 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...

..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 Columbia's launch, which occurred on time and flawlessly,

just 28 minutes ago from the Kennedy Space Center's launchpad 39A.

I was in our truck.

Producer called me in, said, "You've 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.

BIRDS SQUAWK

LINDA HAM: OK, good morning and welcome to the first STS-107 MMT.

Great launch yesterday

and I'm sure everyone's real excited about getting on orbit here

and finally getting under way with this science mission.

We just want to report everybody's all smiles here. That's good.

The second day, I drive into work kind of euphoric

because another launch, another successful launch.

You know the flight director's office

in the Mission Control Center in Houston is working with them.

They're... 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 a 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 reviewing 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 neighbourhood 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 lift-off, you see the roll manoeuvres,

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 that, you know, it's like shadow puppets.

And we got to 81 seconds

and then we see this object come off

of the external tank area.

It moved down and then striked the vehicle,

then exploded into a white cloud.

INTERVIEWER: What was your reaction? Ah...

Inside your head?

My reaction was, "Oh, shit."

ARCHIVE: The shuttle is the most complicated

space machine ever built.

The world's greatest electric flying machine.

It has been a bad day for NASA.

A sense of tragedy in the space programme

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 accident.

All the warning signs were there.

This didn't have to happen.

We let it happen.

# Everybody was kung-fu fighting

# Those kids were fast as lightning

# In fact, it was a little bit frightening... #

Columbia, Houston.

A very good morning to the Red team.

To Rick, Laurel, KC and Ilan.

That music was Kung-Fu Fighting,

selected especially for you by your dedicated training team.

Is it turned on?

Good morning to all and a special good morning to my wife Rona,

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 circles, around the Earth."

It's surreal.

These seven people who are, you know, living in space.

Eating and working and going to the bathroom and...

..and seeing Earth from space.

MAN: Wow.

RICK HUSBAND: Well, actually, things are going really well

and things have been working well.

Columbia 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 watching the mission.

Next up for the Blue shift was a blood draw experiment.

Here, Laurel is telling Mike 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, and to that level, is so admirable.

But more than anything, I just loved listening to Rick's voice.

I loved listening to him talk back and forth with Mission Control.

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 damage all the way down

to the skin of the vehicle.

That would have given us a problem during the landing.

And what does that, in human terms, what does that really mean?

Well, that probably would have been loss of vehicle and loss of crew.

So, I went to see Wayne, my 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 or as manager every day.

In this case, Bob Page knocked on my door,

came into my office and said...

"We've got a problem.

"This is the largest strike of a vehicle that we have ever seen."

He's a little bit of a high-energy guy,

so it wasn't unusual, I didn't think.

But he had 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 is the external tank.

It's carrying cryogenically cold liquid oxygen

and hydrogen and it's going to sit out on the launchpad

in the sunshine.

You don't want that to start boiling off.

So, over the outside of the tank

there's this 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 a windowsill.

Cheap, very effective.

But it's got this property that,

as you go through supersonic flight in the atmosphere,

bits of it come off.

INTERVIEWER: So, foam falling off during launch

was something that had happened before?

Yes, it happened all the time.

Maybe not in these big chunks,

but it did happen all the time.

The question is, "How 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 view

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 he would make some calls and he would see what could be done,

and things were put into motion.

Did the crew know at this point?

No.

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.

STATIC CRACKLES Mom?

Mom?

Miss you.

Bye-bye!

We talked using the early televideo conferencing capability

and super low-tech bandwidth.

It's ratty com but it's a very special time.

It was a huge relief being able to...

..see her again.

But I really couldn't comprehend that she was in space.

Like, it didn't make sense to me at all.

HE GIGGLES

It felt like counting down to Christmas,

waiting for her to get back.

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 and more punch if we talk life and death.

But we don't.

There's an old saying in the space business,

"The first story's 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 those sort of analysis.

The second day of the mission was just an ordinary day for me.

I was ready to go home about five o'clock on a Friday evening.

PHONE RINGS

And then, I got a call from my manager.

She said, "Rodney, do you know that

"a large piece of foam hit the left wing?"

And I think I gasp and I said, "Ooh" or "Ahh". I made some exclamation.

"No, I did not hear that."

And she said, "They have just released a video."

Every time I watched the video,

I'm looking at portions of it 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? That expanding white stuff?"

One can't help but ask, "Is that part of the wing coming apart?"

ROCK MUSIC PLAYS

Columbia, Houston.

Good morning to the Red team.

I was thinking about this foam strike all weekend.

And I thought, "Can't we get the astronauts to look through

"this side hatch window?"

There's a little window right here, 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'd seen something unusual,

they would have probably used binoculars.

They have binoculars on board,

and they have telephoto lenses and 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 responds, must respond.

It was a very easy thing to do

and the crew would have done it happily.

So, let's see. Rodney sent me an email.

"We know that the Remote Manipulator System arm and cameras

"are not available, but what about the left side hatch window?"

He's questioning whether there's been any action

to ask the crew to look for damage.

LAUREL CLARK: OK, well, good morning or good evening,

as the case goes for all you guys

working around the clock there in Houston.

PAUL SHACK: You have to understand, NASA works on procedures.

We have a mission plan.

Red shift are just finishing up their day.

Any deviation needs to be evaluated and assessed

on how it will impact everything.

MISSION CONTROL: Laurel, just to be advised,

you have about two minutes of video left.

To deviate from the processes

and the procedures you'd 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 to 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 and we'll have you on the telly here very shortly.

Say hello to the crew of the space shuttle Columbia,

now travelling above the Pacific at 17,300 miles an hour.

150 miles above us.

Waving to us. Let's give you an idea of who's who...

O'BRIEN, VOICEOVER: 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 scientist.

So, I called to somebody who I know very well at NASA.

I said, "Help me understand how worried I should be for this."

And he said, "Ah, it's foam, it's very light material.

"Probably hasn't caused any damage."

INTERVIEWER: So, they're telling you it's nothing to worry about.

But did you still have a little concern? I was...

It nagged me the whole mission.

Colonel Ramon. I'm curious, was the launch what you expected?

I was thinking about the foam.

I just didn't know how to, in a five-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 OK.

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 spent the weekend analysing this film.

We estimated the size of the foam.

16 inches across, 18 inches long.

Suitcase size.

So, it's a big chunk of foam, moving at 750mph.

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 miles an hour heats up gases,

and very hot gases become something we call plasma.

The shuttle is enveloped in this inferno and it's kind of beautiful.

But, obviously, you want to be protected from it.

Well, they came to the conclusion that 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 fibre material,

which is very heat resistant.

I can show you.

This is a test tile.

There are about 31,000 of them altogether.

And we hope those tiles will stay on

when the orbiter comes back into the atmosphere,

because otherwise the craft itself could be damaged.

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.

REPORTER: But if something should happen to the tile,

is there anything at all that you can do?

During the development of the space shuttle, in the 1970s,

there was quite an effort to develop a way to repair

damaged 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 "accepted risks" of flying in space.

I knew the one tool we had was changing the way entry is done.

You can change the angle of attack coming in

so you can lessen the heat in certain areas.

But you know the calendar is ticking down.

LINDA HAM: OK. Good morning. We're ready for roll.

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,

a representative from engineering, a representative from the crew.

The chairman of the meeting was Linda Ham.

She basically ran this mission.

She was effectively

the deputy to Ron Dittemore,

the program manager in those days.

Linda has excellent judgment,

can grasp complicated problems very quickly.

She was the first woman to be certified as a flight director.

Linda was recalling STS-112, a flight, two flights before.

MISSION CONTROL: We have go for main engine start.

Two, one, we've got booster ignition,

and lift-off of the space shuttle Atlantis.

STS-112 had...

..a very similar piece of foam come off

from almost the same location.

But in that case,

the foam hit a solid rocket booster

and put a dent in it.

The foam travelled, travelled 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 management team, they analysed it

and came up with the conclusion that no safety of flight issue existed.

MISSION CONTROL: Welcome back to Earth, Atlantis.

And congratulations on a truly spectacular mission.

But we dodged the bullet on that one.

The difference with Columbia is that the foam hit the orbiter,

but you can't see where on the wing it hit

and how big the damage to the orbiter may be.

A special team was forming and I was told that I would be on it.

The mission management wanted to know how bad it is.

No damage, minimal damage, or grave damage?

In that room, on the first meeting,

there were probably 12 to 15 people.

They were the best experts in different fields.

But 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 of data, another image.

We knew that performing a spacewalk would have been very dangerous.

Spacewalks are always highly choreographed.

They always go to places where they have handrails,

where they've had a chance to practise.

In this case, people would have been just 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 very well could have caused

damage to an orbiter that might be undamaged.

I knew that the military satellites at that time were extremely good.

There were stories like they could read licence plates from space.

We have quite a fleet of spy satellites out there

and most are trying to, at that time,

chase down terrorists in Afghanistan or 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

"we will always have big uncertainties

"until we get definitive, better,

"clearer photos of the wing and body underside."

So in bold face, I put,

"Can we petition (beg) for outside agency assistance?"

INTERVIEWER: 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 materials,

take the Spacehab apart.

You improvise.

You stuff the hole,

if there was a hole,

with materials that will delay peak heating.

Then you can you talk about altering the entry trajectory.

Or if this had been publicised,

the Russians might have sent up an empty Soyuz.

We did the Apollo 13 scenario.

We would have tried something.

But first, you need the images.

Um...

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."

You know, there's uncertainty.

I gave her the facts 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."

# ..Means no worries

# For the rest of your days

# It's our problem-free

# Philosophy

# Hakuna matata... #

MISSION CONTROL: Good morning, Blue.

That was Hakuna Matata, by the Baha Men, going out to Mike.

And it was picked especially for Dad by the kids.

MIKE ANDERSON: Good morning, Houston. What a wonderful song.

And I'd really like to thank my kids for that one,

both Sydney and Kaycee.

And it's a really good day to wake up today and nothing to worry about,

and Blue shift is ready to start another day of science on orbit.

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 I just thought like he was an explorer.

Kind of like, I don't know, like a space Indiana Jones.

You know, we make it a point 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 society,

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 that time,

that anything concerning had happened.

There were people that did, though, but I wasn't one of them.

I was in my office in Florida,

and I got a phone call from the head

of what we call "systems integrations."

He's an engineer who I respect very highly.

And he said, "Hey, we really don't have all the information

"we'd like to have on this debris strike.

"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 can find out some more information.

NASA does not own any military satellites but, at that time,

we had a close working relationship with the Patrick Air Force Base.

So, I put in a request with them.

INTERVIEWER: How hard could it be to take a few photographs?

I'm not going to pretend that it's easy.

I do appreciate the preparation 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 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 have the ire of all the people

and the science objectives were now ruined,

and that looks badly on NASA.

I think that weighed on him, too.

WAYNE HALE: A little bit later in the 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 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 she said, "I want you to turn this off

"because we don't need to bother those other people."

"OK."

INTERVIEWER: How did you feel when she said that? I was mad.

Because I don't like to be overruled.

I'd been trying to act within my authority,

and I'd been countermanded by my boss.

Linda Ham knew that NASA's history with the Department of Defense

in using spy satellites

was a little bit chequered.

There had been a previous mission

where the landing parachute door came off on launch

so the orbiter was flying with a parachute without its door.

NASA made a request to get some kind of imagery.

However, the photos didn't help much.

INTERVIEWER: OK, so, even if you could get photographs

it 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 with the answers.

If you'd have said,

"Linda, two different people need this information,

"their departments are both asking, are you aware?"

That may have changed the 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 there's seven people who could be in a...?

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.

"Turns out we don't need it.

"Forget I asked 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 Shack.

"Why? Did you do anything about it?" No reply. No reply.

So, I called him and I got him.

He was shouting at me.

You can't call it an argument

because an argument takes two people shouting

and just one was shouting in this case.

I ask him, "Why are you ignoring?

"You didn't reply to my email. Why? I was asking why you didn't respond.

"Now I have you."

Well, I got sarcastic.

I said, "Don't be a Chicken Little."

NARRATOR: Here is Chicken Little.

A little shy on brains,

but a good egg as chickens go.

I knew that story in the American folklore.

Hurry, hurry! The sky 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-intentioned-but-silly chicken.

I was very upset and angry

and disappointed with my engineering organisations 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 the 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 strong 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 wasn't sure what to do.

The thrust was, finish the analysis

even though you have no information

on which to base your analysis.

He said, "It's like being asked

"to analyse a car accident

"that has just happened outside,

"but you're not allowed to look out the window."

The photo denial forced us into a rock and a hard place.

We have to produce an analysis anyway, without a photo.

Now we play volleyball.

And football.

Bicycle kick.

"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 in a question from a reporter.

"During ascent, at 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.

"It is a pleasure working with you every day."

INTERVIEWER: How reassuring does that seem to be?

Oh, OK, so they saw something.

They're taking care of it.

This email was...

..too short, too sweet, too easy.

I really love seeing a team to come together.

And the bigger team who makes this entire mission possible...

..is the team on the ground

and all the folks who work in Mission Control, all the folks who

work at the different NASA centres.

It's just such a great feeling

for me to see everybody working together as a team like that.

LINDA HAM: OK, good morning and welcome to the MMT.

Friday morning, Rodney's team presented their analysis.

I wasn't presenting the results of our analysis.

The protocol was that a senior engineer would

present on our behalf.

We all knew that if the engineers find out that this is bad,

there is nothing we can do.

If the heat shield was lost, that was just the endgame.

RODNEY ROCHA: The presentation showed five scenarios

that we were analysing over the past few days.

Rodney's concern was uncertainty in where the damage was.

The way they compensated for that

was to analyse multiple possible locations.

Instead of analysing this area,

we're going to analyse THIS area.

"It would cause localised heating,

"but no burnthrough,"

I believe, were the words that they used.

RODNEY ROCHA: When we completed the analysis,

none of the scenarios showed a fatal outcome.

I felt some relief. I thought we were in good shape. I believed him.

I mean, you know, that's what you want to hear.

You don't want to hear, "We're going to lose the vehicle."

What's missing in that is we should have

had, in bold face, at the very beginning,

"These are engineering assumption cases.

"We do not know, without extra data,

"whether these are actual representations of reality."

A "turnaround issue" - what they meant was "some level of repair".

INTERVIEWER: So, when Columbia comes back?

When it comes back, but nothing really bad, that bad.

Just local repair.

Patch it up and let's go again.

And that's what was being communicated to Linda Ham?

That everything was OK? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Even though you all sat there and thought it wasn't OK? Yes.

What, you didn't...

You didn't... She was in the room with you.

She was in the room with us.

So, what prevented you from going to talk to her?

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 with only 12 people.

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 that room?

I don't know if...

I don't know.

My thoughts at the time of...

I feared the worst, but I hoped for the best.

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 an announcement that we'd like to make.

It is today that we remember

and honour the crews of Apollo 1 and Challenger.

They made the ultimate sacrifice,

giving their lives and service to their country and for all mankind.

Their dedication and devotion to the exploration of space

was an inspiration to each of us,

and still motivates people around the 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 well.

One day, during the mission,

I worked Mission Control and it was like 2am.

You know, the graveyard shift.

I was reviewing the notes of the mission,

and then, here's this foam issue.

Me and my colleague we were reading that,

and I remember saying, "Well, that's unusual."

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

is your flight surgeon hat, not your family hat.

INTERVIEWER: 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 NASA employee on the mission.

It actually would have broken protocol for me

to bring up an issue to a crew member,

even though it's my wife,

without going through the official channels.

And when you spoke to Laurel in the video conference,

did it cross your mind to bring it up then? No. You know why?

Because that conference was for Iain and Laurel,

and I was a bystander.

I remember a certain sense of relief.

Like, it's almost over. She's almost back, kind of, yeah.

I knew she was going to come back.

I never had a question in my mind.

UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS

LINDA HAM: Columbia, Houston. Good morning,

and we're looking forward to our last day on orbit with you.

Thanks, 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 back to normal,

whatever that looks like.

And the kids decorated the house for his homecoming

and our neighbours put up flags.

REPORTER: Given the fact that you may have lost a little bit of tile

during lift-off, I'm wondering if there is going to be

anything different about the entry profile, taking that into regard?

No, there isn't.

We, 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 we have plenty of margin

and that the impact could not have been,

from this particular material, significant enough...

..and 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

and we were staying right next to Banana River.

We got up and there were dolphin in the water

and looking at the dolphin,

thinking it looked like a picture-perfect day.

I mean, it was so pretty and everything was so pleasant.

We show page A1-15 complete.

MISSION CONTROL: And, Rick, we copy.

I just remember standing out on the balcony with Laura

and 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 seat, Rick Husband.

Pilot Willie McCool.

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 Rick talking.

MISSION CONTROL: Rick, we're ready for the manoeuvre.

RODNEY ROCHA: I did not usually come in for a landing.

To me, those were so routine.

Usually, the orbiter has been working well,

they have a good weather call.

But I had this wing concern because of the impact.

So I said, "I will go in."

I realised that most of those people at those consoles,

they don't know anything that's been going on for two weeks.

They've been looking at

the condition of this system, this system,

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 orbit

and getting it back down safely.

That morning, the atmosphere was upbeat, there's no issues.

We work with the crew to go through check outs of the orbiter systems.

Rick, we're ready.

Here it comes.

Looks good.

We got all of our systems ready,

all the sensors ready and we

prepared for the de-orbit preparation,

which is you convert the space shuttle

from a spacecraft to a re-entry vehicle.

Everything was proceeding normally that day.

The big thing that I remember really paying attention to

shortly before landing was the weather.

MISSION CONTROL: Flight controllers are currently monitoring the fog

that has limited visibility but is dissipating.

Because obviously, it's just critical to have decent visibility,

no big weather issues when you're landing.

Flight Director LeRoy Cain 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.

MMACS and GNC, you're ready?

Flight-MMACS, we're ready. GNC is go.

OK.

Columbia, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston.

Hey, Rick, I guess you've been wondering,

but you are go for the de-orbit burn.

We are happy with the weather at KSC, you are go for the burn.

De-orbit burn is a major decision in the process.

Once that de-orbit burn is made,

you are committed to landing.

They're coming home.

One way or the other, they're coming home.

Columbia, Houston.

Good burn, no trim required.

We copy and concur, Houston. Thanks.

Then we'll meet you in post-burn.

REPORTER: Columbia's altitude now 71 statute miles

as it enters Earth's atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean.

Its speed, 17,000 mph.

THEY LAUGH

REPORTER: Columbia approaching the coast of California now.

Wings level, nose angled up 40 degrees to control heating.

Flight, MMACS

Go ahead, MMACS.

FYI, I've just lost four separate temperature transducers

on the left side of the vehicle, hydraulic return temperatures.

RODNEY ROCHA: As time goes on, we start seeing anomalies.

Sensors are starting to fail.

I mean, you're telling me you lost them all at exactly the same time?

No, not exactly.

They were within probably four or five seconds of each other.

There was something that we didn't understand going on.

And I remember asking my team, you know,

"Just make double sure.

"Let's double-check all of our data."

OK. Where is that instrumentation located?

All four of them are located in the aft part of the left wing.

Something has gone very wrong.

And it is the left wing.

That's the stomach punch right there.

And, Columbia, Houston, we see your tyre pressure messages

and we did not copy your last...

Roger... STATIC CRACKLES

At some point, we lost comm with the crew,

but that's actually common.

I mean, you don't have communications

all the way through entry,

so that didn't initially get my attention.

Columbia, Houston. Comm check.

MMACS: We've also lost the nose gear down talkback

and the right main gear down talkback.

RODNEY ROCHA: Everybody started to lose sensors.

They were getting no telemetry whatsoever.

The screens were just going blank, reading nothing, just turning off.

Columbia, Houston. UHF, comm 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, comm check.

Oh, it was...it was painful.

He makes the call. We hear nothing.

You look at the screen

and the tracking hadn't moved from the Dallas area.

FDO, do you have any tracking?

No, sir.

So, 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 they're showing this debris in the sky."

INAUDIBLE CONVERSATION

INAUDIBLE

ELLEN OCHOA, VOICEOVER: That's when we realised it really was bad.

REPORTER: Y'all, we are awaiting 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,

and so, as a kid, you just kind of ride that energy.

But all of the waiting just felt like an eternity.

Here we go! Woo!

There's this big countdown clock.

I just remember staring at that clock,

watching every second go down. I'm like, "Is it now? Is it now?"

I don't know what I expected when I saw that clock.

Like, for them to just magically arrive when it reached zero?

Iain was very excited.

Mom's coming home and, you know, he's going to get Mom hugs,

erm, great meals...

You know, life will be back to normal.

It is now 9am on the East Coast.

Take a look outside. If you hear a "boom-boom", it's the Space Shuttle.

Somebody from NASA said, "You'll see the big, kind of, parachute

"that pops out of the back."

I think that's probably what I was most excited about,

just watching the parachute come out.

But then the clock started counting back up.

It went zero, negative one, negative two...

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 could kind of feel the air shift a little bit.

There's no Space Shuttle.

I just got this incredible pit in my stomach...

..of fear and of anxiety.

A rush of adrenaline that you just...

You know something's wrong. Something's wrong.

The shuttle is the most complicated space machine ever built.

The world's greatest electric flying machine.

It has been a bad day for NASA.

A sense of tragedy in the space programme,

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 accident.

All the warning signs were there.

This didn't have to happen. We let it happen.

Houston, UHF comm check.

MILA's not reporting any RF at this time.

When are you expecting tracking?

One minute ago, Flight.

Flight, GC. No C-band yet.

Copy.

C-band is 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.

Erm, we've got a little problem on the Space Shuttle Columbia.

It has been out of communication now for the past 12 minutes.

Let's take a look at a live picture of mission control in Houston.

I was live on morning TV.

I was dialled into NASA on a cellphone I had.

There was a secret phone number you could dial into

and hear the mission audio.

The people in the control room are going, "Are you hearing this?"

No further communications with the spacecraft about 8am Central Time...

Hang on, let's listen in.

..and no further tracking data from the spacecraft that was gained from

C-band tracking radar at the Merritt 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 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 were at about 8am Central Time...

Standing on the side of the runway,

realising that my biggest fear is coming true.

I just dropped my head and turned around,

shaking my head, just walked away.

There 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 cellphones start simultaneously ringing.

We realised something's seriously wrong, and I said,

"Let's get the families... Let's get them back to crew quarters."

Wow.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh!

It looks like we've got a van, probably full of family members

of the astronauts, being driven away. That's not good.

I remember grabbing Mom's arm and saying, "Mom, is Daddy OK?"

And I was just kind of staring out of the window,

trying to figure out what was happening.

I can just hear my mom and the driver just kind of whispering

in a hushed tone, like, "What does this mean?"

From WFAA TV, Channel 8, The Spirit of Texas.

We're going to suspend our 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 leaving some kind of trail

over the skies of Texas.

The Space Shuttle over Nacogdoches?

What is... What is happening?

We had just gone through 9/11 and at first I thought,

"Did somebody blow it up?"

It was probably a reasonable thought that a lot of people had,

that it could be something terrorist-related,

even in this small rural area,

because you never know where that might take place.

Phones were ringing off the hook.

Much more than our dispatch staff could handle.

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 falling all over our county,

and so immediately I picked up my camcorder.

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 parts of it.

That's where it hit. That's where it hit and bounced.

Well, it's up in a tree over here.

It must have come right through there. Golly!

That's pretty big.

It was just chaos.

Y'all didn't touch it or anything, did you? No, mam.

You don't understand.

You don't comprehend the massiveness of what's happening.

It became pretty obvious that...

..the worst had happened.

It was just shocking.

People waking up to this horrible news.

Quite frankly, I turned and looked across a big open ploughed field,

and there, in fact, is a piece of smoking wreckage.

This blackened material, letting out white-hot smoke.

There's some rubber burning in our pasture.

They're reporting a piece of wreckage came through

an apartment roof and started a fire.

Catastrophe striking the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Its crew of seven astronauts...

Right now, NASA will be trying to make sense

of what happened in the skies over Texas.

GC, Flight. Flight, GC.

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 off-site outside of this room,

our discussions are on these loops, on the recorded DVIS loops only.

No data, no phone calls, no transmissions anywhere, into or out.

I remember turning around and seeing LeRoy...

..and he had...he had a tear going down his cheek.

That was...that was a hard 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 me and she said,

"There's nothing we could have done."

And all my pent-up frustration and anger just came out

and I said, "I've been hearing that damn stuff all week

"and I'm sick and tired of it!"

I think I was more angry than sad, thinking,

this didn't have to happen.

It didn't have to 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.

It's this big long table, many chairs, and all of these TV screens.

And all of the screens were off. Everything was off.

We were all together, waiting 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, erm...

..it was my job to tell the families.

I can't remember exactly how I said it.

That, erm...

That the crew is lost - that they were not coming home.

I didn't want them to have any kind of false hope, and...

..I just did it in the most...

..caring, compassionate way that I could.

It's almost like, from what I remember,

there was, like, a ringing in my ear.

Like, I don't know what was 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 happening.

In my mind, I'm thinking, kind of, like,

the spaceship is like a cruise ship. There are lifeboats.

Surely they got on a lifeboat, you know?

And, you know, somebody has just got to go get them, cos...

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 the danger.

Somehow they had survived the crash in the ocean somewhere,

and they were all out living on an island.

There was explosive crying.

If you've ever heard an animal scream in agony or...

It was... It was primal.

It was... It was horrific.

Everything just fell apart.

The shuttle wasn't coming home. Dad wasn't coming home.

Sorry.

These were husbands and fathers and wives, gone.

A fair amount of rookies on this particular one.

Somehow I just got my act together and I just started talking.

The mission appeared to go well.

There was one thing that engineers were looking at at launch.

We're going to try to get you some tape of it.

There was a piece of debris which came off the shuttle.

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 cue-up the launch replays?"

All right, let's take a look at this launch. If we can run that through

the telestrator, that would be very helpful.

Look what happened a minute after launch.

Look at this very, very slow... Look at that piece, right there.

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?

The 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 programme?

The second shuttle craft lost.

It was my worst nightmare.

Painful.

Such a searing memory of Challenger and how much it had defined NASA.

This was the very last thing I had thought that I would be reporting

to the President on this day or any other day.

I called the White House, told him that we don't know a lot

but we have just lost Shuttle Columbia. This was my duty...

..to be responsible for this accident.

My fellow Americans...

..this day has brought terrible news and great sadness to our country.

The Columbia is 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 neighbours,

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 realise...

..she's not going to come back.

So it was kind of hopeless.

Nothing really matters any more.

I mean, honestly, the only goal I had...

..was simply just to keep him alive. I mean, 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 am 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 anything or anyone on the ground.

Welcome to the Johnson Space Center.

To my left is Ron Dittemore.

He's the Space Shuttle Programme Manager.

We're devastated...

..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'd heard some reports that during launch

there had been some concerns that some debris hit the wing.

Is that true and is that any cause of concern that

that could have caused today's problems?

It is true. It was judged that 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 ascertain

the causes and the 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 McLean, Virginia.

I received a phone call...

..saying that I would be flown immediately

to Barksdale Air Force Base.

After Challenger, NASA had a contingency plan

in case there was a shuttle accident.

I never really imagined that it would happen.

With Columbia, 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 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 programme knowledge

that we needed to learn very quickly.

From what we understand, a piece of foam insulation

came off during lift-off.

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 about 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.

REPORTER: The recovery effort is massive,

involving dozens of agencies,

covering many hundreds of square miles.

It's the largest recovery effort that has ever been attempted

in this country.

As an 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 reassembled, in a manner-of-speaking.

Literally 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 remains.

A spacecraft breaking up at 190,000 feet.

It's something you couldn't, like, get out of your mind.

I mean, I'd been in space before.

This was something I was about to do again.

And then this horrific thing happens to my classmates,

my co-workers, friends.

So I called the constable and I said, "Hey, I need a helicopter.

"I've got to get to East Texas."

On the way, you could see there were pieces of Space Shuttle,

thousands and thousands of pieces, all over the place.

So, we land on the high school...

..it was a high school football field, and, erm...

..a police officer said to me, he says,

"Hey, we have a report of one of the crew members' bodies."

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 programme has been a source

of great technological innovation.

But that hard-won reputation is looking badly knocked.

For many of the thousands who work at the Lyndon Johnson Space Center

in Houston, today 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 OK. 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 it was very public arguments.

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 went 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 were less keen

for your help, or less pleased you were there, perhaps?

I think the folks that were probably less interested in our help

were more at the management level in NASA.

I call it the Managers' Club.

It's a type of a culture

where there are rules of behaviour and ways of talking.

You don't jump the chain of command.

And that's insulting, to go up to someone higher and ask directly.

You're supposed to co-ordinate all your questions, especially harsh

or strong questions to managers. You don't do that 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 the 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 Shuttle Programme Manager Ron Dittemore.

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 up-mass you could launch into an orbit.

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 Ron 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 Columbia 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 they 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 public and say, "We know what didn't happen."

Can 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 because

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 Linda Ham's boss,

and a good manager,

but what's always the first step in...in grief?

Denial.

I called Ron and we had a very brief conversation.

I said, "Ron, let me just remind you, OK?

"We've got 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, pre-emptively,

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.

Each week, there was a new trailer-load of debris showed up,

came right in this hangar, through those doors,

and it would be catalogued 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 know, 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-wing reconstruction,

you can see these burned 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.

OK, so as the vehicle is entering the atmosphere,

these black tiles are protecting the structure,

the aluminium of the vehicle, in high-heat areas,

and the grey is the wing leading edge reinforced carbon-carbon -

RCC panels.

Those protect the vehicle from the highest level of heat,

those 3,000-degree 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 aerodynamic 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 reinforced carbon-carbon.

There were a lot of people that said

there's something else that explains this.

There 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 astronauts' lives in danger.

The Observer moves the story forward, saying that there have been

repeated warnings about safety at NASA over the past couple of years.

We decided to ask NASA about the history of foam strikes,

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 a dozen occurrences.

We turned that in to 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 time - what we call "popcorning".

Think of popcorn. When popcorn pops, it pops up and comes out,

and so that's what we called it - "popcorning".

They weren't very big, so you're not talking about

much damage to the tiles,

and so it had 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 did any damage

"to the vehicle and we don't have to worry about it. It's only foam".

Two missions before Columbia, it happened on STS-112 Atlantis.

A significant strike hit the skirt of the solid rocket booster

and actually put a dent in it.

Prior to the launch of Columbia,

in a couple of the meetings, the topic of foam

coming off 112 came up.

There's probably, erm...

..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 STS-112 Atlantis,

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 Programme sitting around the centre table,

I was adamant at that meeting, either fix the problem

or don't fly an external tank on the next launch, which is impossible.

From that meeting, I never heard any discussion of...

.."Let's wait and see if we can solve some of this.

"Let's get a better understanding of this before

"we schedule the next launch." None of that I ever heard.

In other words, again, they were thinking it was more

of a turnaround issue, and so it wasn't preventing

shuttle flights from going forward.

The pressure on the management team to stay on schedule

and the concept of "it's just foam"

is leading the charge 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 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 and Ron Dittemore,

two of the top managers in the programme.

"The external tank rationale for flight for the STS-112

"loss of foam was lousy.

"The rationale states we haven't changed anything,

"we haven't experienced any safety flight damage in 112 flights."

The concluding sentence, "Rationale was lousy then and still is."

What I take that to mean is that Linda Ham is raising a concern

but they appear 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 similar events,

simply because those flights did not have catastrophic consequences.

The classic... The classic normalisation of deviance.

You have to make sure that every incident

is thoroughly investigated and properly assessed.

And that wasn't done for the 112 foam loss.

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 we're accepting too much risk."

Yeah, I was concerned, you know...

As I said, the, erm...

The sense that the risk was greater than we should be expecting,

was starting to surface.

We were moving in the right direction,

we just didn't get there in time.

We should have never launched Columbia

until we fixed that problem.

Lisa Stark with ABC News.

When you realised that you had this debris that had struck the shuttle

and you started your analysis, what was the 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 believed that taking a picture, looking for tile damage,

it does not show us the depth of tile that may have been shaved off.

We cannot make a determination conclusively

whether that represents a concern or not.

Linda, reading through the transcripts, in hindsight,

were you sufficiently open to the idea

that this was a really serious problem?

You're asking in 20-20 hindsight or what my thought was then?

Well, it sounds like you were just kind of seeking reassurance

that everything was OK, 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.

They said the worst case on the RCC would be coating 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 turnaround issue and not a safety issue.

And so 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... Absolutely

Did you know that other people at NASA, other departments,

were also requesting images 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 know.

Nobody's talking to each other and so nobody knows what's going on.

That's just kind of the way it was.

NASA is a series of fiefdoms.

Ten separate centres, each of them have their own responsibilities.

But there isn't necessarily a lot of exchange of knowledge

across those silos.

Frankly, the system is not designed for good communication.

But that's not an excuse

because this foam problem was 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.

This sort of stick to your guns of...

..convincing yourself that it's OK.

That just made matters worse.

Why would you not just get the pictures

that could show the damage and then work the problem?

Erm...

I could only deal with the data that was presented to me.

The whole situation was a case of people doing...

..their jobs as they understood them.

But I think everybody was operating with good faith. There was no...

I wouldn't say malfeasance, but negligence...

There may have been... I don't even think there was negligence.

I just think that the actions we took were inadequate

for the problem we were facing.

I think there was a mindset and sort of a hope

that we've seen 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.

It seemed like by staying 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've found the physical cause of the shuttle crash.

But there were still people at NASA who didn't believe

that foam could break reinforced carbon-carbon.

At that point, the only question that was really left

to tie the whole chain of events together was,

does foam break reinforced 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 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?

Five, four, three, two, one.

Whoa!

OK, foam will break reinforced carbon-carbon

I mean, there was no doubt at that point, right? Case closed.

There's no denying it.

You know, there was foam falling from day one.

They should have had that test done day two.

This was a known failure.

But I think the failure to imagine being wrong,

the failure to imagine the consequences of failure

were catastrophic.

And I think it's this whole notion of the failure to imagine failure.

NASA's trying to move forward after Tuesday's blistering report,

blaming it for failing to prevent the Shuttle Columbia tragedy.

NASA stands accused of complacency, of a flawed safety culture,

of major management 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 programme with echoes of Challenger.

They knew about the foam.

They could take pictures and people chose not to.

Pure grief and sadness turned into more of, like, anger and disgust.

NASA was something that I was so proud of

because my dad loved it

and it 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 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 conceived? We'll never know.

Astronauts learn of the foam hit.

They are sent this grainy video and an email that dismisses

the foam hit as, quote, "not even worth mentioning".

Knowing that 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 such an indictment

was that the astronauts were expected to successfully fly

this multimillion dollar mission and were given that responsibility,

but they had no authority.

In terms of a hypothetical, 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 them

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 just going to say the programme 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 dissenting opinions,

and if somebody says, "Hey, let's get better data to make a decision",

why is getting better data 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'm right up there saying, "I knew."

And... And I wish I could have 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 foam come off.

While NASA is saying it's nothing, some engineers believed

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

owned 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 maybe 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 top bosses at NASA who made those decisions,

what would you say now?

Yeah, erm...

I never really thought about it, but I guess I would want them

to know that I forgive them

and that my family forgives them.

And that I can't imagine what they went through,

having to make those decisions.

Like, that breaks my heart thinking about it.

Erm...

But just that I'm not angry about it any more.

And it happened, but I don't blame them.

I don't think that they're bad people.

In the end, after I go down that journey of what-if'ing

and if someone had done this, if someone had not done that,

in the end, it all comes out the same - that the crew perished,

that everyone died.

And so, for me, I had to very, erm...

..purposely make a decision that this was not going to be something

that was going to define me for the rest of my life -

that 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 it.

I mean, none of that was a path I wanted to go on at all.

And God has been very merciful 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 stake.

Rick was an astronaut.

It was something that we always called a calculated risk

but it was a risk that Rick decided to take.

And I'm OK with that.

If she had listened to me, you know, things would have been OK

and she wouldn't have been up there.

I had told her not to go.

I was angry that she chose to take that risk...

..instead of staying with me.

Daddy, I'm here!

Hi.

Oh, my gosh.

It's crazy over here, right?

LAUREL LAUGHS

You need your sunglasses?

Try them on.

This is Laurel, and she is my daughter.

She has a lot of my mom's spirit.

The same enthusiasm and positivity.

I imagine...

..it would be harder if...

..she wasn't such a great kid.

So I got pretty lucky there.

NASA has released video footage taken inside the cockpit

of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

It was recorded in the final moments before the shuttle broke up.

The last part of the tape was burnt-up in the accident.