All language subtitles for Space Shuttle Columbia The Final Flight S01E03 1080p WEBRip x264-BAE_track3_[eng]

♪

-Columbia, houston,
good burn, no trim required.

-Houston, thanks.

-We will meet you in post-burn.

[ laughter ]

♪

♪

♪

-Columbia approaching
the coast of california now.

The shuttle speed
is 16,400 miles per hour.

♪

-Flight back. Go ahead mmacs.

-Fyi, I've just lost four
separate temperature transducers

On the left side
of the vehicle ,

Hydraulic return temperatures.

♪

-We start seeing anomalies.

Sensors are starting to fail.

-Okay, is there anything
common to them?

Dsc or mdm or anything?

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. "

-Okay. Where are those ?

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 tire-pressure
messages ,

And we did not copy your last.

-Roger.

♪

-I remember that clipped call
that rick had ,

Knowing you can have
communications that drop out

Or are intermittent
at that 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.

♪

-Good morning to you.
I'm miles o'brien.

It is now 9:00 a.M.
On the east coast,

6:00 a.M. Out west.

Take a look outside.
You should see

What looks like
a streaking meteor.

It's actually the space
shuttle columbia coming back.

We're watching it.
Landing about 15 minutes away.

♪

-We've also lost the nose gear
down talkback

And the right main gear
down talkback.

♪

-Columbia, houston. Comm check.

♪

-And then 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.

♪

-Mila's not reporting
any r.F. At this time.

-Fdo,
when are you expecting tracking?

♪

-One minute ago, flight.

♪

-Columbia, houston,
uhf comm check.

♪

-He makes the call.
We hear nothing.

♪

You look at the screen,
and the tracking

Hadn't moved
from the dallas area.

Oh, it was painful.

♪

-I mean, we were just waiting on
the runway for him to land.

It's gonna happen
right in front of us

And we're very excited.

All the crew kids are
just enjoying each other, too,

So running up and down
the bleachers

And just enjoying being there.

♪

-At the runway, there was
just a lot of energy in the air.

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

But all of the waiting
just felt like an eternity.

-Here we go.

-There's this big
countdown clock.

I just remember staring
at that clock,

Like, watching every second
go down,

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 gonna get mom hugs,
great meals.

You know,
life will be back to normal.

♪

-Somebody from nasa said,
"you'll see the big

Kind of parachute
that pops out of the back."

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

[laughs] was watching
the parachute come out.

♪

-There was something not right.

I remember our capcom,
charlie hobaugh,

Trying to re-establish
communications.

And he said,
over and over again,

"columbia, houston, comm check."

-Columbia, houston, comm check.

♪

-And I had not lost hope

That we would re-establish
communications to the crew.

♪

-No c band yet.

-Copy.

♪

-C band's a radar
that sits on the ground.

And literally,
it sends out a signal,

And it bounces it off
of the spacecraft

To tell us where it is.

But we were getting nothing.

♪

You know,
the room was just silent.

♪

-Alright.
Miles, back over to you.

-Alright.
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
at that point,

So 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
were going,

"are you hearing this?"
I'm, like, nodding.

-No further communications
with the spacecraft

About 8:00 a.M. Central time.

-Hang on. Let's listen in.

-And no further tracking data
from the spacecraft

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 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."

♪

♪

That's when we realized
it really was bad.

♪

-We're going to suspend
our normal format right now,

Because we've got
some breaking news.

This is 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.

♪

-It was a Saturday morning.

I was preparing to come to work.

It was beautiful day,
beautiful drive.

And as I turned
onto park street,

I heard a loud boom.

[ explosion ]

-All of a sudden,
our house just shook.

We, you know,
looked at each other,

And we said, "what is that?

The space shuttle
over nacogdoches?

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.

-They were reporting
what they knew on tv,

But here we knew that it
was falling all over our county.

♪

-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.

-Fdo, do you have any tracking?

-No, sir.

♪

-No phone calls off-site,
outside of this room.

Our discussions
are on these loops

On the recorded dvs loops only.

-You go into records-retention
and data-preservation mode,

Which is something
you hope to never have to run,

But is part of your training.

♪

At that point, you're
not gonna solve the problem.

You're just there to ensure

That somebody can help
understand what had happened.

♪

-If you work
in human space flight,

This is the worst possible thing
that can ever happen.

♪

-We are a minute and a half
past the scheduled landing time.

The space shuttle is not here.

This has never happened before.

-We were all waiting for
the space shuttle to come back.

I thought
as soon as the clock hit zero,

We would hear something
or see the shuttle come in.

♪

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 can 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 know something's wrong.

Something's wrong.

-The astronaut family escorts,

All of their cellphones
start simultaneously ringing.

-We realized
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.

-And I'm standing at the runway.

I'm listening to the radio,
and I'm listening to the calls.

I knew my biggest fear
is coming true.

Turned around, shaking my head.
Just walked away.

There wasn't anything else
you could do.

♪

I remember grabbing mom's arm
and saying,

"mom, is daddy okay?"

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

Trying to figure out
what was happening.

I can just hear my mom
and the driver

Just kind of whispering
in a hushed tone.

Like, "what does this mean?"

♪

♪

-It was scary
when I left this house

And I was driving into town.

You could see there was
a large piece of something

On the ground.

And immediately, you thought,

"well, that's part
of the space shuttle."

I picked up my camcorder.

This was something
that was gonna be big.

Oh, my goodness.

♪

I wonder what that is.

-There was a large piece
of debris

Right in the middle of their
parking lot, behind the bank.

♪

-Well, happy thought he heard
something hit a tree over here.

-Mm.
-It came through these trees.

-At 8:00 this morning?

Is that the biggest one
you've seen?

-That's pretty big.

♪

-You see this?

This is parts of it.
That's where it hit.

-That's where it hit
and bounced.

-And bounced.
-Golly!

-Came through here,
and it hit right there.

-It was just chaos.

-Y'all didn't touch it
or anything, did you?

-No, ma'am.

-The woods
must be full of stuff.

♪

-I started driving.

And everywhere you looked
along the highway,

There's debris everywhere.

There were many items
that were recovered --

Chunks of twisted metal,

Large pieces,
small pieces, huge pieces.

There's every shape and size
you can imagine.

The environment was
absolutely surreal.

♪

-You don't understand.

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

♪

-No data, no phone calls,

No transmissions anywhere,
into or out.

♪

-I remember turning around
and seeing leroy.

And he had
a tear going down his cheek.

♪

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 gonna
take you to crew quarters."

♪

And so we were just kind of
taken to this huge boardroom.

There's this big,
long table, many chairs,

And all of these tv screens.

And all of the screens were off.

Everything was off.

We're all together,
waiting in this room.

But as a kid
I was just looking around to see

If I could kind of figure out
was what going down.

♪

-I remember going in
the conference room.

And...

It was my job
to tell the families.

♪

I can't remember
exactly how I said it, that --

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's, like,
a ringing in my ear.

Like, I don't know what
was being said or what, like...

♪

-[ sighs ]

And, you know, I just --
you can't even process that.

♪

-This is not happening.

There's no way
this is happening.

Time stops. Nobody spoke.

It was just --

You know, we were very quiet.

-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's
just got to, like, go get them.

'cause, you know,
I'm thinking of, like,

You know, all of the
science-fiction movies

Where they get into
the little pods,

And they zoom away
from the danger.

♪

-Somehow, they have 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 primal.

It was horrific.

♪

-And then they told us that
the shuttle had broken apart.

And as a 9-year-old,

I didn't really understand
what that meant.

And so, in my mind, I was like,
"mom, like, what does that mean?

What does that mean?"

I was waiting for someone
to explain.

But then it was just...

Everything just fell apart.

[ voice breaking ]
the shuttle wasn't coming home.

Dad wasn't coming home.

Sorry.

♪

♪

-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.

-Right now, nasa will be trying
to make sense of what happened

In the skies over texas.

-Searching for wreckage
from the columbia shuttle,

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.

And 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 call a constable, and I
said, "hey, I need a helicopter.

I've got to get to east texas."

♪

On the way, I could see there
are pieces of space shuttle --

Thousands and thousands
of pieces all over the place.

♪

I was the first person
there from nasa.

♪

-There's a guy called terry lane
who's an fbi agent.

He said to me,

"we have a report of one
of the crew member's bodies."

Um...

♪

So, that was the first
of my classmates.

♪

This was not something
I was trained for.

-Astronaut mark kelly came in
and said,

""this is what
we would like to do.

We want to be very respectful of
our friends and our colleagues."

He wanted to not do anything

Until they had a priest
or a pastor.

-We just tried
to do the best job we can

To handle this as respectfully
as possible.

-We placed the human remains
into the hearse,

And it was taken back
to the sheriff's office.

♪

Eventually, all seven
astronauts were recovered.

♪

-You know you're thinking,

"we've got to all figure out
what to do now."

There's a catastrophic failure.

A space shuttle accident
is usually not one thing.

It's a series of events.

We need to figure out
what the hell happened.

-What is this going to do
to the space program,

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's lost.

There are no survivors.

♪

All americans today
are thinking, as well,

Of the families
of these men and women

Who have been given
this sudden shock and grief.

You're not alone.

Our entire nation grieves
with you

And those you loved
will always have

The respect and gratitude
of this country.

♪

-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 realize...

♪

...She's not gonna come back.

♪

So it was kind of hopeless.

Nothing really matters anymore.

♪

-He said, "I'm gonna grow up
to be a scientist

And invent a time machine
and go back and warn her."

How does a kid
have that kind of insight?

On occasion, he would have
one of these moments

Where he would say,
"I wish she had listened to me,"

Almost like a parent would talk
to a child about it --

"I told you
you shouldn't do this,

And look what happened."

I don't know how to answer that,
because he was right.

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 gonna check out
and join mom now."

♪

-Parents, husbands,
and fathers and wives gone.

I was sickened,
like a body blow.

♪

And so somehow,
I just got my act together,

And I just started talking.

The tragic loss
of the space shuttle columbia

On her 28th flight,
the 113th shuttle mission,

16 days seemingly flawless
ending

With a sudden and seemingly
inexplicable disintegration

Over northeast texas.

♪

Things happened very quickly.

There was a conversation, a
transmission from rick husband,

The shuttle commander, sort of
half of a "roger," if you will,

That kind of thing,
and it was all over.

Let's try to put together
what we know

And give you a sense
of where

This investigation
might be headed.

I felt like
it was my responsibility

To talk about the foam strike,

To get it out there
in the public.

If you take a close-up here,
that bipod is the place

Where they think
a little piece of foam fell off

And hit the leading edge
of that wing.

I talked to the folks
in the control room,

And I said, you know,

"can you cue up
the launch replays?"

Alright. Let's take a look
at this launch.

"look what happened
a minute after launch."

Got this very, very slow --

Look at that piece of foam
right there

That struck the shuttle
as it came off.

The question was,
what did it do?

♪

I didn't know for sure.

I still was
the armchair analyst.

But challenger
was deep in our memory...

♪

...And this was kind of
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?