All language subtitles for The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth S01E03

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.