I live in Amarillo, Tx. I can see Rick Husband's childhood home from my back yard. The family lived on the next street. The Amarillo International Airport was named after Astronaut Rick Husband and has a huge statue of him. He was a wonderful man, so sad.

I had the honor to work for Captain Brown early in my Navy career when we were based in Fallon, NV. He was a commander at the time working as a flight surgeon and in conjunction was also working on a classified program. I was a young sailor at the time, fresh out of Intelligence Specialist tech school. Captain Brown made an immediate impression on me. Not only was Captain Brown the most intelligent person I’d have ever met, he was also one of the nicest, polite, humble officers I had ever met. Captain Brown took me under his wing and taught me so much in such a small amount of time. I worked for him for a year and half or so. I vividly recall watching him work on his application for NASA. I asked him about it one day and I remember he was hopefully optimistic about his chances. He was an amazing human being who had a tremendous impact on this world. He is truly missed. God Bless

Ignoring the corporate factor for a second: Space is never without risks. And this crew knew this. But they still dared to endeavour, and for that I take my hat off to them. Dare mighty things.

Incredible syncing and editing of the footage here. THANK YOU for enlightening and educating the general public on this tragic event. At least we can learn from it, as we will undoubtedly continue to fulfill our natural desire to explore and evolve.

Thanks for posting although it hurts me too watch. Got a story about this. Not much of a story, but anyways.. I was living in Melbourne, Australia at the time and watched them go overhead as a beautiful bright constant-motion star a few days, or the day before(?), prior to the re-entry. I had a few friends with me, and I told them that I could take them outside to see the shuttle, and they thought I was crazy, and that I couldn't. (They weren't really 'spacey' people...), but of course I had the heavens-above website to tell me exactly where and when, and my friends were so impressed and excited when I told them to look to a place in the sky, then I did a count-down, and there it was!! Kind of dim at first then getting very bright as it arced overhead. We were waving and calling at it (which was silly of course, but we couldn't help ourselves...), but it was so fascinating and magical thinking there were people in that star!! A day or two later a was crying in my bedroom when I heard the news. Looking back on it I didn't think that it would affect me that much, but I found myself being very upset. I went and visited my mum and told her that I was upset, and why, and starting tearing up again, and seeing me cry she started crying too! The only other time that has happened was when my father died suddenly - so it was kinda weird that we were crying over this astronaut tragedy. I think if I hadn't have seen them going over that night, I wouldn't have been so upset - but somehow I had manifested some sort of emotional investment in the whole thing. In a weird way I felt like one of the last people on earth to see them, and wave to them, and be excited about their adventure, although I know this wasn't, and isn't, true. Many, many people would have done similar things all across the globe. I am a little apprehensive now when it comes to hearing about plans for more adventurous manned spaceflight. I know we go up to ISS regularly with crew swaps, but bigger things are on the horizon - I still hope! God/Universe speed and protect all those brave people putting themselves on top of so much fuel and enormous controlled releases of fire, thrust and energy, to be hurtled through the atmosphere and space at speeds, pressures and temperatures no human body was remotely designed to endure without a cloaking layer of technology from the brightest minds our race can conjure. Anyway, sorry for rambling, just that this vid brought that all back & I hadn't really looked back on that episode for a while in such detail, so I thought I would share. Cheers & love to all.

Today is 2019. This is the first time I get emotional about it. I guess this new perspective changes everything. This is so in-your-face. It is unstoppable and unavoidable. This brings you right there...

All the debris gave off sonic booms.. it shook me out of bed and rattled the windows. I'll never forget it.

For those interested, there is a museum in Hemphill, Tx. It is about what the searchers found and compiled on the ground, and how the community came together and helped. It also has info on the shuttle and the astronauts.

Don't know why I even watched this except to salute those poor brave astronauts who perished on this fateful mission. God rest their souls. I remember it like yesterday,

Hearing "no commonality" in multiple failures must have given the engineers chills, because it means that something seriously bad is happening.

That also jives with what I heard from some residents in Sabine County where elements of the crew cabin ended up. It all kind of merged into a prolonged roar. It is still amazing that no debris killed anybody on the ground. I heard of one screw that got pulled from a house as recent as 2008. It drilled through the roof and a box of papers in an attic before lodging in the floor of the attic. The damage wasn't found until the house was getting a leaky roof fixed.

I live in Amarillo, Texas. I wasn’t working that day and I remember being outside and seeing the debris trail as the shuttle passed overhead. I knew that wasn’t normal. I made it back inside, in time, to see the report on television, that the shuttle had been lost.

In 1977 At Kirkland AFB, New Mexico, I took an aviation safety course. The instructor was a Col. Stevens, recently retired. He reported to Chuck Yeager at the Air Force Safety Office while on active duty. Many times the colonel would talk about the shortcuts being taken on crew safety as the Shuttle was being developed. I remember him telling us there were going to be lives lost in the program. When Challenger went down, his words echoed in my mind, and were confirmed again by Columbia.

The tire pressure was the clincher.

This is well put together, and is still a good watch many years later.

I am sure by the time the astronauts realized how bad it was, it was over in a flash. I doubt there was time for pain or panic at all. I think about each one of them every time I see a photo or video of their smiling faces. Each one was a person, with families, friends.

When he says: Where is that instrumentation located? You can almost hear him thinking: Don’t say left wing

Watched it from my back yard in North East Texas. I'll never forget the sadness I felt when i realized what i was seeing

Thank you. Hurts to watch but very highly detailed and helps us to understand what happened on that tragic day.

There was expected to be a little communications problems with that portion of the re-entry. Also, the Shuttle crew does not transmit continuously. By the time the crew knew they were in trouble, they had no ability to communicate to the ground or, even if they did for a brief moment, they were probably too busy trying to get the Shuttle under control. Mission Control seems calm because they are trained to remain calm and watch the data on the screens.

dirac is right. Ever since challenger they had a ridiculous amount of cameras watching every launch. The cameras picked up the foam strike and the managers saw it. They ignored it because they assumed foam wouldn't be able to damage the carbon-carbon panels on the leading edge of the wing (the c-c panels were extremely durable).

Very well done and explained. Thanks for posting this video along with audio timeline.

The despair in their voices. They knew immediately. You know the sounds of all the alarms that were triggered. And ground hasn’t been able to contact them since the beginning of the video

Very sad. Thanks for compiling this material.

NASA tested large portions of foam in the lab and couldn't find out how it could crack and wrongly suspected the technicians of having applied it improperly. Then when a shuttle launch was cancelled, they found that the foam when applied on the scale of the external tank and treated as a single gigantic piece, begins to crack when they loaded the cryogenic propellants into it, caused by the shrinkage of the tank itself. This was only possible to observe when an entire tank full of propellant was subject to the temperature changes. NASA then apologized to the technicians. NASA had come very close to a similar disaster in STS 27 when hundreds of tiles on Atlantis were damaged following impacts from pieces of SRB insulation at 85 seconds into the flight, similar to Columbia. One tile was broken off, and were it not for a solid steel plate at just that spot, Atlantis could have broken up. The Commander didn't think they could make it back with the damage. He was infuriated by NASA's attitude and planned to tell them what he thought in case his sensors began to fail and instruments indicated Atlantis was going to disintegrate. Looks like NASA didn't learn from the lesson (not that they could have done anything for Columbia, but it's just their dismissive attitude towards known problems). They forgot the high standards they set for Apollo. However till the end NASA never quite managed to resolve the problem of the foam shedding.

Still gets me when I see this... such brave astronauts.

I remember turning on the tv and for first few seconds trying to understand what I was seeing.

Well put together. Great video analysis.

Damn I remember this day horribly. I was manning the AFN Radio News main boards in California. Our thing was to always break coverage and broadcast each shuttle launch and land. One of the tv techs was a huge space junkie and knew when the shuttle would be overhead and that I’d have 3 minutes to get to the board to do the switch. So we stepped out on the loading dock and sure enough there it was. Only the tech gasped and said “oh that shit isn’t right, this one’s bad bud. Get in there NOW!” We has been getting NASA beeps and suddenly it stopped. We held normal programming and several of us listened to the other feed forever it seemed until the off air signal was given and tv news popped up. Just broke us all. All being military and retired military. Just hurt.

:(......seems like yesterday. As life does.....R.I.P.

.Flight Director Leroy Cain denies that he ever considered the possibility that the instrumentation drop out was in anyway related to the suspected damage to the orbiter's heat shielding. I don't believe him. He acknowledged being briefed on the issue but it wasn't considered a "safety of flight" issue as there was no direct evidence of damage and the team dismissed it, still, it would certainly have occured to me, I can't imagine that it did not occur to him.

My thoughts are with the crew of Space Shuttle Columbia who forever will fly among the stars. Rest In Peace

Scotland the Brave was the wake-up call on the day of re-entry for Laurel and her Scottish heritage. I was watching the NASA channel live that morning. Laurel thanked mission control after the tune. It sounded like she was crying. The bagpipes of that tune sounded a little haunting. One usually associates them with formal events such as holidays and funerals.

I was in the McDonald's drive through when it happened above us in Texas. My hubby was at our Rent house painting when I went to grab breakfast. He heard the Boom and ran outside thinking I crashed his truck. Brings back memories of the 1986 space shuttle explosion. Bad memories. I feel for the families devastated by these losses.

This is a really good combo of the footage people had taken and timeline, still makes me real sad especially seeing the first debris, knowing whats happening and how no one knew for several minutes until they were already gone in an instant.

At approx 2:00 after receiving the first sensor problems and were on the left wing, the director knew they were dead. He was privy to the knowledge that it had taken the largest foam hit of any orbiter and this was both the location and the time at which if it were going to fail it would. He knew at that time it did.

In a book on the space shuttle, the last chapter that talks about the breakup says that in an interview with the engineers, they said that because the density of the air is so low up there, the crew would never realize it if the left wing was damaged, or even FELL OFF entirely for several minutes after reentry until the drag became significant and then it would all be over in seconds. The only clue would be a trail of sensor failures. And that was eerily the case till the end. Considering all that, the shuttle flew like a champ till the very end.

As I understand it, multiple sonic booms were heard over Texas as the pieces descended low enough in the atmosphere to generate booms that could be heard. It apparently sounded like a crackle. Good video footage combining. I've seen similar, but this is the most elaborate.

Based on the g-forces present in the spin, their rate of travel, and so forth, they would have had at most a few milliseconds before being physically ripped apart. It was over virtually immediately for the astronauts. They didn't suffer, take some comfort in that.

The kirkland afb pic is incredibly creepy you can see the damage 3 minutes later gone.

All these years later, it still gives me chest pain to see............

From info provided, I hope and pray their deaths were quick and painless. The violence of the shuttle once it loses stability and starts to end-over-end is shocking when you think about the speed with which they were traveling. My guess is, the concussion itself would be enough.

It was early in the morning ( I believe on a Sunday). My roommate and I were heading to work in the Grand Canyon. He pointed out out and said “what is that?”. All that we could see is a orange flame. It went from west to east (skyline to skyline) in a minute or so. I’ve never seen anything that fast. I said it must be some sort of military aircraft. That thing is fast whatever it is! We got to work and he came out of his office a hour or so later. He said it was the space shuttle and everyone died! I wish we had cell phone cameras back then but it’s etched in my mind like a video.

This woke me up that morning. The whole Earth shook as she went over. Can't believe it's been this long.

5:40 sounds like Columbia radioed "feelin the heat". Chilling.

@JMChladek, I was in Alvarado, just south of Fort Worth. At that point, the multiple sonic booms were not crackling, but a prolonged,very loud, thundering and ground shaking, boom. It has to have been multiple pieces and probably traveling at multiples of the speed of sound. We thought it was an underground seismic test as we heard and felt many times before from a nearby Halliburton facility, but it lasted much longer-- and was a Saturday. Rattled the dishes and windows all the while, too.

I suspect that your timing might be a bit off at the moment of actual breakup as it wasn't quite that abrupt. According to the survivability report the vehicle remained largely for about a minute after loss of communication, whilst pitching up to about 90 degrees and entering a flat spin. Recording equipment aboard Columbia continued to operate for the entire period and there was an additional burst of telemetry data after about 40 seconds (this was not passed to the MCC due to checksum errors in the data but it was logged at the receiving station). The cockpit detached about a minute after the last communication and that was the point where the major breakup occurred. We know the crew were alive and concious for this period because some switches on a control panel were found in a non-normal configuration when the control panel was recovered. The crew had been trying to start hydraulic pumps to get control of the vehicle back.

From the moment they first heard they'd lost those four sensors everyone in mission control knew why, and they were all thinking the same thing, "please let it last, please let it last..."

Information about the crew was kept quiet out of consideration for the families. The association of certain items was not published so people could not associate them with what went on in the crew module. The info about seat belt and suit performance was released mostly because it was a big surprise to those involved. Most people dont even know the crew module (what came back from it) was reconstructed in 3D behind the scenes for years after the accident.

"Feeling the heat" at 05:44, then it's almost one minute before breakup. That must have been one minute of hell.

Good video. I am a grown man, and cried that day.

I was working for NASA (the first time) at the Glenn Research Center near Cleveland then, we watched the launch in our breakroom, watching the NASA feed, seeing stuff the public doesn't. It was the first time I'd seen that and it was WAY cool. Little did we know what was to happen. I remember being outside washing my truck when my wife (now X) poked her hear out the door and said they'd lost the Columbia on radar. I said losing the shuttle on RADIO is normal during re-entry. She said no, she thought they said radar. I told her if they HAD lost it on radar, it was because it didn't exist anymore. I dropped the hose and ran inside, and to my dismay and great sadness, saw the fiery pieces re-entering the atmosphere. There were some VERY sad faces the next work day. I remember the Challenger disaster as well. I'd only been into my career 3 years, and as a contractor for the Navy we were all at our drafting boards, listening to the radio while it was launching....until it came apart. Another sad day, some of the girls started crying, everyone was stunned. These are 2 or many events I'll never forget. RIP to the brave men and women of these 2 spacecraft, and Godspeed to them. EDIT: Here's another thing: When I worked for NASA at Glenn, I spent some time working with the 1x1 (foot) supersonic windtunnel, and got to see a test at Mach 3+ I think it was via the Schleiren optics (allows you to see flow and shock waves - WAY cool!) and at even those airspeeds (nowhere close to 16,000mph), the instant there is any sort of major flaw in the aerodynamics, the airflow tears it apart instantly. When the superheated air got into the wing it tore apart the aluminum, which had already been severely weakened by the overtemps and it was all over but the pieces tumbling down to earth in a fiery halo. I remember in the test, seeing a tiny piece of the stainless steel tape that they use to cover the tiny gaps between the parts fluttering in the wind so fast it was just a blur. It was tiny and was getting a little bigger when one of the techs mentioned it. It still wasn't very big at all when it suddenly....just disappeared! I whipped my head around from left to right instinctively trying to follow it's path when the entire room erupted in laughter at me. They said: "First time, right?". The guy looked at me and chuckled and says everyone does that the first time that happens. Because you don't realize that, unlike, say tossing a piece of paper out of a car window, the airstream is moving so fast, the human eye can't detect its movement down the tunnel. Thus, it just appears to disappear. It was a humbling experience, but way cool.

that was indeed a very sad day for the space program... I was at work in Montgomery Al....and when a co worker told me of the tragedy... I did not Believe her... RIP Columbia crew

Of course it doesnt say it. You saw that on one of my other comments. All 7 helmets were recovered. The failure point on 6 of the helmets was below the ACES suit helmet ring. In other words 6 of the helmets still had the ACES helmet ring attached to it meaning it was on and locked. Mr. Browns did not because he was talking on what we call a hand held mic that should be stowed for landing. If he had his helmet on, he would not need the mic. He was video taping the middeck as an avid photographer

That’s horrific. It’s difficult to comprehend that this may have been avoided if later inspection procedures were in place on this mission. In space, nothing should be taken for granted.

I always explain this accident to kids like this: So you cross a busy highway 106 times and you don't get hit by a car therefore it must be totally safe to cross a busy highway. That's the thinking behind foam hitting the shuttle. It caused no catastrophic incidents so it must not be a safety issue.

Very nicely done. Thanks for putting all of these together.

7:14, there is a big puff, that has to be when the Columbia came apart. The single trail turns into multiple trails, just seconds later. Prior to that, there is a large piece of debris that comes off. That was probably the left wing.

I was still in the process of moving from one apt. to another, and so hadn't moved any big furniture over yet. Had my TV though.....along with my sleeping bag, where I spent the night on the floor. When I woke up, I think the networks were replaying footage. This was in northern CA.....which I don't the shuttles typically cross over when landing. But a year or two earlier, there was a rare, early morning flyover. The original landing site was changed due to weather or something. I'd just arrived home after a late night shift....& heard the shuttle was scheduled to pass over at around 4am or close to that. So I waited around in my carport for a while.....but not really sure of what to expect. I was just about ready to give up....thinking I must've missed it. All of a sudden....there it was. As I recall....it looked like the orange glowing tip of a cigarette.....larger than what I expected & easy to see. What I thought was a contrail....I later heard was a plasma trail.....that never expanded outward, but just hung in place like a long while rope, expanding from horizon to horizon. As soon as the shuttle was out of sight to the east.....I ran upstairs & turned on the TV. That thing was already on final approach over Florida.

Everyone's calmness is unbelievable.

seeing it fall apart, and have a piece fall on your roof, is grim.

listened to the radio break up many times with my eyes closed...pattern sounds just like an extended car crash.

Man, I remember being in the beach in Indialantic, Florida. They were super late and the thought of them not coming back didn’t even cross our minds

It’s Feb 2023, and I believe this is the oldest video on KZfaq I’ve ever seen 😳 RIP to the Columbia crew 🙏

I think the pilots at least knew there was something wrong. They were experienced enough to know that she wasn't handling 'right'. Nothing they could do about it though.

I was at home in Longview, Tx ....a very loud low frequency boom and the whole house shook - I thought 2 trains had collided at the rail yard nearby....

Something Richard Feynman said during Challenger's investigation. "When you engineer something to perform in a certain way and it does something that was unintended, such as O ring blow by or in this case, falling foam, you have a problem". Both of these issues were well known before anything happened.

Page 1-19 of the SCSIIT report:. "The normal sequence for strap-in is to attach the lap belts to the crotch strap first, followed by the shoulder straps. Analysis of the seven recovered helmets indicated that this same crew member was the only one not wearing a helmet. Additionally, this crew member was tasked with post-deorbit burn duties. This suggests that this crew member was preparing to become seated and restrained when the LOC dynamics began."

Thanks for that. I've been to Alvarado a couple times, so I am a little familiar with the area. While I wasn't living in Texas when Columbia broke apart, I have a reasonably good idea what it may have been like seeing those contrails and hearing that rumble (not to mention the recovery efforts that took place in the weeks and months after that). I still take time to reflect about it on the anniversary dates.

It may sound a little off to some, and I'm not mitigating the tragedy whatsoever, but I can think of no way I'd rather go than a space travel-related incident. Space travel is one of the best things that our species has ever accomplished.

The report stated that none of the astronauts lowered the visors or turned on the emergency oxygen. They likely went unconscious quickly due to cabin depressurization. Even ten seconds would be enough time to lower a visor. Leading up to depressurization, the crew was still controlling switches with dexterity before they went unconscious, indicating that forces were probably a few G's or less. They probably weren't being seriously injured by high G's or gasping for breath during that time.

I was traveling south in New Mexico and saw it break up and fall to the earth. Very horrifying, I knew immediately what had happened. R.I.P.

"Roger, the...." Anyone that messes with Kerbal space pc can attest.

They were doomed from the time of launch, and didn't know it. Even if the shuttle hadn't broken up, due to the damaged flight controls, as soon as aircraft flight mode was entered, they wouldn't have been able to control it and would have just spun in and crashed.

I remember watching. Once I saw multiple streaks I knew.

It is always sad when pioneers in any endeavor lose their lives, but most people who risk their lives, are well aware of the risk they are taking and they choose to do so. Many pioneers have lost before, from traveling in a wagon train to the West or on high mountains or in deep oceans. Let's just hope it doesn't happen again, but the odds are that it will. But they are very brave and deserve honor and our respect. I imagine it is very difficult for everyone who works on these projects to have something fail and lives are lost; they will remember it forever. But mankind owns the human mentality, so they keep pursuing the impossible. They probably always will.

No matter how often I watch one of these replays, I am filled with sadness for this mission and crew. They were doomed from Day #1.

I was driving from Charlotte to Atlanta that morning with my young children in the car, when the story broke on NPR. We all knew the gravity of the situation and listened and talked and prayed. We were held captive by the humanity of it for those four hours. Makes me sad to think about it.

Shout out to NASA Mission Management Team Chair *Linda Ham* for canceling the plan for imaging of the wing while in orbit without consulting the Debris Assessment Team. Had imaging been allowed, options could’ve potentially been explored. They had food for 30 days, which could’ve been stretched to double that in a life and death situation. Plenty of time to attempt a rescue with Atlantis. But we’ll never know cuz they lacked the balls to even try, in deep denial and fearing what they’d see. Had this been the NASA of the Apollo-era, back before they went completely flaccid, all possible information and imaging would’ve been gathered asap and every attempt would’ve been made to save the astronauts. But somehow we went from steely eyed missile men to hollow, self-preserving suits with empty briefcases and miles of red tape in only one generation. And it’s not me saying all this, it’s the analysts from the investigation. Columbia rescue would’ve been potentially the greatest moment in American space history, rivaled only by the first lunar landing.

What a lot of people dont' know is the foam did break apart from the shuttle and the shuttle was going so fast it slammed upwards into the foam..instead of the foam falling down into the shuttle wing.

I have no doubts that such possible tragic disaster was foreseeable by engineers at the early stages of project development. Of course I'm not an expert in building spaceships, but could it have been technically possible to construct within a spaceship a separate crew cabin in a shape of sphere also covered by a protected layer, for example like the re-entering Soyuz capsule? During the take-off and re-entering phases ( before the landing itself ) there's no any crucial need for crew to observe anything through the illuminator, so they could have been put safely into this sphere capsule and could have passed the most dangerous flight phases inside it. In a deadly case scenario like this such capsule could have been able to save the crew's members lives.

Ive worked for nasa during the apollo era. we spent billions making sure every weld was microscopically flawless, every screw, every impeller, every tube, every casing, every bulkhead crafted with surgical precision. our contractors reported the weights of every component down to the microgram. after apollo1 we redesigned the cm and reworked the lm and sm. every material was evaluated, procedures re-written, numerous cm's that were already in advanced production phases were scrapped, we changed everything from the switches down to the goddam interior paint coating. who would have thought we'd be brought down by foam...FOAM! the shuttle was an engineering disaster, hidden if front of the world. they barely had a test program. every hard lesson learned during apollos development was ignored. jk

I lived an hour south of Dallas and I had been watching this on NASA TV. I heard several large booms that shook the windows of the house and then not too long after hearing on NASA TV about them losing all instrumentation and everything I immediately knew what those booms were... That was a very very sad day....

Also, Im gonna call "bullpoop" when the controller claimed there was "no trim showing up." There had to be elevon trim building up as the ship started having to fight all the excess drag from the left side of the vehicle. Commander Hoot Gibson mentions "elevon trim" when talking about STS-27. ATLANTIS took a hit down its right side from cork coming off of the right hand SRB nosecone. It did severe damage to the tiles. The crew saw this when looking over the bottom of the shuttle with the RMS. The ground did not get clear photos due to the encryption requirements of the DoD mission (just one more reason the military has no business being on a civilian agency spacecraft). The ground discounted the crews concern. Commander Hoot Gibson assumed they would not make it, and said that if he saw "elevon trim" starting to come in, he would know that the ship was fighting drag and probably going to break up, and would have used the last moments before death to tell the ground exactly what he thought of their engineering analysis. The Atlantis survived and NASA took precisely the wrong tact. Instead of being horrified by the tile damage, they saw the damage that the shuttle survived as a chance to loosen up the rules even more.

I always felt the Space Shuttle was right on the edge of disaster every time it flew. It was oversold and it undelivered.

God bless their families still today 2019. Such brave people

Excellent video.

omg around 2:50 you can hear the interference caused by the separating debris in the radio transmission

"No commonality" except for the now-glaring commonality of it being the orbiter's portside wing. It's heartrending to think of it.

When he asks were those actuators are, they know, they bloody know

Masterfully assembled composite of that morning's events and the real-life, high stakes drama playing out just over everyone's heads. The degradation of Columbia's structural integrity was already beyond containment. No smartphones back then as we know them today. I had to wait until a brief break from work that Saturday morning to return a missed call from my father to learn that the Space Shuttle Columbia's mission had ended in tragedy. I told several work associates and we headed to the facility's cafeteria to watch what was being reported on TV (CNN, Miles O'Brien). Once that day's Duty Superintendent grasped the situation and the serious overtones of what had happened our planned early dismissal at 3 PM EST was changed to 12:30 PM EST. I don't believe that anything of any real importance was accomplished at work that day after, say, 11 AM EST that first day of February, 2003. I left an unfiled report regarding six high-value pieces of vehicle computers (BCMs) sitting on my desk which I saw first thing the following Monday.

Linda Ham was demoted after the Columbia accident. She definitely had an attitude problem with respect to her lack of willingness to listen to other people, especially below her. Such an attitude problem can create disasters in the future, even if a previous particular accident has been deemed as unavoidable and not a direct result of someone's attitude problem.

Rest In Peace....

My cousin, who lives in East Texas, found some of the debris in a field a couple of days later. She reported it and NASA did a sweep of that area collecting debris.

"...Columbia goes into uncontrolled flight..." The animation show it tumbling and spinning around, but all the videos do not show such tumbling. What is more likely to have happened when the left wing broke off is that the shuttle flipped over so it was flying backwards and upside down. The upper body of the shuttle was not designed to take the stresses of reentry, and the cargo doors probably broke off in a few seconds , followed shortly thereafter by the breakup of the rest of the shuttle. This is why you also see the three main engines preceding the rest of the debris in the latter videos.

I hope after 100-150 years and more time..people remember these astronauts, they should remember how much sacrifices had to make to get there. I really hope.

A very cool operational ground crew.. They knew when they lost the first three wing sensors.. Thermal tile damage.. All they could do is think.. Appolo 13 we can make it..

The depress likely happened in a matter of seconds and likely caused unconsciousness within seconds. The period leading up to depress probably did not cause a high degree of panic or anguish related to contemplation of death. If it had, at least some of crew would have been taking actions to try to avoid or delay death by lowering their visors or turned on oxygen, assuming no very high G's to prevent them from doing so.. Very high G's would have likely knocked the crew unconscious anyway.

The Columbia disaster was the result of NASA taking a chance - which they had done many times before,and hoping the shuttle wouldn't be fatally damaged by a falling piece of foam during the launch. There was several times that the Shuttle's was struck by foam and they never seriously tried to remedy that problem. They didn't learn the lesson of the Challenger disaster and once again became complacent. When Columbia was struck by that 1lb piece of foam during launch, the laws of probability had caught up with them.

It's sad when they talk about losing more sensors and meanwhile the shuttle is already coming to Earth in pieces.