-i just kept telling him how much i loved him and he said, "i love you guys so much." he goes, "evelyn, i love you so much." and just kept saying that. those are our last words ever. that was it. -i got a really nice note from evelyn husband and she just said, "i just want you to know how much we at nasa appreciate how you cover space." i was worried about her and her kids. anytime a shuttle is going to come to earth, i'd be worried. in this case, i had a little more worry. ♪ -columbia, houston, good morning, and we're looking forward to our last day on orbit with you.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -my wife, laurel, was on the shuttle. she was a scientist primarily involved with life sciences.

one day during the mission, i was reviewing the notes, and then here's this foam issue. during launch, a large piece of foam had come off the external tank and impacted the left wing. me and my colleague had this discussion of, "hey, you can use a family conference to talk to laurel and find out what she knew." -oh! -you got to remember the hat you're wearing is your flight-surgeon hat, not your family hat. it would have broken protocol for me to bring up an issue to a crew member, even though it's my wife. -i remember a certain sense of relief like, "it's almost over.

she's almost back." -i didn't talk to laurel about the foam issue. that conference was for iain and laurel, and i was a bystander. -i knew she was going to come back. you know, i never had a question in my mind. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

-given the fact that you may have lost a little bit of tile during lift-off, i'm wondering if there's going to be anything different about the entry profile, taking that into regard. -no, there isn't. we -- the engineers and analysts took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing, and we have no concerns whatsoever. all of the analysis says that we have plenty of margin and that the impact could not have been significant enough. and, therefore, we haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. so nothing different. it will be nominal, standard trajectory.

-the night before landing, we went out to dinner, and i was still concerned. "we really don't know the damage yet. it could be bad." -that's all we talked about -- the landing the next morning and how things had gone so badly the last two weeks. -i was recounting all of the pushback that we were getting from management -- two weeks of just utter frustration and anger. -we talked a lot about the worst-case scenario. -if they're having trouble with the wing, it would be during entry, when the shuttle and the astronauts are coming on that hot entry, high-speed hot entry, into the earth's atmosphere and they're going to attempt a landing. ♪ ♪

-you know, it's been a long 16 days, and so we're all just super-excited to see our loved ones again and just be back to normal, whatever that looks like. and the kids decorated the house for his homecoming, and our neighbours put out flags. -we did paper chains and making banners and so we had it all decorated just to welcome him home. -we were super-excited, and i remember, like, as it got close to them getting back, we were just ready, super-ready to have him home. and as we said, columbia coming back. it's been 16 days now since she left the kennedy space center. this is the route, which you see on your screen. -i remember getting up that day.

we were staying right next to banana river. we got up, and there were dolphin in the water. what a picture-perfect day. i mean, it was so pretty, and everything was so pleasant. -we show page a1 to 15 complete. -and, rick, we copy. -i just remember standing out on the balcony with laura, watching the sunrise and just saying to her, "this is a day you'll never forget." -we're about 42 minutes away from an engine firing that would begin columbia's descent. the crew in the final stages of their preparations now, taking their seats. at the commander's seat, rick husband. pilot, willie mccool. -[ laughs ]

-i was desperately waiting for my mom to come back. the thing i was most excited about was just holding her again and talking to her. -they put bleachers close to the runway, and you're driven down there and you're in a set of bleachers with your friends and family that you have invited for the landing. -they had speakers, and you could hear rick talking. -and, rick, we're ready for the manoeuvre. -i did not usually come in for a landing. to me, those were so routine. usually, the orbiter has been working well, they have a good weather call.

but i had this wing concern because of the impact. so i said, "i will go in." i realized that most of those people at those consoles -- they don't know anything that's been going on for two weeks. they've been looking at the condition of this system, this system, but they don't know any other history. -i was the lead entry ground controller for the mission. my primary thing is getting the spacecraft up on to orbit and getting it back down safely. that morning, the atmosphere -- it was upbeat. there's no issues. we work with the crew to go through system checkouts. -we got all of our systems ready, all the sensors ready, and we prepared for the de-orbit preparation, which is you convert the space shuttle from a spacecraft to a re-entry vehicle.

everything was proceeding normally that day. -the big thing that i remember really paying attention to shortly before landing was the weather. -flight controllers are currently monitoring the fog that has limited visibility but is dissipating. -because, obviously, it is just critical to have decent visibility, no big weather issues when you're landing. -flight director leroy cain discussing weather conditions at present with forecasters here. -leroy was the person in charge. so everybody on their consoles are monitoring their own systems, and they're all reporting into leroy what they're seeing. -columbia, houston. -go ahead, houston. -hey, rick, i guess you've been wondering, but you are go for the de-orbit burn. we are happy with the weather at ksc. you are go for the burn. -de-orbit burn is a major decision in the process.

once that de-orbit burn is made, you are committed to landing. they're coming home. one way or the other, they're coming home.

♪ -columbia, houston, good burn, no trim required. -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.

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throughout my life are watching sports with my dad. now, i work at comcast as part of the team that created our ai highlights technology, which uses ai to detect the major plays in a sports game. giving millions of fans, like my dad and me, new ways of catching up on their favorite sport. ♪ -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.

the chances of a plane crash -- 1 in 11 million. you're not going to finish those salted nuts, right? never waking up from anesthesia -- 1 in 185,000. validate your parking or just see how it goes? -what? -why stress about the unlikely? does a killer clown worry about being struck by lightning while winning the lottery? -sure don't. but your odds of falling victim to online crime are 1 in 4.

you need aura. you, your family all protected from scary online stuff. [ laughs ] aah! protect everything your family does online with aura. ♪ -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,