Original subtitles

It's almost over Sacramento now.

Don't see anything yet. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

See. Oh, is that it? There it is. Right there. There it is.

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

Oh, it's cool.

That is cool!

Oh, check that out, man!

It's going really fast.

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

WOW!

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

I see what you're saying.

That thing looks like it's flipping all over the place. Oh, yeah!

I can still see it, but I'm losing it.

I can't. I've got it... Still got it in the camera.

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

They're in Texas right now.

It was a Saturday morning.

I was preparing to come to work.

It was a beautiful clay, beautiful drive.

Ancl as I turned onto Park Street...

..| heard a loud boom.

All of a sudden, our house just shook.

We, you know, looked at each other and we said, "What is that?"

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

SIREN WAILS

Phones were ringing off the hook,

much more than our dispatch staff could handle.

I didn't know if we were being attacked.

REPORTER: Search and rescue teams are warning people

not to touch any debris should they come across it.

REPORTER: There are some disturbing pictures

that are coming up from the broadcasters.

NEWSREADER: We're waiting for more details as to how this happened,

maybe the beginnings of why it happened.

NASA has declared a state of emergency over Texas.

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

NASA has gone through this before, 17 years ago,

with the space shuttle Challenger.

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

If you work in human space flight,

this is the worst possible thing that can ever happen.

The shuttle is the most complicated space machine ever built.

The world's greatest electric flying machine.

It has been a bad day for NASA.

A sense of tragedy in the space program me,

and as word spreads across the nation...

There are no simple and easy answers.

We are doing everything we possibly can to find out

what caused this accident.

All the warning signs were there.

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

Lean in. Bunch up. Arms.

Hug up. Bunch up. Bunch up.

Lean in there, everyone. LAUGHTER, CHATTER

All right!

Here we go! CAMERA FLICKERS

All right, very good.

OK, don't move too far.

Who's first? OK, here we go.

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

OK, thank you...

I was an astronaut crew secretary.

All right... Cheese! LAUGHTER

I would see the crew daily.

Hold on, let me take the glasses off.

That would be easier.

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

But you fly 12,500 miles an hour?

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

SHE LAUGHS

Woohoo, baby! LAUGHTER

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

and I read what they did with their lives.

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

Dr Dave Brown, surgeon.

Dr Kalpana Chawla, PhD.

Laurel... Laurel was a submarine doctor.

I thought that was so cool.

Mike, he was an Air Force pilot.

And then Willie, he was like a test pilot.

Rick, he'd already been up to space.

And then there was llan -

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

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

They came together to start training.

Welcome aboard.

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

and get going here?

This is your sleeping liner. And this is the sleeping pad.

Post-flight, if you can provide us some comments,

we'd really appreciate if this worked for you.

Laurel, do you want camera?

Four of us are flying for the first time,

and that could be seen as a disadvantage.

In some ways, it's an incredible advantage

because we have a wealth of enthusiasm and excitement

that other, more seasoned crews may not have.

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

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

We met in Navy dive school.

She beat us in the swimming, the guys.

Ancl that was kind of irritating.

She was just tenacious.

She always had a smile on her face no matter what happened.

It was really beautiful.

THEY LAUGH

I feel very fortunate to be assigned to this mission.

I'm expecting it to be an experience of my lifetime so far.

If you're a rookie astronaut and you've never flown before,

the first mission is the best mission.

It could have been hauling garbage to some planet

and she would have loved it.

Ready, ready, mark.

We were so excited.

I remember going into NASA,

taking a series of photos with my mom and dad after school.

I was seven.

She had her orange jumpsuit on with the helmet.

I was worried. I was, like, thinking, like,

"How is her hair going to fit in there?"

She made everything joyful all the time.

She was my whole world.

I remember the Columbia mission being announced.

I mean, I knew them all.

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

We were all there at the same time.

You get your blue flight suit... HE CHUCKLES

...that's pretty exciting. I mean, you're like, "Yes!"

Yeah. It's a... It's a big deal.

This is like the lifelong dream for all of us.

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

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

There's a lot of risk involved.

But I really believe that humans are explorers.

You want to see what's over the next hill,

you want to see what's across the ocean,

you want to see what's on the surface of the moon.

Almost like it's in our DNA.

And in this country -

I mean, especially the United States of America -

I mean, we're really good at this stuff.

NASA is a very popular government agency.

I mean, think about this for a second -

we sent people to the moon in the 1960s.

Think about how hard that was.

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

APPLAUSE

And NASA does some hard stuff.

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

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

They've got the flag up now...

It's about what it means for us as a nation to lead in space

and lead in this kind of technology.

You know, we have a record of success.

MUSIC: Kids in America by Kim Wilde

# Friday night and everyone's moving

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

# I search for... #

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

The maiden voyage of the space shuttle...

Columbia will open a new chapter in American space travel.

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

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

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

The shuttle is the most complicated space machine ever built.

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

it will show whether or not it can fly.

I had an emotional feeling with Columbia

because she was the number one.

She was paving the way to the utilisation of space

in a more practical way - cheaper, better.

Previously, rockets were expendable, one-time use.

But the space shuttle was reusable in its design,

up to 100 times.

It was a quantum leap forward in space travel.

The first flight of Columbia...

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

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

cos we didn't have a hotel room.

I have binoculars and I have a camera.

We're three miles away.

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

six, five, four...

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

WHISTLING AND CH EERING

And 'R's up and away.

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

People had seen Apollo launches exploring the moon.

The space shuttle reignited that interest.

It was the pride of the United States.

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

ever built by the human race.

History will be made today when the Space Shuttle Columbia

comes down for the first time from space.

You can see the faint speck in the middle of the dark spot.

This was a grand experiment,

because no-one had ever had to land a spacecraft like a glider before.

This is the single most critical time for the spacecraft

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

the structure takes it.

As the shuttle was entering the Earth's atmosphere,

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

Most metallic structures without protection

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

Columbia, you're really looking good, right on the money.

...so they devised the heat shield, which was made of tiles

to protect the shuttle from breaking up during entry.

CHEERING Welcome home, Columbia.

Beautiful, beautiful!

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

CHEERING

The reusable space truck will be given a free ride

back to the Kennedy Space Center, where a second launch is planned,

perhaps as early as August.

In the beginning, there were four operating shuttles -

Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis and Discovery.

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

Sometimes, they were sending satellites.

Quite a few classified missions for the Department of Defense.

Eventually, they were used for assembling and building

the International Space Station.

But reusability puts demands on the design -

that it has to be robust and resilient

and come back intact and fully operational.

That's a huge demand.

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

Working in a 2,000-cubic foot lab attached to the cargo hold,

the crew will study fires, moss growth,

human prostate cancer cells and how rats adapt to weightlessness.

In all, there are more than 59 experiments.

My husband, Rick, was the commander of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Howdy! LAUGHTER

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd ever meet an astronaut,

much less marry one.

My mother always told me, when you go out with someone,

to ask them about themselves, because guys really like that.

SHE LAUGHS So that's what I did.

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

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

Hi, my name is Rick Husband. I'm the commander of STS-107.

We're going to be flying a 16-day science mission.

I was, I think, probably 10 or 11.

I knew it was a big, in-charge position

and that he would be the leader of the team.

You think of something like Buzz Light year in Star Command.

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

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

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

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

throughout the mission.

We're just watching our...

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

who is busy documenting our journey toward space.

He was an amateur videographer, but not that amateur.

He was really good at it.

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

I know. 6.30.

Dave, your camera is affecting me. SHE LAUGHS

It is? Yeah. Why?

You know, Rick just...

He wanted to make sure that the crew was comfortable with it...

Chicken and rice, Italian vegetables, all in a tortilla.

...which they were.

They trusted Dave. They felt comfortable with him doing that.

OK, you're on.

Rolling. Take three, Dave and Laurel.

Action!

We're here in the Wind River mountains with the crew of STS-107.

Brought to you by the National Outdoor Leadership School.

Well, Laurel, are you ready?

Dave, my palms are sweaty,

my knees are weak.

I'm ready for an outdoor adventure.

CHEERING, APPLAUSE

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

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

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

Ancl it comes around.

Right down into this valley.

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

and Dave filmed the crew while they were doing that.

LAUGHTER

This is such a nightmare.

I'm trying to make these stupid brownies

because everybody wanted brownies for breakfast.

You're not hungry?

I'm not that hungry.

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

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

SHE LAUGHS

WOW!

Looks kind of like bear scat.

THEY LAUGH

But...you know.

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

Mmm! LAUGHTER

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

of what they call behavioural health...

And what do you think, Willie?

...where you're not just technically competent,

but you're low-maintenance...

...cos you are inherently in a confined space.

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

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

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

There have been fights.

There was a cosmonaut who talked about

how he was going to kill his fellow cosmonaut.

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

"And it's really important."

CHEERING

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

...was forever.

They walked in sync with each other.

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

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

They were a unit.

ALL: One, two, three!

Excellent!

Woohoo!

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

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

Michael Anderson was my husband.

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

the underwater experience to simulate zero gravity.

He was excited.

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

But he was excited.

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

Halfway he was joking, but halfway he was thinking,

"Hmm! This would be kind of cool."

Check O2 actuator is in EVA.

He loved it. It was his dream.

Complete VD2.

But he thought about it. I mean, he thought about the safety issues

and he knew he was in a dangerous career field.

I'm probably different than most astronauts.

I really don't enjoy launches.

You know, I think a launch is a terrible way to get to space.

When you launch in a rocket, you're not really flying that rocket.

You're just sort of hanging on.

Even though we've gone to great pains to make it as safe as we can,

there's always the potential for something going wrong.

You know, so we try not to think about those things.

We train and try to prepare for the things that may go wrong.

But there's always that unknown,

and I guess it's that unknown that I don't like.

I went with Michael to Florida for the first time

and actually saw the shuttle.

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

"You really, really, really want to do this?", I remember saying to him.

Because...

...somehow it didn't look as glamorous as it did on television.

I was like, "Wow, that's, you know, the oldest one in the fleet,

"and I don't know about this."

It looked smaller to me.

You know, it looked a little older.

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

And then I remember thinking about what happened to Challenger.

Space Shuttle Challenger is just a few seconds away

from blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center

near Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Let's take a look right now.

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

RADIO: Lift off confirmed. Lift off.

Engines throttling up, three engines now at 104%.

Challenger go at throttle up.

Roger, go at throttle up.

CROWD SCREAMS

The vehicle has exploded.

We hear from Launch Control the vehicle has exploded.

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

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

This is unheralded in the history of the space program me.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have covered the space shuttle launches

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

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

WAILING

It was a sad clay for all Americans.

This was our space program me.

This was our national space program me.

Ancl here they lost their lives doing it for our country.

When I thought about Challenger, I talked to Michael.

I said, "You know what? You do what you're doing,

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

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

We prayed a lot about it.

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

"Like, if something happens, God is going to take care of me,

"he's going to take care of, you know, you guys as a family,

"you'll be OK. There are risks to this. Like, I chose

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

He was like, "But we don't want to be fearful about it."

Do you remember in the conversation, did you nearly say, "|'m not sure,"

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

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

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

I wouldn't have stopped him.

I was working at NASA then.

I had done this threat assessment.

Any commercial airliner, your chances of a bad outcome

are one in a million, probably closer to one in 10 million.

Scuba diving and flying in general aviation,

military flying, is one in 100,000.

Ancl flying in a space shuttle?

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

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

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

"Well, if it really is that risky, what doesn't NASA tell that to me?"

And I said, "Well, I don't know,

"but I'm at NASA and this is the analysis I've done."

You know, if somebody told me,

"Hey, you can go on this roller-coaster ride

"and there's one in 100 chance that you'll die,"

well, there's no chance in the world,

no chance in hell, I would do that.

Flying on the space shuttle,

the benefit we get for our country is enormous.

You know, I think a lot of us feel

that this is a tremendous amount of risk...

...and there will be, you know,

accidents and people will lose their lives,

but I also think that people generally think

it's not going to be them.

NASA has grounded its four shuttles until at least September

because of small cracks that have been found in the fuel lines.

The concern is the cracks could grow

and splinter into hazardous chunks of metal.

They got a bunch of us, like, a dozen engineers,

to go fly down to Kennedy Space Center to go look at cracks.

There was copious amounts of engineering discussion

and testing going on.

If a main engine were to explode, that would destroy the vehicle,

it'd be out of control. We'd lose the vehicle and the crew.

It's too dangerous to fly any shuttle

until we get a handle on this.

It grounded the entire fleet, including Columbia.

They found a crack in one of our older vehicles

that are undergoing some rehab work,

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

in some of the other vehicles.

It was, like, delayed and delayed and delayed.

You're kind of glad that they're dealing with

whatever the issue is and you're hoping that everything's OK.

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

There were many, many meetings and many thousands of hours spent

on this, but NASA management and engineering came up with solutions.

Once these propulsion cracks were fixed and repaired,

we can resume flight.

But I had oversight into all the missions

and there were numerous problems with the other shuttle fleet.

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

the damages and things that were out of whack.

The thermal protection system, the tiles,

were being damaged every flight.

One time, a large piece of foam

from the gigantic fuel tank

dented the solid rocket boosters on liftoff.

Another time, a vulture hit the tank.

If it hit the windows? Catastrophe.

This is a complex vehicle that always needs a lot of care taking.

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

of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration -

the leader of the agency at that time.

Every single mission that I was there for

was scrubbed, rescheduled,

delayed because something wasn't exactly right.

What did catch my attention in terms of the shuttle,

from the very first time I saw them up close,

was this was 1970s technology.

This was a lot of moving parts -

a lot of mechanical moving parts.

Ancl any time you have that happen,

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

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

36, 37 clays to launch

and it's starting to get exciting.

Why is it exciting?

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

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

Three weeks from the launch, we were flying from Houston

to Albuquerque for Christmas,

lain and Laurel and I.

It was my clad flying the plane and me and our dog in the back seat.

And we start hitting some of this turbulence,

and all of a sudden the plane gets into this, like, down wash.

It's going down like this.

Well, I mean, we just crashed.

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

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

something I cannot explain.

I think it messed lain up because the closer we got

to the flight itself, he kept saying,

"I don't want you to leave, Mom. I want you to stay here on Earth."

Basically, he said, "I don't want you to go."

I begged her pretty desperately not to go.

I was... I was very emotional,

and I was crying to her.

Stop... Tried to stop her from leaving.

How hard do you think it was for Laurel?

Oh, deeply difficult.

I think that you couldn't quantify the magnitude of their love.

Motherhood's been incredible.

Ancl I tell my son all the time

that my most important job is being his mother.

I relied on my mom for so much.

So much.

How much did she love being a mom?

Well, I think she loved that more than being an astronaut.

I think that she loved that more than anything else in her life.

And if she'd pulled out at that point,

how would that have impacted the mission?

Oh, it would have cancelled it,

or delayed it at the very least.

Because the crew members are so specifically trained,

there's no backups.

I can't even imagine the quandary that she would have faced,

having to decide that.

But she was committed and determined to get the job done.

These guys have trained, you know, forever for this mission.

And the last thing they want is for them to catch something and be sick.

That just would be catastrophic for the...for the mission.

So they put them in quarantine a week prior.

The children weren't allowed to be around them.

I had to say goodbye to him before he went to quarantine.

Ancl I remember hugging his waist

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

That moment, actually right here in the kitchen,

I remember crying and just knowing

how much I would miss him.

We drove him to quarantine,

and we all said goodbye and, like, had hugs and kisses,

and it was a really sweet moment.

And it was just us, and that was it, he was off.

This is going to be good.

llan just walks into the kitchen,

starts looking in cupboards, starts grabbing stuff,

and it just miraculously happened. He transformed it.

Cheers.

We're almost there!

The last time lain saw his mom was in Houston, in the crew quarters.

And actually they're supposed to not see their kids for seven days,

and we snuck him into crew quarters,

unbeknownst to anybody else,

for him to get a hug from his mom,

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

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

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

It was a very long hug.

You know, maybe...

I don't know if they knew it was the last one or not.

Who could deprive a child of that from his mom?

APPLAUSE

Absolutely thrilled to be here.

Thrilled to go do a lot of work,

see some incredible things and spend some more time

with this great group of people I'm with today.

I left Washington to head down to Florida to witness the launch.

Had an opportunity to visit with the crew.

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

At that time, I was in briefings in the White House

to identify what are the high-value targets,

what are the things that would be an attraction for terrorists

to just get the attention of the American people?

One of them was a shuttle.

But this one I looked at more carefully

because of the presence of the “an Ramon.

llan Ramon says he is uncomfortable in the spotlight,

but none of his six shuttle crew mates

is the first astronaut from Israel.

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

a higher security concern given the nature of the Middle East

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

Anybody from Al-Qaeda, from Isis, you know, the extremists,

would love to make a statement about, why don't we take that out

as a way to make a statement across the globe

of what we're capable of doing?

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

and this flight especially is going to take care

of a better life on Earth.

I was 12 years old.

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

We were taken from place to place

and being escorted with different cop cars.

Security following the bus.

My clad didn't want us to be worried about anything,

but we knew it was risky.

The post-9/11 regimen remains in place.

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

enhanced radars, surface-to-air missiles

and the launch time kept secret until the day before.

There were gunboats out there.

There's, you know, frogmen in the water.

They had snipers on the roof of the hotel

as well as mounted police all up and down the beach.

You could easily hide a sniper in a swamp out there

with a high-powered rifle, and a couple of hits

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

This is shuttle launch control

and everything is going well

and as planned with the countdown for the launch of Columbia

and shuttle mission STS-107.

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

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

INDISTINCT CHATTER

Good morning. Morning, llan.

How are you doing?

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

How about you? Are you ready?

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

Shalom. Ready for the big clay?

Pliers...tethers...

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

...give me the camera a little bit.

Yeah, I want to take a picture with Laurel.

In 2003, I was responsible for all the astronauts.

I was here supporting. I was an astronaut myself.

Every time you get suited up, there is anticipation.

I don't know, anxiety, excitement.

Yeah, launch day is pretty special.

HELMET CLICKS

Good sound. Yeah.

OK. Go ahead and close your visor...

OK. All right. Here we go.

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

card game, this poker game,

because it's been clone since Neil Armstrong.

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

One step closer to launch here.

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

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

It's incredibly exciting.

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

All right. And the time is...

Everything is timed very specifically and they actually

have a...you know, it was an old analogue clock with a marker on it.

And you just got to wait. You want to go.

You know the risk and you know what you're getting ready to do.

You know, if you don't, you probably shouldn't be in that business.

Rick Husband got the whole crew together inside the suit room

before they went out the door into the hallway.

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

and said a prayer.

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

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

Christian, Hindu, Jew, all together as one,

as they walked out of the suit room.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

CH EERING AND WHISTLING

All right! You can do it!

All right!

Ancl our astronauts coming out now

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

Commander Rick Husband, payload specialist llan Ramon,

pilot William McC00l and mission specialists Michael Anderson,

David Brown, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla.

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

LAUGHTER

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

There it is.

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

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

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

Hut, hut, hut, hut, hut, hut... Woohoo! All right.

Morning, gentlemen, welcome to the 195.

We're going to have a wonderful clay today.

When you're up there at the 195-foot level

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

I mean, you're all suited up and this is for real.

And the vehicle, it's venting, it's creaking.

It's like it's alive.

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

inside this thing blasting off into space.

This thing is big.

It's big. It's really big.

For me, if there was any apprehension, it was then.

I mean... But you can't say, "No, I don't think I want to do this."

You know, you're pretty much, you're going.

How are you? How you doing?

“an. Good to see you.

Thank you. Good to see you.

The final folks to speak to them,

that's the astronaut support personnel and the crew

that's strapping them into the vehicle.

Ancl the NASA test director, Jeff Spaulding,

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

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

laying on their backs.

Husband climbing in somewhat difficult, cramped quarters there.

Next to enter the vehicle will be llan Ramon,

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

They help get their harnesses on,

get them strapped in and, you know,

when they close the hatch, that's it.

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

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

Here at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida,

a lot of concern about security with the first Israeli astronaut

on board Columbia for this 16-day science mission.

I'm there to cover that launch, like we always were.

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

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

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

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

One of the experiments on board the shuttle...

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

You know, 9/11, llan Ramon, did they really fix those cracks?

And then it's up to, you know, a million movable parts

all working in synchronicity, which is kind of...the fact that it

ever worked at all is pretty amazing.

Back here in the space shuttle flight control room,

the ascent team of flight controllers, who have been

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

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

The ascent team is led by flight director

Leroy Cain for today's launch.

OK, folks.

Going to ops one, count from 20.

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

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

You could commit to launch or you could scrub

and have to come back and try again another day.

As a flight controller in Mission Control,

STS-107 was my second mission.

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

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

that is kind of the moment where you realise

that this is about to get real.

Go/no go for launch. FIDO? Go.

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

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

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

For me, personally, I could feel my adrenaline gland

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

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

Get ready for a G1 launch target.

There's a lot of responsibility.

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

It is not an easy business.

Houston, flight is go.

By then, it's too late to figure out

whether you're ready to do it or not.

You're committed at that point,

so now it's focus on what's ahead of you.

The only person who was authorised to launch

the shuttle itself was the launch director

at the Kennedy Space Center.

On the moment on which everything lined up

and the launch director was convinced they were ready to go

for launch, that's when he said, "Go for launch,"

pressed the button and that was it.

The countdown clock will resume on my mark.

Three, two, one. Mark.

T-minus nine minutes and counting.

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

We had 300 or 400 invited guests to the launch,

and so each family had that amount.

It is a huge event.

The strongest emotion is just excitement. I mean, we're just...

There's a huge buzz. I mean, it's really amazing.

We were in this big building and they had us

standing on the roof to watch everything.

So we were just kind of waiting all together and, you know,

all the kids were kind of talking and playing

until things kind of started counting down.

Go for orbiter access arm retract.

T-minus five minutes and counting.

And we have a go for APU start.

The auxiliary power unit activation has been recorded.

I do remember being outside and looking

at the shuttle getting ready to take off.

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

and then he started crying.

The whole launch was him crying. It was awful.

T-minus three minutes, 25 seconds and counting.

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

and rudder are being completed at this time.

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

on the launchpad and I just thought,

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

There's just such a mixture of emotion.

There's pride, excitement, fear.

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

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

Ancl the gaseous oxygen vent hood will be slowly retracted

away from the top of the external tank.

You feel it.

Ancl it's, "My husband's in that...

"with all that fuel and all that power."

So you trust everybody has clone their jobs

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

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

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

and initiate O2 flow.

For the first two-plus minutes of the mission,

with the solid rocket boosters attached,

there's no option for abort.

You have to wait till they're done and burned out and cut away.

That is a blackout zone. That's a death zone.

No matter what happens in that scenario, you cannot do anything.

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

T-minus one minute and counting.

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

And then the moment came, you know,

the moment where the launch was coming.

Each family came together and kind of were hugging

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

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

Whoo!

11, ten, nine, eight,

seven, six, five, four, three,

two, one. CHEERING

The weird thing is that you see that flash

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

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

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

And then it's "Ba-boom!"

LOUD BANG

CHEERING

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

107! 107!

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

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

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

ALL CHEER

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

It's incredibly visceral and emotive and inspirational.

The international research mission finally under way.

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

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

Every time that kind of gets me.

Columbia travelling at 1,800 miles an hour.

You're watching seven of your closest friends on this

ball of flame going off into space.

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

I mean, it's very emotional.

Columbia's three main engines

draining a half a ton of fuel per second,

heading towards space on the first shuttle mission of the year.

You know how on TV it looks like you're going up really smoothly?

No. Not at all.

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

Ancl there's a lot of vibration.

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

"There's something wrong here."

I was like, "This does not feel right to me.

"Cannot possibly feel like this."

Solid rocket booster separation confirmed.

Guidance now converging.

Columbia's on board computers commanding the main engine nozzles

to gently swivel, aiming the shuttle for a precise target

in space for main engine cutoff.

I was, like, more nervous.

You know, you see the plumes of smoke and the fire

and you kind of know what's going on, but you're just kind of like

in the back of your head, "ls it supposed to do that? ls that correct? OK."

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

All these thoughts and then all of a sudden they're just gone

and you're just still hearing it.

When I lost sight of the shuttle going up,

that's when I kind of felt like a little sting from it.

You know, just like a feeling of,

"Man, how could she just leave like that?"

Columbia in its preliminary orbit.

I remember looking at the planet for the first time.

I mean, I still have the whole image burned into my brain

where you look over and you see this big, round, blue ball.

Ancl it's just incredible to see the planet as what it is,

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

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

Everything in great shape as the orbiter is now

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

Standing by for further activity on board.

Space shuttle Columbia is safe in orbit

and here at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida,

NASA and the US Air Force breathing a collective sigh of relief.

The perfect launch for Columbia, a perfect climb to orbit.

They're in orbit and that's when you're, you know, you're home free.

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

when they were, you know,

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

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

This is 225km above us.

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

because anything can happen till then, and once they turn off

those main engines and they're in orbit,

you know, you're in a relatively safe situation.

You can safely walk away from the camera and...

..they started quickly playing the launch replays and...

Ancl that was when we saw it.

This is Mission Control, Houston, continuing to watch

replays of Columbia's launch, which occurred on time and flawlessly,

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

I was in our truck.

Producer called me in, said, "You've got to look at this."

It was kind of a grainy image but you see this...

this, poof! Like a...

Like you dropped a bag of flour on the ground and it all

floated into the air.

Didn't take much of a telephoto to show this kind of explosion,

but it did not look good at all.

It looked bad.