Original subtitles

REPORTER: Y'all, we are awaiting Space Shuttle Columbia,

as we promised.

About ready to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It's supposed to happen in about 15 more minutes.

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

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

But all of the waiting just felt like an eternity.

Here we go! Woo!

There's this big countdown clock.

I just remember staring at that clock,

watching every second go down. I'm like, "ls it now? ls 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?

lain was very excited.

Mom's coming home and, you know, he's going to get Mom hugs,

erm, great meals...

You know, life will be back to normal.

It is now 9am on the East Coast.

Take a look outside. If you hear a "boom-boom", it's the Space Shuttle.

Somebody from NASA said, "You'll see the big, kind of, parachute

"that pops out of the back."

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

just watching the parachute come out.

But then the clock started counting back up.

It went zero, negative one, negative two...

Where's the double sonic boom?

No sonic boom.

I'm kind of looking at all the other families,

but no-one was really saying anything.

You could kind of feel the air shift a little bit.

There's no Space Shuttle.

I just got this incredible pit in my stomach...

...of fear and of anxiety.

A rush of adrenaline that you just...

You know something's wrong. Something's wrong.

The shuttle is the most complicated space machine ever built.

The world's greatest electric flying machine.

It has been a bad day for NASA.

A sense of tragedy in the space 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.

Houston, UHF comm check.

M|LA's not reporting any RF at this time.

When are you expecting tracking?

One minute ago, Flight.

Flight, GC. No C-band yet.

COPY-

C-band is a radar that sits on the ground

and literally it sends out a signal and it bounces it

off of the spacecraft to tell us where it is.

But we were getting nothing.

You know, the room was just silent.

All right, Miles, back over to you.

Erm, we've got a little problem on the Space Shuttle Columbia.

It has been out of communication now for the past 12 minutes.

Let's take a look at a live picture of mission control in Houston.

I was live on morning TV.

I was dialled into NASA on a cellphone I had.

There was a secret phone number you could dial into

and hear the mission audio.

The people in the control room are going, "Are you hearing this?"

No further communications with the spacecraft about 8am Central Time...

Hang on, let's listen in.

...and no further tracking data from the spacecraft that was gained from

C-band tracking radar at the Merritt Island tracking station in Florida.

My team was in the control room and they were like, "This is serious.

"We need to get Miles off that couch."

Ancl as I was making my way across the newsroom to this other set,

I literally started heaving.

The last communications with the Shuttle Columbia

during its descent from orbit were at about 8am Central Time...

Standing on the side of the runway,

realising that my biggest fear is coming true.

I just dropped my head and turned around,

shaking my head, just walked away.

There wasn't anything else you could do.

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

The Space Shuttle is not here. This has never happened before.

All of a sudden, the astronaut family escorts,

all of their cellphones start simultaneously ringing.

We realised something's seriously wrong, and I said,

"Let's get the families... Let's get them back to crew quarters."

Wow.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh!

It looks like we've got a van, probably full of family members

of the astronauts, being driven away. That's not good.

I remember grabbing Mom's arm and saying, "Mom, is Daddy OK?"

Ancl I was just kind of staring out of the window,

trying to figure out what was happening.

I can just hear my mom and the driver just kind of whispering

in a hushed tone, like, "What does this mean?"

From WFAA TV, Channel 8, The Spirit of Texas.

We're going to suspend our normal format right now

because we've got some breaking news.

This is videotape of the Space Shuttle Columbia

on its way to a scheduled landing this morning.

But then we began to see this...

It looks like you can see pieces of the shuttle coming off.

There you can see numerous streams leaving some kind of trail

over the skies of Texas.

The Space Shuttle over Nacogdoches?

What is... What is happening?

We had just gone through 9/11 and at first I thought,

"Did somebody blow it up?"

It was probably a reasonable thought that a lot of people had,

that it could be something terrorist-related,

even in this small rural area,

because you never know where that might take place.

Phones were ringing off the hook.

Much more than our dispatch staff could handle.

There was mass confusion.

We can only hope that what we're seeing is not the worst,

but we don't have any confirmation.

Well, they were reporting what they knew on TV,

but here we knew that it was falling all over our county,

and so immediately I picked up my camcorder.

This was something that was going to be big.

Oh, my goodness.

I wonder what that is.

A large piece of debris right in the middle of their parking lot,

behind the bank.

You see this? This is parts of it.

That's where it hit. That's where it hit and bounced.

Well, it's up in a tree over here.

It must have come right through there. Golly!

That's pretty big.

It was just chaos.

Y'all didn't touch it or anything, did you? No, mam.

You don't understand.

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

It became pretty obvious that...

...the worst had happened.

It was just shocking.

People waking up to this horrible news.

Quite frankly, I turned and looked across a big open ploughed field,

and there, in fact, is a piece of smoking wreckage.

This blackened material, letting out white-hot smoke.

There's some rubber burning in our pasture.

They're reporting a piece of wreckage came through

an apartment roof and started a fire.

Catastrophe striking the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Its crew of seven astronauts...

Right now, NASA will be trying to make sense

of what happened in the skies over Texas.

GC, Flight. Flight, ac.

Lock the doors. Copy.

I was starting to see the beginning of the process for shut down,

preserve your data,

because it's going to be needed later, for investigation.

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

our discussions are on these loops, on the recorded DVIS loops only.

No data, no phone calls, no transmissions anywhere, into or out.

I remember turning around and seeing Leroy...

...and he had...he had a tear going down his cheek.

That was...that was a hard moment.

I glanced up and I saw an engineer,

I remember her eyes and cheeks were wet.

She was sobbing and crying. And she looked at me and she said,

"There's nothing we could have done."

And all my pent-up frustration and anger just came out

and I said, "I've been hearing that damn stuff all week

"and I'm sick and tired of it!"

I think I was more angry than sad, thinking,

this didn't have to happen.

It didn't have to happen.

We were told, "We're going to take you to crew quarters",

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

It's this big long table, many chairs, and all of these TV screens.

Ancl all of the screens were off. Everything was off.

We were all together, waiting in this room,

but as a kid, I was just looking around to see if I could,

kind of, figure out what was going down.

I remember going in the conference room...

...and, erm...

...it was my job to tell the families.

I can't remember exactly how I said it.

That, erm...

That the crew is lost - that they were not coming home.

I didn't want them to have any kind of false hope, and...

..| just did it in the most...

...caring, compassionate way that I could.

It's almost like, from what I remember,

there was, like, a ringing in my ear.

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

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

This is not happening.

There's no way this is happening.

In my mind, I'm thinking, kind of, like,

the spaceship is like a cruise ship. There are lifeboats.

Surely they got on a lifeboat, you know?

And, you know, somebody has just got to go get them, cos...

I'm thinking of like, you know, all of the science fiction movies

where they get into the little pods and they zoom away from the danger.

Somehow they had survived the crash in the ocean somewhere,

and they were all out living on an island.

There was explosive crying.

If you've ever heard an animal scream in agony or...

It was... It was primal.

It was... It was horrific.

Everything just fell apart.

The shuttle wasn't coming home. Dad wasn't coming home.

Sorry.

These were husbands and fathers and wives, gone.

A fair amount of rookies on this particular one.

Somehow I just got my act together and I just started talking.

The mission appeared to go well.

There was one thing that engineers were looking at at launch.

We're going to try to get you some tape of it.

There was a piece of debris which came off the shuttle.

I'm going to bring in a model here.

I felt like it was my responsibility to talk about the foam strike,

to get it out there in the public, so...

..| talked to the folks in the control room and I said, you know,

"Can you cue-up the launch replays?"

All right, let's take a look at this launch. If we can run that through

the telestrator, that would be very helpful.

Look what happened a minute after launch.

Look at this very, very slow... Look at that piece, right there.

What was that?

There was a piece of debris which struck the shuttle as it came off.

Was it a piece of foam? Was it a piece of ice?

The question was, what did it do?

I still didn't know for sure. I still was the armchair analyst.

But Challenger was deep in our memory

and this was a similar scenario.

In the wake of Challenger,

NASA management just tried to shut everything down,

and it created a huge amount of bad blood between the media...

It made NASA look guilty as hell.

How will they respond to this?

What is this going to do to the space program me?

The second shuttle craft lost.

It was my worst nightmare.

Painful.

Such a searing memory of Challenger and how much it had defined NASA.

This was the very last thing I had thought that I would be reporting

to the President on this day or any other day.

I called the White House, told him that we don't know a lot

but we have just lost Shuttle Columbia. This was my duty...

...to be responsible for this accident.

My fellow Americans...

...this day has brought terrible news and great sadness to our country.

The Columbia is lost.

There are no survivors.

All Americans today are thinking as well

of the families of these men and women

who have been given this sudden shock and grief.

They gave their lives for us and we want everybody to know

how much we appreciate that, especially their families,

because it's the most precious gift they could give.

When we drove up in front of our house...

...our whole street, all of our neighbours,

were standing outside of our house to welcome us.

just hugged and cried in the street.

We walk into the house that my brother and I had decorated

to welcome my clad home, and now we have to take this down.

Like, this is.... He's not here.

We were home...

...but it wasn't the same.

The solution for the first day was...

...drink alcohol and talk.

I mean, drinking - a lot.

Until I'm just passed out.

Going home, you go through it all over again.

You realise...

...she's not going to come back.

So it was kind of hopeless.

Nothing really matters any more.

I mean, honestly, the only goal I had...

...was simply just to keep him alive. I mean, literally.

It's like, I don't want him to get to that despondent stage where

he just says, you know, "|'m going to check out and join Mom now."

This happened under my watch.

But I didn't have the answers.

In every public forum I'm going to have to be in,

how am I going to explain this to anybody?

We're going to find out, we hope, in a few minutes, what NASA knows.

NASA, as an agency, will have a lot of tough, pointed questions,

asking specifics.

At this time we have no indication that the mishap was caused

by anything or anyone on the ground.

Welcome to the Johnson Space Center.

To my left is Ron Dittemore.

He's the Space Shuttle Programme Manager.

We're devastated...

...because of the events that unfolded this morning.

Do you have any idea how much of a damage area may have been left on

the left wing and how big that piece of foam was that came off?

Tell me who's leading this investigation.

We'd heard some reports that during launch

there had been some concerns that some debris hit the wing.

ls that true and is that any cause of concern that

that could have caused today's problems?

It is true. It was judged that that event

did not represent a safety concern.

We have appointed a Mishap Investigation Board,

an external group, people who are independent from NASA, to ascertain

the causes and the circumstances under which the tragedy occurred.

My thoughts are on what we missed...

...what I missed...

...to allow this to happen,

but I guarantee you we're going to fix it.

I was playing tennis in McLean, Virginia.

I received a phone call...

...saying that I would be flown immediately

to Barksdale Air Force Base.

After Challenger, NASA had a contingency plan

in case there was a shuttle accident.

I never really imagined that it would happen.

With Columbia, we had people who had experience

with accident investigation

from the military, Navy and Air Force, on the team.

I came to the investigation

as a helicopter pilot who knew something

about doing accident investigations.

I did not come to the investigation as a Space Shuttle expert.

I literally knew nothing about how the shuttle was put together.

We needed NASA's help because, by definition,

everybody who came in as an external part of the investigation team

is not a Space Shuttle expert.

There was years of shuttle program me knowledge

that we needed to learn very quickly.

From what we understand, a piece of foam insulation

came off during lift-off.

This piece hit part of the left side of the shuttle

and they don't know if there was any damage or not.

Very early on, NASA told us that

they knew about a foam...a debris event.

But we didn't even know enough about the shuttle

to understand that there was foam on the tanks.

The press wants to know what happened, and it's like...

...yep, so do we.

REPORTER: The recovery effort is massive,

involving dozens of agencies,

covering many hundreds of square miles.

It's the largest recovery effort that has ever been attempted

in this country.

As an investigator, I wanted as ironclad a case

as we could possibly have for the sequence of events

leading to the cause of the crash of Space Shuttle Columbia.

But if we were going to do that,

we needed to collect all the debris and reconstruct the shuttle.

1,200 sites have been identified.

All those pieces will be brought to the Kennedy Space Center,

where Columbia will be reassembled, in a manner-of-speaking.

Literally thousands of pieces of debris are now pieces to a puzzle.

They've already made hundreds of finds,

from tiny scraps of metal to whole panels...

...and the tragic but inevitable discovery of human remains.

A spacecraft breaking up at 190,000 feet.

It's something you couldn't, like, get out of your mind.

I mean, I'd been in space before.

This was something I was about to do again.

Ancl then this horrific thing happens to my classmates,

my co-workers, friends.

So I called the constable ancl I said, "Hey, I need a helicopter.

"I've got to get to East Texas."

On the way, you could see there were pieces of Space Shuttle,

thousands and thousands of pieces, all over the place.

So, we land on the high school...

...it was a high school football field, and, erm...

...a police officer said to me, he says,

"Hey, we have a report of one of the crew members' bodies."

I was the first person there from NASA.

This was not something I was trained for.

We just try to do the best job we can to handle this

as respectfully as possible.

For decades, the American space program me has been a source

of great technological innovation.

But that hard-won reputation is looking badly knocked.

For many of the thousands who work at the Lyndon Johnson Space Center

in Houston, today was the first day back at work since the disaster.

They'd apparently been encouraged not to talk to the press.

The investigators rented a building right outside the gate.

I felt OK. I felt, "This is a good thing,

"this has to happen, I hope they're thorough."

Inside, the internal conflict was building.

Getting angry at management, and it was very public arguments.

It wasn't just one-on-one. It was out in the hallways.

It was so accusatory.

There was so much anger and frustration.

On the first clay that we went into johns on Space Center,

there were people who received us very well.

There were people who were not happy that we were here.

I was one of the first people to be...

...interviewed and interrogated.

They had access to everything - all videos, all data, all emails.

People had to comply.

In some cases, we're asking for data, and they'd be like,

"I can't give you that information right now.

"You're going to have to go up through

"a very formal NASA chain of command to be approved."

Generally speaking, who were the ones who were less keen

for your help, or less pleased you were there, perhaps?

I think the folks that were probably less interested in our help

were more at the management level in NASA.

I call it the Managers' Club.

It's a type of a culture

where there are rules of behaviour and ways of talking.

You don't jump the chain of command.

And that's insulting, to go up to someone higher and ask directly.

You're supposed to co-ordinate all your questions, especially harsh

or strong questions to managers. You don't do that directly.

You use the intermediaries to do that.

You don't talk bluntly or pose questions like that

to a NASA manager.

Are you going to risk your career in NASA by standing up

and arguing with the chain of command?

Because that can be very career limiting

and you find yourself shuffled off into a windowless room

and, you know, just going through paperwork.

I want the system, I want the NASA manager culture, confronted.

Good afternoon, everybody,

and welcome to the johns on Space Center for today's briefing.

Again joining me is Shuttle Programme Manager Ron Dittemore.

Today, I brought with me...

...a piece of foam, and I think we've made some foam available to you,

so that you can get an understanding of the composition of this material.

It's very lightweight, which is logical.

You would want it to be lightweight because the more weight you put

on the tank, the less up-mass you could launch into an orbit.

So it's difficult for us to believe as engineers, as management,

and as a team, that this particular piece of foam debris

shedding from the tank represented a safety-of-flight issue.

I caught some segment that Ron got into

in which he said in a declarative voice...

Right now, it just does not make sense to us that a piece of debris

would be the root cause...

...for the loss of Columbia and its crew.

There's got to be another reason.

How can he say that? Where is he getting that from?

What a big denial.

To be certain it was foam is nonsense, right?

But to be certain it wasn't foam is equally nonsense, right?

Ancl that's what they were saying.

It's not foam. Well, how do you know?

I know from the accident investigation team's perspective,

no-one was going to go public and say, "We know what didn't happen."

Can you get that shot right there?

That's a NASA official. He's holding a piece of foam,

which he is now saying could not have had enough impact because

it's too light to have damaged those tiles that we've been talking about.

I knew Ron, I had respect for Ron, Ron was Linda Ham's boss,

and a good manager,

but what's always the first step in...in grief?

Denial.

I called Ron and we had a very brief conversation.

I said, "Ron, let me just remind you, OK?

"We've got a clear understanding that we are not going to

"eliminate ANYTHING until the data has come in

"to definitively eliminate it."

To bring that out and dismiss it, you know, pre-emptively,

I think speaks volumes.

At the very least they had to acknowledge it,

but it was acknowledging their own mistakes.

And that's hard to do.

Each week, there was a new trailer-load of debris showed up,

came right in this hangar, through those doors,

and it would be catalogued and then put out on the floor.

I want to know what the debris is telling us,

I want to know what the aerodynamics are telling us,

and I want to know what the sensors are telling us.

You know, follow the debris. What's it telling you?

Ancl if you follow the logic,

you begin to see pieces that are telling you a story.

As we were progressing through the left-wing reconstruction,

you can see these burned tiles.

This reinforced carbon-carbon looks like it's been burned

in a way that's very different than everything else.

All of that data pointed to a problem at RCC Panel #8.

Something very different happened in this location on the orbiter

and so let's go see if we can understand what that was.

OK, so as the vehicle is entering the atmosphere,

these black tiles are protecting the structure,

the aluminium of the vehicle, in high-heat areas,

and the grey is the wing leading edge reinforced carbon-carbon -

RCC panels.

Those protect the vehicle from the highest level of heat,

those 3,000-degree temperatures, so that you don't get metal melting.

But we had never had any experience in breaking a panel.

What was starting to join up was, you've got video analysis

that says the strike on the orbiter created a hole in the wing.

Ancl you can see that there had been some sort of penetration

against the RCC panel.

Hot gas had entered

and the shuttle had lost aerodynamic control and crashed.

But I think the challenge for a lot of folks at NASA

was believing that foam had clone that.

They would say foam can't break reinforced carbon-carbon.

There were a lot of people that said

there's something else that explains this.

There are dramatic new details tonight from NASA

on what scientists knew and when they knew it about possible trouble

that could put the Columbia Shuttle astronauts' lives in danger.

The Observer moves the story forward, saying that there have been

repeated warnings about safety at NASA over the past couple of years.

We decided to ask NASA about the history of foam strikes,

which had never been clone.

I was asked by the accident investigation team

to help find that type of information.

I went through a database...

...and I was shocked to find that there were over

a half a dozen occurrences.

We turned that in to the investigation board

and I said, "You're not going to believe this. Take a look at this."

1983 was the first bipod ramp foam loss.

1990.

1992.

'92 again.

1994.

As well as those bigger pieces, we saw small pieces of foam

fall away all the time - what we call "popcorning".

Think of popcorn. When popcorn pops, it pops up and comes out,

and so that's what we called it - "popcorning".

They weren't very big, so you're not talking about

much damage to the tiles,

and so it had become the norm at NASA.

This mantra, "|t's only foam, it's only foam."

"Hey, we see foam loss all the time and it never did any damage

"to the vehicle and we don't have to worry about it. It's only foam".

Two missions before Columbia, it happened on STS-112 Atlantis.

A significant strike hit the skirt of the solid rocket booster

and actually put a dent in it.

Prior to the launch of Columbia,

in a couple of the meetings, the topic of foam

coming off 112 came up.

There's probably, erm...

..15 to 20 people around the table,

and then there's a lot of other people at NASA in the room.

We talked about starting to look into this a little bit more

because we've seen it come off on, you know, more than one flight now.

It could certainly be an issue and we should understand

if there's a way to prevent it.

Late October of 2002, after STS-112 Atlantis,

I went to a meeting about that flight.

I had put together a report

about the foam loss and the damage to the solid rocket booster,

and I presented the case that said...

...that amount of foam, that mass,

in one chunk, coming off Shuttle Atlantis...

...this was the vehicle telling us something is wrong,

here's your warning.

At risk of being insubordinate, I said to the heads

of the Shuttle Programme sitting around the centre table,

I was adamant at that meeting, either fix the problem

or don't fly an external tank on the next launch, which is impossible.

From that meeting, I never heard any discussion of...

.."Let's wait and see if we can solve some of this.

"Let's get a better understanding of this before

"we schedule the next launch." None of that I ever heard.

In other words, again, they were thinking it was more

of a turnaround issue, and so it wasn't preventing

shuttle flights from going forward.

The pressure on the management team to stay on schedule

and the concept of "it's just foam"

is leading the charge through all of this.

So it wasn't like they weren't talking about issues at all,

but there certainly was a big focus on the schedule.

Here's an email. It's Tuesday, January 21st.

This was sent six clays into the Columbia mission.

This is a private exchange between Linda Ham and Ron Dittemore,

two of the top managers in the program me.

"The external tank rationale for flight for the STS-112

"loss of foam was lousy.

"The rationale states we haven't changed anything,

"we haven't experienced any safety flight damage in 112 flights."

The concluding sentence, "Rationale was lousy then and still is."

What I take that to mean is that Linda Ham is raising a concern

but they appear to rely on the fact that previous flights

which had suffered this foam loss had returned safely.

In other words, "We've gotten away with this."

This is a failure to learn from past similar events,

simply because those flights did not have catastrophic consequences.

The classic... The classic normalisation of deviance.

You have to make sure that every incident

is thoroughly investigated and properly assessed.

And that wasn't done for the 112 foam loss.

People were saying they were willing to accept the risk.

What they didn't understand is how much risk they were accepting.

After the 112 loss, people were starting to say,

"Maybe we're accepting too much risk."

Yeah, I was concerned, you know...

As I said, the, erm...

The sense that the risk was greater than we should be expecting,

was starting to surface.

We were moving in the right direction,

we just didn't get there in time.

We should have never launched Columbia

until we fixed that problem.

Lisa Stark with ABC News.

When you realised that you had this debris that had struck the shuttle

and you started your analysis, what was the discussion about

trying to take a look either through satellites or these large telescopes

that the military has? And why was the decision made not to try that?

We certainly had that discussion.

We believed that taking a picture, looking for tile damage,

it does not show us the depth of tile that may have been shaved off.

We cannot make a determination conclusively

whether that represents a concern or not.

Linda, reading through the transcripts, in hindsight,

were you sufficiently open to the idea

that this was a really serious problem?

You're asking in 20-20 hindsight or what my thought was then?

Well, it sounds like you were just kind of seeking reassurance

that everything was OK, as opposed to digging in

and saying, "How do we know this?"

I didn't have a preconceived notion on the damage or the possible

consequences and I needed to wait for them to complete their work.

The best experts at our disposal concluded

that it was a minor problem, not a significant problem.

They had clone the engineering assessment and evaluated it.

They said the worst case on the RCC would be coating damage,

which would not be a flight safety issue.

And when you added all that up, there was no need to take pictures

to document any evidence, because we believed it to be superficial

and it to be a turnaround issue and not a safety issue.

And so we didn't take any pictures.

Had we known that there was a catastrophic situation on orbit,

we certainly would have clone everything we could... Absolutely

Did you know that other people at NASA, other departments,

were also requesting images during the mission?

I did not know at the time. I did not know.

'n.

I'm not aware of anybody else during the mission saying that.

I only learned later that there really were

people outside of our team that were trying to do something about it.

I had no idea what was happening because there was no communication.

I'm not in the loop, I'm not in the know.

Nobody's talking to each other and so nobody knows what's going on.

That's just kind of the way it was.

NASA is a series of fiefdoms.

Ten separate centres, each of them have their own responsibilities.

But there isn't necessarily a lot of exchange of knowledge

across those silos.

Frankly, the system is not designed for good communication.

But that's not an excuse

because this foam problem was not a new problem.

It was ignored right up until an opportunity

to intervene presented itself, and then that opportunity

to get a spy satellite to take a look was dismissed.

This sort of stick to your guns of...

...convincing yourself that it's OK.

That just made matters worse.

Why would you not just get the pictures

that could show the damage and then work the problem?

Erm...

I could only deal with the data that was presented to me.

The whole situation was a case of people doing...

...their jobs as they understood them.

But I think everybody was operating with good faith. There was no...

I wouldn't say malfeasance, but negligence...

There may have been... I don't even think there was negligence.

I just think that the actions we took were inadequate

for the problem we were facing.

I think there was a mindset and sort of a hope

that we've seen foam strikes before

and it's never caused a safety flight issue,

so we're assuming that's the case here.

But not a sure thing.

It seemed like by staying ignorant of the degree of damage,

the mission management team perhaps didn't want to know

about the worst-case scenario.

At this point, from our work in the hangar,

I think we have enough information to say

that we've found the physical cause of the shuttle crash.

But there were still people at NASA who didn't believe

that foam could break reinforced carbon-carbon.

At that point, the only question that was really left

to tie the whole chain of events together was,

does foam break reinforced carbon-carbon?

We're here at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas,

to conduct a test designed to show whether foam

that fell off the external tank of the Columbia Orbiter

could create a hole big enough to destroy the vehicle.

How does NASA move forward if we don't do the foam test?

We need to do this.

Everything came down to whether or not the foam shot

was going to break an RCC panel.

But if our investigative analysis is wrong,

then what?

Five, four, three, two, one.

Whoa!

OK, foam will break reinforced carbon-carbon

I mean, there was no doubt at that point, right? Case closed.

There's no denying it.

You know, there was foam falling from clay one.

They should have had that test clone clay two.

This was a known failure.

But I think the failure to imagine being wrong,

the failure to imagine the consequences of failure

were catastrophic.

Ancl I think it's this whole notion of the failure to imagine failure.

NASA's trying to move forward after Tuesday's blistering report,

blaming it for failing to prevent the Shuttle Columbia tragedy.

NASA stands accused of complacency, of a flawed safety culture,

of major management failures.

This stinging report, with its 29 recommendations, is not just about

technical failures, but also about a human failure.

NASA had conflicting goals of cost, schedule and safety.

It's our view that clearly there is still evidence

of a silent safety program me with echoes of Challenger.

They knew about the foam.

They could take pictures and people chose not to.

Pure grief and sadness turned into more of, like, anger and disgust.

NASA was something that I was so proud of

because my clad loved it

and it felt almost like they had betrayed him.

It kind of became this inner struggle in me of...

...how can I hate this thing that, like, my clad loved so much?

Why?

Why? Those are the questions that you can't answer.

The only...the only reason...

...was because of the way they made decisions within that culture.

If there was damage, could it have been detected in space

and some rescue plan conceived? We'll never know.

Astronauts learn of the foam hit.

They are sent this grainy video and an email that dismisses

the foam hit as, quote, "not even worth mentioning".

Knowing that concerns had been downplayed to the crew,

I felt angry.

I mean, I just was extremely disappointed.

I think that Rick would have wanted to have known

that something was very wrong with the vehicle.

One of the things that I thought was such an indictment

was that the astronauts were expected to successfully fly

this multimillion dollar mission and were given that responsibility,

but they had no authority.

In terms of a hypothetical, and I think other people

in senior levels that probably felt the same way,

if we knew that the crew wasn't going to survive,

why would we tell them? Why wouldn't we let them

just carry out their mission and feel like they were successful?

I regret that I didn't do more, but given what we know now,

it's unlikely anything I could have done would have made a difference.

I feel ashamed.

So, who's guilty? I'm not just going to say the program me managers are.

We're all guilty.

If you don't speak up for your own system

and you're the victims of this environment, we're guilty, too.

Yes, there were individuals who made very poor decisions.

You need to embrace dissenting opinions,

and if somebody says, "Hey, let's get better data to make a decision",

why is getting better data a problem?

But, I mean, I was in mission control, I was a NASA employee,

I knew about the foam strike.

When there's blame that's laid out, I'm right up there saying, "I knew."

And... And I wish I could have done something differently

but I...| can't undo that, and it...

You can just make it better for those that follow.

I fought, but I share some of the blame

that says maybe I could have fought harder.

But the thing I can't get past is,

if we knew entry was going to cause loss of the vehicle

and loss of the crew, there are things we can do as human beings.

Ancl that is, for the families, the chance to be able to say goodbye.

That wasn't afforded to anyone.

Ancl that's always haunted me.

Sorry.

During the mission, I could have easily clone a story

because I saw the foam come off.

While NASA is saying it's nothing, some engineers believed

there might be some concern. What if I had clone that?

I was the one who could have, you know, should have and could have

owned that story in a way that potentially

even might have changed the course of events.

I didn't stay on that story, in order to go be the person explaining

all the clever ways we were going to kill people in Iraq.

Ancl maybe I was doing what NASA was doing.

I was sweeping it all under the rug.

Ancl so I'm part of the problem, you know? I'm complicit.

If you could say anything to those individuals, the managers,

the engineers, the top bosses at NASA who made those decisions,

what would you say now?

Yeah, erm...

I never really thought about it, but I guess I would want them

to know that I forgive them

and that my family forgives them.

Ancl that I can't imagine what they went through,

having to make those decisions.

Like, that breaks my heart thinking about it.

Erm...

But just that I'm not angry about it any more.

Ancl it happened, but I don't blame them.

I don't think that they're bad people.

In the end, after I go down that journey of what-if'ing

and if someone had done this, if someone had not done that,

in the end, it all comes out the same - that the crew perished,

that everyone died.

And so, for me, I had to very, erm...

...purposely make a decision that this was not going to be something

that was going to define me for the rest of my life -

that I was going to be on a mission to fix that

or on a mission to be angry about that or make people pay for it.

I mean, none of that was a path I wanted to go on at all.

And God has been very merciful to help me with that,

just to be able to keep moving forward.

You know, I just prayed and hoped that NASA learned from this.

That the lessons that they learned will carry on

to future space flights, so that they won't forget that people

are on the end of whatever they're doing,

that people's lives are stake.

Rick was an astronaut.

It was something that we always called a calculated risk

but it was a risk that Rick decided to take.

And I'm OK with that.

If she had listened to me, you know, things would have been OK

and she wouldn't have been up there.

I had told her not to go.

I was angry that she chose to take that risk...

...instead of staying with me.

Daddy, I'm here!

Hi.

Oh, my gosh.

It's crazy over here, right?

LAUREL LAUGHS

You need your sunglasses?

Try them on.

This is Laurel, and she is my daughter.

She has a lot of my mom's spirit.

The same enthusiasm and positivity.

I imagine...

...it would be harder if...

...she wasn't such a great kid.

So I got pretty lucky there.

NASA has released video footage taken inside the cockpit

of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

It was recorded in the final moments before the shuttle broke up.

The last part of the tape was burnt-up in the accident.