molecules of the upper atmosphere. The few early sparks didn’t impress McCool as much as he had hoped. He felt let down. But as the shuttle continued its descent, the fire outside its windows continued to build.
“It’s going pretty good now, Ilan,” McCool said, trying his best to describe the view for his friend below decks. “It’s really neat, just a bright orange-yellow out over the nose, all around the nose.”
In time, the bright orange-yellow turned into a full-blown inferno.
“You definitely wouldn’t want to be outside now,” Husband said.
“What, like we did before?” Clark joked, distracted for the moment from her filming. She returned her focus to the camera’s viewfinder, capturing the smiles of her crewmates while they charted their course over Hawaii, across the last patches of the Pacific Ocean, into the airspace over northern California …
Mission Control noticed abnormal readings from four temperature sensors in the shuttle’s left wing.
… over Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico …
Husband called down: “And, uh, Hou—” His transmission was cut off.
Mission Control saw then that more sensors had tripped, indicating a loss of tire pressure in the left landing gear.
Husband tried to talk to the ground again. He had seen the lights go off in front of him: “Roger, uh, buh—”
… on into Texas …
When, just sixteen minutes before touchdown, all of those shuttle watchers on the ground saw that heartbreaking flare, and that one streak of white light becoming several.
But Mission Control couldn’t see what those sky-turned eyes had seen.
They knew only that on liftoff, just eighty-one seconds into
Columbia
’s flight, a chunk of the external tank’s insulating foam had broken off, striking the underside of the left wing. Over the course of the crew’s sixteen days in orbit, film of the foam strike was watched again and again by engineers on the ground, just to make sure that no serious damage had been done. They decided that it wasn’t cause for concern. Wayward foam had struck every shuttle during launch. Always, it had bounced away harmlessly, like a bug off a windshield.
This time, however, it had not been harmless. The foam had punched a ten-inch hole into something called RCC panel 8, one of the black, heat-resistant, reinforced carbon-carbon panels that cover the shuttle’s nose and the leading edges of its wings. The same superheated plasma that had enraptured
Columbia
’s crew poured through that hole like mercury, burning away the sensors that first raced hearts at Mission Control. While the shuttle continued its journey home at eighteen times the speed of sound, thirty-seven miles up, that plasma melted the wing’s aluminum skin from the inside out. Without it,
Columbia
first began to shake, and then to tumble, and finally it broke apart.
“
Columbia
, Houston, comm check …”
There was no reply.
There was only quiet. In their desperation, technicians willed Husband’s voice to crackle across the radio, for streams of data to begin pouring out of the heavens, for a blip to appear on a screen so that everybody could breathe again.
Outside, in the bleachers at the start of this seemingly perfectday, the adults waited for the two sonic booms that would signal
Columbia
’s arrival, one after the other, two minutes before touchdown. The countdown clock ticked past that deadline, and still there was no sound. In a growing silence that was broken only by the sounds of the children playing, the crowd watched the clock continue its countdown, second by second. Before they could watch the clock reach zero, the families were taken by their hands and loaded into vans and smothered in hugs.
In a family video conference during
Columbia
’s final flight, Laurel Clark’s doom-fearing son, Iain, had asked the question that even those who knew intimately the answer now found themselves asking:
“Why did you go?”
· · ·
Still warm in his
“It’s going pretty good now, Ilan,” McCool said, trying his best to describe the view for his friend below decks. “It’s really neat, just a bright orange-yellow out over the nose, all around the nose.”
In time, the bright orange-yellow turned into a full-blown inferno.
“You definitely wouldn’t want to be outside now,” Husband said.
“What, like we did before?” Clark joked, distracted for the moment from her filming. She returned her focus to the camera’s viewfinder, capturing the smiles of her crewmates while they charted their course over Hawaii, across the last patches of the Pacific Ocean, into the airspace over northern California …
Mission Control noticed abnormal readings from four temperature sensors in the shuttle’s left wing.
… over Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico …
Husband called down: “And, uh, Hou—” His transmission was cut off.
Mission Control saw then that more sensors had tripped, indicating a loss of tire pressure in the left landing gear.
Husband tried to talk to the ground again. He had seen the lights go off in front of him: “Roger, uh, buh—”
… on into Texas …
When, just sixteen minutes before touchdown, all of those shuttle watchers on the ground saw that heartbreaking flare, and that one streak of white light becoming several.
But Mission Control couldn’t see what those sky-turned eyes had seen.
They knew only that on liftoff, just eighty-one seconds into
Columbia
’s flight, a chunk of the external tank’s insulating foam had broken off, striking the underside of the left wing. Over the course of the crew’s sixteen days in orbit, film of the foam strike was watched again and again by engineers on the ground, just to make sure that no serious damage had been done. They decided that it wasn’t cause for concern. Wayward foam had struck every shuttle during launch. Always, it had bounced away harmlessly, like a bug off a windshield.
This time, however, it had not been harmless. The foam had punched a ten-inch hole into something called RCC panel 8, one of the black, heat-resistant, reinforced carbon-carbon panels that cover the shuttle’s nose and the leading edges of its wings. The same superheated plasma that had enraptured
Columbia
’s crew poured through that hole like mercury, burning away the sensors that first raced hearts at Mission Control. While the shuttle continued its journey home at eighteen times the speed of sound, thirty-seven miles up, that plasma melted the wing’s aluminum skin from the inside out. Without it,
Columbia
first began to shake, and then to tumble, and finally it broke apart.
“
Columbia
, Houston, comm check …”
There was no reply.
There was only quiet. In their desperation, technicians willed Husband’s voice to crackle across the radio, for streams of data to begin pouring out of the heavens, for a blip to appear on a screen so that everybody could breathe again.
Outside, in the bleachers at the start of this seemingly perfectday, the adults waited for the two sonic booms that would signal
Columbia
’s arrival, one after the other, two minutes before touchdown. The countdown clock ticked past that deadline, and still there was no sound. In a growing silence that was broken only by the sounds of the children playing, the crowd watched the clock continue its countdown, second by second. Before they could watch the clock reach zero, the families were taken by their hands and loaded into vans and smothered in hugs.
In a family video conference during
Columbia
’s final flight, Laurel Clark’s doom-fearing son, Iain, had asked the question that even those who knew intimately the answer now found themselves asking:
“Why did you go?”
· · ·
Still warm in his
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