-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
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.
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.
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.
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?