-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.
Fdo, do you have any tracking . No, sir. No Phone Calls offsite, outside of this room. Our discussions are on these loops on the recorded Dvs Loops only. You go into Recordsretention And Datapreservation mode, which is something you hope to never have to run, but is part of your training. At that point, youre not gonna solve the problem. Youre 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