from space shuttle columbia as columbia continues to orbit the earth at an altitude of about 150 statute miles. columbia, houston, laurel, you re loud and clear on air to ground one. -the second day, i drive in to work kind of euphoric because another launch, another successful launch. you know, the flight director s office and the mission control center in houston is working with them. they re everything s good. i walked into the analysis lab to start reviewing film from the launch. we started the film at the beginning. [ rockets roaring ] we re watching this liftoff. you see the roll maneuvers, beautiful blue sky. we do the normal review, and we start pointing out all the things that we normally see. and we got to 81 seconds, and then we see this object come off of the external tank area. it moved down, and then striked the vehicle and explode into a white cloud. my reaction was, oh, shit. - you ll always find me sunny side up you ll always find me sunny side
-for the second time in nasa s history, a space shuttle has been lost along with its entire crew. once again, we are asking ourselves, how could this have happened? -do you have any idea how big that piece of foam was that came off? -we d heard some reports that during launch there had been some concerns that some debris hit the wing. is that true and is that any cause of concern and that could have caused today s problems? -it is true. it was judged that, erm , that event did not represent a safety concern. -this happened under my watch, but i didn t have the answers. in every public forum i m gonna have to be in, how am i gonna explain this to anybody? at this time, we have no indication that the mishap was caused by anything or anyone on the ground. -nasa never wants to look stupid. nasa wants to be the agency with the answers. -my thoughts are on what we missed, what i missed to allow this to happen. -but if you overlook something, it will come to bite you one day or anot
one would have to interrupt the mission to get the right lighting, to make sure you re over, the right satellite is in position. and then now you have an army of people on the ground. we have to reorient the shuttle for the proper exposure angles and all that. and to do that means they may have to terminate their science experiments. in a program manager s mind, that s responsible for getting shuttles up there on schedule, if you interrupt the science mission, you have the ire of all the people and the science objectives were now ruined. and that looks badly on nasa. -a little bit later in the day, in the afternoon, i got a call from linda, and she said, hey, i heard that you were trying to get some better pictures. and she said that she had talked to all the appropriate managers and no one had a requirement for any more information. they had what they needed to do the analysis.
the chairman of the meeting was linda ham. -she basically ran this mission. -if there were going to be any changes, she headed up this team that would have to approve any changes. -she was effectively the deputy to ron dittemore, the program manager in those days. linda has excellent judgment, can grasp complicated problems very quickly. she was the first woman to be certified as a flight director. linda was recalling sts-112, a flight two flights before.
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