28th Flight News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

♪ ♪ ♪ -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 me...

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 w...

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 b...