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However long the investigation takes, it will start with an examination of the last 45 min. of Columbia's life. Commander Rick Husband fired his deorbit engines at 8:15 a.m. E.T. when the ship was high over the Indian Ocean. Half an hour--and half a world--later, it hit the edges of the atmosphere just north of Hawaii at an altitude of about 400,000 ft. (122,000 m). Shortly after, a faint pink glow began to surround the ship, as atmospheric friction caused temperatures to rise to between 750[degrees]F and 3,000[degrees]F across...
...astronauts, busy monitoring their deceleration, temperature, hydraulics and more, didn't have much time to watch the light show play out, and by the time the glow brightened from faint pink to bright pink to plasma white, the ship had arced around the planet into thick air and daylight. "It all happens so smoothly ... you hardly notice it," says retired astronaut Henry Hartsfield Jr., who piloted Columbia in the early 1980s...
...weather would soon seem irrelevant. At 8:53 a.m., when the ship was crossing over San Francisco, a data point flickered on monitors at Mission Control indicating that the flow of information recording the temperature of the hydraulic systems in Columbia's left wing had suddenly ceased. At 8:56, when the ship was somewhere over Utah, the temperature in the landing gear and brake lining--again on the left side--registered high. Two minutes later, three temperature sensors embedded in the skin on the left flank of the ship quit transmitting. A minute later, temperature sensors in the left...
...Roger," Husband responded. "Uh ..." All at once, communications were cut off as if by a knife, and with them went every other scrap of data coming down from the ship...
...cause of all this horror, investigators will have a lot of places to turn. The mission began with at least one anomaly when, at the moment of launch, a piece of foam broke from the insulation on the giant external fuel tank and struck the left wing of the ship. "We spent a goodly amount of time reviewing the film [of the launch] and analyzing what that might do," says shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore. "From our experience it was determined that the event did not represent a safety concern...