Last Flight of the Columbia - transcript

CONTROL: Columbia Houston just wanted to express the thanks from the Orbit 1 team and the great job you’ve all done.

ASTRONAUT: We appreciate it.

NARRATOR (JACK FORTUNE): On a clear winter’s day in February 2003 the space shuttle Columbia was returning from a successful mission.

LAUREL CLARK: Columbia is a beautiful ship, she is performing magnificently.

NARRATOR: Everything appeared to have gone according to plan, all that was left was to bring the shuttle safely back to earth.

ASTRONAUT: God it’s really neat, just a bright orange yellow out on the nose.

NARRATOR: Then a series of chance events came together to bring the mission to a disastrous end.

ASTRONAUT: It’s crazy in there isn’t it?

ASTRONAUT: It’s raining…

ASTRONAUT: You definitely don’t want to be outside now.

NARRATOR: All seven astronauts died. But now it seems that the whole tragedy could have been avoided. And that everyone on board might have been brought back to earth, alive.

MAN – REPORTING ON ASTRONAUTS (VOICE OVER): The astronauts are coming out now, as they are making their way to the astronaut….

NARRATOR: On the 16th January 2003 the crew of the space shuttle Columbia waved goodbye to their families for the final time. For the seven astronauts it was a day of a lifetime’s dreams fulfilled.

CONTROL: Three, two, one, we have booster ignition, lift off at station…multitude of national and international research experience.

RICK HUSBAND: From the time from I was about four years old I wanted to be an astronaut.

DAVE BROWN: I remember growing up thinking that astronauts and their job was the coolest thing you could possibly do.

MICHAEL ANDERSON: Everything you do on flight is just, just miraculous, you just can't believe it’s actually happening.

ILAN RAMON: I’ve dreamed to be an astronaut. When I was selected I, I really jumped er almost to space.

CONTROL: Houston now controlling the flight of Columbia. The International Research Mission finally underway.

RICK HUSBAND: We copy, the throttle off.

MAN (VOICE OVER): The throttle up call acknowledged by Commander Rick Husband joined on the flight deck by pilot Willy McCool, flight engineer Kalpana Chawla and mission specialist Dave Brown. Mission specialist Laurel Clark, payload Commander Mike Anderson and payload specialist Ilan Ramon seated down on the mid-deck.

NARRATOR: Within ten minutes of the launch those seven astronauts were experiencing the sheer magic of space.

BILL NELSON: Oh the joy of looking out the window of the space craft back at home, and home is not America, home is not the Western Hemisphere, home is planet earth.

NARRATOR: But what few people knew was that back on earth NASA had their fingers crossed. The whole space shuttle project was in deep trouble.

NARRATOR: Many were beginning to suspect that it was just an expensive white elephant.

NARRATOR: The shuttle was designed as a cheap and easy way of taking commercial projects in to space. NASA had always hoped that it might even make money. But all that changed in 1986. Ever since the Challenger disaster all those money making projects had dried up.

TOM HENRICKS: The space shuttle was originally designed to be a low cost way of getting things in to space. And it was meant to be very reliable. After the Challenger loss we realised it wasn’t all that reliable and it was also determined to be expensive compared to launching things on unmanned rockets.

NARRATOR: The other supposed use for the shuttle was as a mobile space laboratory, a place where valuable scientific experiments could be conducted.

NARRATOR: But the science wasn’t getting done. Instead the shuttle was being used merely as a ferry to take parts up to the immensely costly international space station.

TOM HENRICKS: In recent years the majority of space shuttle missions have been launched to assemble the international space station however they are not conducting very much science during the assembly phase.

Dr HENRY McDONALD: The scientific community in the United States were and are disappointed that the international space station was taking so long to construct. So there’s a lot of pressure on the agency to do a science mission.

NARRATOR: NASA had to do something to justify the four billion dollars a year it was spending on the shuttle. So Columbia the oldest craft in the fleet was fitted with a state of the art space laboratory.

NARRATOR: This mission would be the first to use it. It meant that for NASA and the seven astronauts on board there was a lot at stake.

NARRATOR: And for sixteen days everything went according to plan. The team worked round the clock on their experiments.

WILLIAM McCOOL: If we didn’t work twenty four hours a day we’d be giving up eight hours of sleep time that could otherwise be used for science. So the intent is to back each minute of the twenty four hours that we’re on orbit with science.

KALPANA CHAWLA: We get experiments from earth sciences, physical sciences and life sciences.

MICHAEL ANDERSON: We try to get a good idea of what happens to the human body in space and how we can use that information down here on earth.

RICK HUSBAND: There’s one that looks at dust aerosols in the atmosphere to see if they can characterise where certain dust storms originate and then what effects if any they have on the environment.

DAVE BROWN: Looking at ozone, particularly looking at say things like er global warming and improving our ability to predict if that’s happening.

NARRATOR: After two weeks in space the science mission was declared a triumph. All that was left was to gather their results, re-enter the earth’s atmosphere and come home.

MICHAEL ANDERSON: The entries are a little bit better than the launch, you know it’s a little quieter, it’s not quite as violent and er you can enjoy it a little bit.

WILLIAM McCOOL: At the end of sixteen days we’ll do orbit, we’ll come back and land, slowing from seventeen thousand plus miles per hour down to two hundred plus miles per hour. We’re hoping our commander will make a smooth landing and the mission will be over.

ALL: Bye, Bye.

NARRATOR: On the 1st February 2003 Columbia began its descent back to earth. As the shuttle raced over the pacific towards the US the crew put on their suits preparing themselves for a routine landing. It was now eight forty a.m. and these are pictures of their last moments alive.

LAUREL CLARK: Columbia’s a, a beautiful ship performing magnificently.

NARRATOR: At eight forty four a.m. Columbia re-entered the earth’s atmosphere.

NARRATOR: Still everything appeared normal.

ASTRONAUT SPEAKING TO CONTROL: There might be er some plasma.

FLIGHT DIRECTOR: Everything look good to you? Control on…and everything is normal?

CONTROL WORKER: Control’s been stabled yet good trims, I don't see anything out of the ordinary.

FLIGHT DIRECTOR: Ok.

ASTRONAUT: It’s noisy in there.

NARRATOR: Then, just twenty two minutes before touch down, at eight fifty four in the morning there was an unusual reading from one of the shuttles many censors.

ASTRONAUT: Flight deck.

CONTROL: Go ahead.

ASTRONAUT: I’ve just lost four separate ……on the left side of the vehicle, hydraulic return temperatures.

CONTROL: Four hyd return temps?

A

STRONAUT: To the left outboard and….

CONTROL: Columbia Houston we see your tyre pressure messages and we did not copy your last.

CONTROL: Columbia Houston com check.

CONTROL: Columbia Houston UHA com check. Columbia Houston UHA com check. Columbia Houston UHA com check. Columbia Houston UHA com check.

NARRATOR: At nine sixteen the truth dawned on mission control. The space shuttle had been lost.

FLIGHT DIRECTOR: T C flight, T C flight. Lock the doors. Copy.

NARRATOR: Thirty eight miles above ground the space shuttle had exploded. All seven on board were killed. The question was what had gone wrong.

NARRATOR: Jim Oberg was a NASA mission controller for more than twenty years. To him the death of seven astronauts and the loss of the shuttle was more than just an unfortunate accident. It had to be someone’s fault.

JIM OBERG: The first feeling of course is oh no not again. Oh not what is it that we did wrong. Because we know how to fly shuttles safely, done it more than a hundred times, something had gone wrong in the processing and in the decision making process, somebody on our team hadn’t done their job. And it’s a feeling of loss and a feeling of betrayal.

NARRATOR: Serious questions now loomed in Oberg’s mind. Should those astronauts still be alive? Had somebody at NASA made a catastrophic error that had caused the disaster? And if so what had it been?

FLIGHT DIRECTOR:: T C Flight, T C Flight. Lock the doors. Copy.

NARRATOR: Within minutes of the disaster NASA’s investigators had swung in to action. It had begun with that call, lock the doors.

JIM OBERG: This involves not changing the computer configuration.

FLIGHT DIRECTOR: There's a whole list of data collection items that we need to make sure we log through.

JIM OBERG: Not talking to other people and losing the thought you had in your mind at the moment of the disaster.

FLIGHT DIRECTOR: No phone calls, off site, outside of this room, our discussions are on these loops and on the recorded DV loops only.

JIM OBERG: It involves locking the doors so that no one comes in or out and destroys the body of evidence, the body of impressions which must be preserved, must be documented, written down right away so that sometime months in the future people can look back at these records and see perhaps the one observation, the one thought, the one clue that unravels the mystery.

NARRATOR: The next person to be involved was Admiral Hal Gehman. He was put in charge of the official enquiry.

HAL GEHMAN: The Challenger accident caused a complete review of emergency procedures and one of those procedures was to put in place a standing er accident investigation board and that standing accident investigation board was immediately summoned by telephone.

NARRATOR: The first thing we investigators did was set out to collect the wreckage.

INVESTIGATOR: We can tell this is part of the wing because it has tiles on both sides.

JIM OBERG: The classic reaction to an aviation disaster is to piece together the wreckage after you’ve gathered it together, to find the answer. In wreckage you're looking for pieces that have malfunctioned, that are broke, before the accident. Lots of pieces get damaged after the accident during the crash, and separating out the damage of the actual impact with the damage that caused the impact is the key problem for most investigators.

NARRATOR: But gathering the wreckage proved immensely difficult.

HAL GEHMAN: There are several unique things about the wreckage. Er it covered the widest area of any aircraft accident ever. Hundred and hundreds of miles obviously because the shuttle broke up at two hundred thousand feet going many, many thousands of miles an hour. We walked around the fields and we drove through East Texas and, and saw some of the debris as it laid in the field untouched by human hands, er and got a feel for how difficult this was.

NARRATOR: The wreckage turned out to be spread over three separate states, and to date almost two thirds of it is still missing.

NARRATOR: So early on the investigators realised that the standard approach wouldn’t work. But they did have another crucial piece of evidence.

NARRATOR: It was all to do with when the shuttle had broken up. The disaster had occurred at a very specific point in its journey back to earth.

HENRY McDONALD: A key element in this particular incident was where in the flight profile the event occurred. Shortly after the beginning of the re-entry.

NARRATOR: The shuttle hits the earth’s atmosphere at a tremendous speed. This creates temperatures of almost three thousand degrees.

BILL NELSON: You have all of this energy at er mark twenty five, seventeen thousand, five hundred miles an hour.

HENRY McDONALD: The friction of the air passing over the vehicle and the shock waves create these tremendously high temperatures.

NARRATOR: It was at this point when temperatures were at their highest that disaster had struck. For the investigators this was a huge clue.

NARRATOR: Heat is the shuttle’s biggest enemy. Built largely out of aluminium its metal frame simply can not withstand the temperatures that occur on re-entering.

JIM OBERG: If the heat from outside the shuttle gets in to the structure it can soften the aluminium so that it begins to fail, melt it entirely, or even set it on fire.

NARRATOR: For this reason the shuttle’s designers had developed an elaborate system of heat protection. The bodies of all the craft were covered in white ceramic tiles. These were known to be fragile but could withstand temperatures of up to one thousand two hundred degrees. The underside of the wing was coated with special dark tiles. These took the brunt of the heat and could face temperatures of two thousand three hundred degrees.

HENRY McDONALD: The windward surface of the vehicle sees the next highest temperatures and these are protected using the er the black tile that you see here.

NARRATOR: But facing the highest temperatures of all were the edges of the wings. They faced temperatures of up to three thousand degrees. They had been given their own unique protection called re-enforced carbon carbon panels.

NARRATOR: These panels were so vital that they had been built to be virtually indestructible. It was now clear to the investigators that some how Columbia’s heat protection had been breached.

NARRATOR: Precisely where it had happened and what had done it now became the whole focus of Gehman’s investigation.

NARRATOR: The most common theory was that some mysterious object had damaged the fragile black tiles under the wing, as these took most of the heat.

HAL GEHMAN: We developed a set of hypotheses that covered the whole range of, of what could possibly have happened.

JIM OBERG: It was a meteor impact.

HENRY McDONALD: Corrosion for example.

JIM OBERG: Was it some kind of upper atmospheric lightning during the descent.

HENRY McDONALD: Possibility of a wiring fire.

JIM OBERG: It could have been impact on the shuttle from space junk.

NARRATOR: What was needed was something to narrow down their search.

NARRATOR: So they set about examining all the data Columbia had been down to earth during its entire mission.

HAL GEHMAN: The shuttles do not have black boxes as er commercial aircraft do but the shuttle sends down to earth hundreds and hundreds of measurements on a continuous basis.

NARRATOR: this data was recorded back at mission control. It gave the investigation sixteen days of information, detailing the shuttle’s performance during the voyage.

HENRY McDONALD: One of the first clues was to look at what was abnormal about this data that was coming down when it was re-entering.

NARRATOR: Then the investigators began to examine the unusual pattern of signals, just before the explosion.

JIM OBERG: What looked unusual to mission control during the final minutes of Columbia’s flight were the temperature sensors on the left wing. Some were showing a little higher than expected temperature, and others were dropping off entirely.

NARRATOR: Just four minutes in to the hottest phase of re-entry, eleven minutes before the tragedy, a sensor in the left landing gear showed a sudden rise in temperature. Over the next few minutes there was a cascade of hot sensor readings, all coming from the same area, the left wing.

HAL GEHMAN: The temperature rises were all located in the left wheel well of the main landing gear, and so we, we knew that whatever had happened to the Columbia it had originated in the left wing.

NARRATOR: It was the investigations first real breakthrough. The search had narrowed to what could have damaged the left wing.

ASTRONAUT: We’re going to have a great mission, we appreciate all the great hard work everybody’s put in to this, and we’re ready to go.

NARRATOR: It was now that they began to concentrate on an event that had happened at the very beginning of Columbia’s voyage. It was something to do with the shuttle’s large orange fuel tank.

PAUL FISCHBECK: During this particular launch it appears that a large chunk of this spray on foam broke off at the place where the shuttle attaches to the tank up by under the nose.

NARRATOR: This video shows a piece of orange insulating foam falling off the fuel tank, eighty one seconds in to the flight.

PAUL FISCHBECK: A chunk appears to be about the size of a briefcase, maybe a little bit bigger, and weigh somewhere around two and a half to three pounds was the estimate.

NARRATOR: This foam would have slammed in to Columbia at tremendous speed.

PAUL FISCHBECK: The velocity at which it hit the orbiter was estimated to be around five hundred miles an hour. Um which is a lot, so if you take a briefcase and you run in to it with your car at five hundred miles an hour er it can do some damage.

NARRATOR: Paul Fischbeck should know what he is talking about. Ten years ago he studied the effects of previous foam strikes on a shuttle. He discovered that the black tiles underneath the wing had been damaged more than a thousand times by foam strikes.

PAUL FISCHBECK: The tiles themselves could be described as like crunchy Styrofoam, so that if you take a pencil and you drop it from a foot it will stick in to the tile. Er you can crumble them in your hands without, without any difficulty, you can etch your name in it with your fingernail. So if debris is hitting the orbiter er the tiles are not designed to withstand a lot of damage.

NARRATOR: To Fischbeck the shuttle had only avoided accidents in the past out of pure luck.

NARRATOR: The foam had to be the cause of the tragedy.

PAUL FISCHBECK: My study had shown that there was a real possibility of losing the shuttle because of such a strike.

NARRATOR: It is now clear that others were worried by the foam strike too. There was an exchange of alarmed emails between the top engineers.

ENGINEER (VOICE OVER): As a reference if the debris was one point two eleven kilogrammes the kinetic energy would have been equivalent to a five hundred pound safe impacting at seventy five miles per hour. If the debris was twenty eight point seven killogrammes…..If the wing is off…..Or has a big hole in it you're not going to make the runway. Any more activity today on the tile damage or, or people just relegated to just crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

NARRATOR: NASA now had to work out just how bad the damage might be. It had close ties with the military. A spy telescope could have been commandeered to search for the damage. This was certainly requested. But that option was rejected.

WOMAN (VOICE OVER): Even though this is not a common occurrence it’s something that has happened before and is not considered to be a major problem.

NARRATOR: NASA could be so confident because it had already assessed the damage and believed it wasn’t serious. The source of their information, a special computer program called Crater.

NARRATOR: Crater was based on experiments conducted in nineteen ninety nine. Scientists had actually fired pieces of foam at the black tiles that covered the underside of the wing. The idea was that they could then use the data to model any damage that the foam could cause. This model was applied to Columbia.

JIM OBERG: A team of engineers spend a lot of time looking at the video, trying to compute where the object hit the wing. And then saying well how big must it have been, how much damage could it do, what the computer program will say it might do.

NARRATOR: The answer from Crater was clear.

JIM OBERG: They all, even in a worse case, said we’ll have a lot of tile damage and probably some scorching but this is not a safety or flight issue, safety or flight issue, that’s the term they used.

NARRATOR: In other words Crater said Columbia should come home safely. But a computer program is only as good as the information fed in to it. Investigators have discovered that the experiments on which Crater was based had one serious flaw.

HENRY McDONALD: We now know that not all of the results were entered in to the Crater computer program.

NARRATOR: The problem was that they had only taken in to account the damage caused by very small pieces of foam.

PAUL FISCHBECK: They had fired larger pieces of debris to see what would happen and they found that it did so much damage to the tiles they actually couldn’t measure what was going on, so they stopped doing that.

HENRY McDONALD: The Crater computer program is not really applicable to large foam impact strikes.

NARRATOR: The piece of foam that had hit Columbia was vastly bigger than anything used when Crater was designed.

PAUL FISCHBECK: What we saw was a piece of debris that was seven hundred times the size of the largest one that they used in their experiments. Because of this big ship, totally, you know a much bigger piece of debris hitting, the model that was developed based on the small pieces is way outside the range where you can make accurate predictions.

NARRATOR: Many people now think that it was a catastrophic decision to rely on Crater. It was simply not accurate enough to assess the damage on the black tiles under the wing.

NARRATOR: But for a long time NASA disputed this. It claimed a piece of foam no matter what size could not have caused the loss of something as big as the shuttle.

MAN AT PRESS CONFERENCE: And today I brought with me a piece of foam, it is, it is very lightweight so its designed to be resilient and be an insulating material to keep the tank cold and it, it’s easy to break and it’s easy to break up in to particles. Right now it just does not make sense to us that a piece of debris would be the route cause for the loss of Columbia and its crew. There’s got to be another reason.

NARRATOR: After that press conference the arguments went back and forth. But then a new piece of evidence appeared. Something so surprisingly that it would challenge everyone’s assumptions about the safety of the shuttle. It emerged when Admiral Gehman and his team decided to re-examine the exact location of the damage. They requested enhanced pictures of the foam strike.

HAL GEHMAN: We availed ourselves of photographic which were not available er well they were available but were not used in the analysis of the foam strike, because it was not assessed as being er so critical.

MAN AT CONFERENCE: Based on the analysis that we’ve done in every discipline we have reached some agreement on what happened.

NARRATOR: The enhanced pictures revealed something so unlikely that no one had ever considered it.

JIM OBERG: It was clear that no one should have jumped to conclusion early that the fragile easily damaged tiles were obviously the place where the damage occurred.

NARRATOR: The foam hadn’t struck the fragile black tiles underneath the wing, it hadn’t even struck the white tiles coating the bulk of the shuttle. The foam had struck the wings edge, the area covered by the ultra strong grey carbon panels.

TOM HENRICKS: The leading edge, the re-enforced carbon carbon is hard, it’s like a rock. And for foam to have damaged the RCC enough to cause an accident still surprises me.

NARRATOR: If true this was a deeply disturbing discovery. The grey panels were so critical to the shuttle’s survival that they had been thought to be virtually indestructible.

NARRATOR: The idea that these panels could be breached had never occurred to anyone. So the investigators decided to re-enact a foam strike on the leading edge of the wing.

NARRATOR: They took the wing off another shuttle and set it up in the lab. For a whole month scientists bombarded it with large chunks of foam. Strike after strike the damage to the grey re-enforced carbon panels was recorded. In the end there was no doubt.

MAN (VOICE OVER) RE: TEST: Three, two, one, zero.

NARRATOR: The foam really must have destroyed even this most critical part of the shuttle. They could even work out exactly where it had occurred on Columbia.

MAN AT PRESS CONFERENCE: This is the wheel well with the landing gear, obviously this is RCC number nine, this is RCC number eight, this is the T seal between eight and nine, seven, eight, nine, ten. Once you get through here then you burn through, burn through the spar, this is all open, the heat can go anyway it wants to and then starts cutting wires.

NARRATOR: The implications of this discovery are immense for the whole shuttle fleet. If foam can damage this critical structure then major modification should be made before the shuttle is safe to launch again. It is something that will cost millions of dollars to correct. Something that a cash strapped NASA can ill afford.

NARRATOR: So after six months of work the investigators have finally settled on the likely cause of the tragedy.

JIM OBERG: When they saw it was launch day, this debris comes off the tank, rams in to the leading edge, just below the front edge, and cracks a piece of that leading edge structure. This leaves a gap, it flies for sixteen days with the gap, the gap doesn’t hurt anything, it’s not measured, no one knows it’s there. Re-entry day, almost immediately as soon as the, the air begins heating up, it begins entering through that thin gap of several centimetres wide, grabs thirty or forty centimetres long, in to the wing. The hot air goes to work on the aluminium side softening it. Other pieces nearby begin sagging, tearing loose, the gap gets larger, the blast gets higher, spreads through the wing, begins being noticed by the sensors, by then it’s too late, by then the wing is doomed, the shuttle’s doomed and the crew is doomed.

NARRATOR: But many now feel that the story needn’t have ended there. A growing number of people believe that those astronauts did not need to die, and that despite the damage they could have been brought back to earth alive. It all began with that fateful decision to rely solely on Crater.

JIM OBERG: If people had known and recognised the extent of the damage, there were many different ways to play this out, and many of those ways involve the crew surviving.

NARRATOR: With hindsight this is what NASA could have tried. First if it had used telescopes it would have gained a far more accurate picture of the damage.

BILL NELSON: Now I would have done a lot of things different, and I think that we’re seeing in the investigation of the Gehman commission, we’re seeing that clearly they should have taken the photographs so that they had knowledge of what the damage was while they were on orbit.

NARRATOR: Even if telescopes weren’t available NASA could have asked one of the astronauts to leave the shuttle and examine the wing in space.

JIM OBERG: To inspect that part of the leading edge of the wing and over the edge of it underneath would have made the crew have to go out on to one of the doors, open doors of the shuttle, and then look over the edge, it’s about fifteen feet down to the wing. Eyeballs right up against the wing and over the edge, what do you see? Expletive deleted.

NARRATOR: Once it knew what it was dealing with NASA had several options to bring the crew home safely. It could have tried to bring Columbia through the atmosphere while protecting the damaged left wing. They could have re-entered at a different angle, favouring the undamaged right side.

JIM OBERG: You might have led sort of sideways, crabbing the shuttle in, scorching the good side, protecting the damaged side.

TOM HENRICKS: Or changing the angle of attack, the pitch of the nose, which would again change the heat profile somewhat.

BILL NELSON: That might have bought you a little bit of time. And a few less degrees of heat on the left wing. Could that have saved it? I sure would have died trying.

NARRATOR: If the damage was not too serious then using this method they might have been able to land safely. And even if that wasn’t possible there was another option, bailout. For a bailout they would only have needed to get the shuttle down to forty thousand feet.

PAUL FISCHBECK: The important thing is to get, get the crew low enough to the ground so they can bailout.

JIM OBERG: They will blow the hatch and there's a pole that extends out the hatch that they hook on to, jump out. The pole carries them down below the wing, if they just jumped out the hatch directly they’d go in to the wing.

NARRATOR: This way the crew could have leapt from the stricken shuttle and parachuted safely to earth. It is something they were trained to do.

NARRATOR: But even if this wasn’t possible NASA still had another much more ambitious option. A rescue mission.

NARRATOR: At the time of the disaster the shuttle Atlantis was being prepared for launch. NASA could have sent it up to rescue the crew within weeks.

BILL NELSON: Even if a shuttle’s on the launch pad it would not particularly have been designed to go in to the same orbit that another shuttle’s in. But NASA could very quickly adapt an emergency like this to adjust that mission to get to that orbit.

NARRATOR: While NASA would have been working furiously on the ground preparing the Atlantis the Columbia crew would be facing a threat from the very air that they breathe.

JIM OBERG: The problem would be the carbon dioxide that the crew breathes out. It builds up in the cabin, it’s scrubbed out with chemical canisters that are used up.

NARRATOR: Without a new supply they would be poisoned by bad air before a rescue mission could reach them. But even this problem was surmountable. NASA could have sent up supplies on one of the many available un-manned rockets.

JIM OBERG: One of the ways would be to find a rocket, buy it, lease it. Put half a tonne of supplies in a box on top of it, launch it in to the flight path of the shuttle. Send out the two men in their spacesuits, grab the package, you now have extra supplies, you can last another a few weeks, and just wait.

NARRATOR: With clean air the crew could survive for weeks while NASA made the Atlantis ready.

NARRATOR: Within hours of launch the rescue shuttle would be right next to Columbia, and then would begin the biggest space walk in history.

JIM OBERG: They can do it, fly up near by and probably just hook a line between the two of them. Go down that line using hooks in the line two of the spacewalkers from the Atlantis would go up to the Columbia and bring the people out. This kind of rescue mission is something that there, there will be a Hollywood about because it is really science fiction, but the NASA people could have done it.

NARRATOR: A rescue mission like this would have been a major achievement for NASA and a public relations coup, proof that they had the expertise and skills to do remarkable things. The tragedy is none of these options was even considered.