A wrenching 13-minute video tape of the last moments of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia shows them joking, waving at the camera, and talking excitedly of experiencing re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere.
The tape, released by Nasa yesterday, has moments that take on a bitter irony with hindsight.
As the astronauts talk of the heat building around the nose cone during re-entry, commander Rick Husband jokes: ”You really wouldn’t want to be outside right now.”
Shortly afterward Columbia broke apart in the skies above Texas, killing all seven crew.
The partly scorched video cassette was found three weeks ago near Palestine in Texas, among the shuttle wreckage strewn across several US states.
It was said to be ”a miracle” that the tape survived.
Normally, the entire re-entry of a shuttle is recorded, but what is left of the heat-damaged tape spares relatives by ending four minutes before the first sign anything was wrong.
There is no hint in the tape that the astronauts had any idea of their fate they were hurtling toward.
Four crew members are shown: Husband, pilot Willie McCool, and mission specialists Laurel Clark and Kalpana Chawla. The other three were on the lower deck.
Much of the 13 minutes is painfully mundane.
Chawla talks about putting on her gloves, McCool moves a clock out of the way, and Husband sips a drink.
At one point, Clark, dressed like the others in an orange spacesuit and helmet with the visor up, picks up the camera and films herself and Chawla smiling and waving in the cramped deck.
The tape begins nine minutes before re-entry.
As the shuttle hits the atmosphere, orange and yellow flashes appear outside the windows, a normal sight on re-entry, according to the space agency.
”Looks like a blast furnace,” Husband said.
”Yep, we’re getting some Gs [gravity],” McCool replied.”Let go of the card and it falls.”
Husband then added: ”You definitely don’t want to be outside right now.”
Clark, seated behind him, joked: ”What, like we did before?” — drawing a big laugh.
Relatives were shown the footage before it was released. Jon Salton, Clarke’s brother, said: ”Seeing them like this, it’s obvious how much they cared for each other
”The dedication all of them showed was remarkable.”
Nasa said that the tape added nothing to its continuing investigation into the devastating accident.
Growing frustration was evident at the space agency yesterday when its head, Sean O’Keefe, angrily rejected comments by the shuttle director, Ronald Dittemore, that nothing could have been done to save the crew even if mission control in Huston had known.
”To suggest we could have done nothing is fallacious,” O’Keefe said.
”If there had been a clear indication of problems, there would have been no end to efforts.”
O’Keefe also said that he had learned only on Wednesday of Nasa email conversations in which engineers discuss, a day before the re-entry attempt, whether chunks of insulation that hit the shuttle at take-off might cause catastrophic failures in Columbia’s landing gear and hydraulics. – Guardian Unlimited Â