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00:00When they launch in 1981, the space shuttles take the world by storm.
00:15And it was just one of the most spectacularly beautiful things I'd ever seen.
00:21But their fatal flaws are soon revealed.
00:25RSO reports vehicle exploded.
00:27Yet the shuttles will go on to be a part of some of the greatest scientific discoveries of our age.
00:34I was looking at a huge amount of galaxies.
00:37The shuttles become a symbol of peace.
00:41I am the person who ended the Cold War.
00:43And at the end of their mission, the shuttles set the scene for the next chapter in man's conquest of space.
00:49That was one of the great days of our lives.
00:57And liftoff, liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower.
01:07At the start of the 1980s, the space shuttles promised to be a new, safe and cost-effective way of getting into space.
01:15But that dream dies on the 28th of January, 1986.
01:23Just 73 seconds into its mission, the shuttle Challenger blows up on live television.
01:30Flight photo. RSO reports vehicle exploded.
01:32The crew of seven, including a schoolteacher, perish as their families watch in horror.
01:39The Challenger disaster was definitely a turning point, not just for the shuttle program, but for NASA itself.
01:45NASA's shuttle fleet is grounded.
01:48Our world turned completely upside down in an instant.
01:52The Challenger disaster shows that the shuttles are much harder to maintain and more dangerous than NASA ever imagined.
02:01Having sown the idea that the shuttle was something that was going to deliver routine access to space,
02:08in the most desperate, conspicuous way possible, the shuttle had been proven not to be that machine.
02:15The future of NASA's shuttle fleet is in doubt.
02:18But 5,000 miles away, a shuttle is secretly being prepped for flight.
02:27This one isn't American.
02:31This is a Russian shuttle.
02:35They call it the Buran, which means blizzard.
02:38At first glance, it looks almost identical to NASA's shuttles.
02:43The similarity was not coincidental, for sure.
02:49When I saw it, I said, they copied it.
02:52The structure of details were exactly the same thing that the shuttle had.
02:59From the moment NASA started building their shuttle fleet in the early 1970s,
03:05Soviet spies are sent to steal the plans.
03:08The Russians were supporting a very extensive KGB exercise to get hold of technical material in order to build their own shuttles.
03:19Soviet leaders know from the beginning the Pentagon has a hand in the shuttle's design.
03:24The Russians clearly thought that the shuttle was giving us some sort of great military advantage.
03:32The Soviets conclude the American shuttles have been built to attack them.
03:37The Russians assumed that this was a machine that was going to be capable of dropping a bomb on Moscow
03:43before Soviet defenses had any chance to react.
03:47President Reagan has no love for the Soviet Union.
03:52They are the focus of evil in the modern world.
03:55And he frightens the Russians even more with his plan to use NASA's shuttle fleet to build a missile defense shield in space.
04:03For us to be able to pick off their weapons, that sounded to me like a very good idea.
04:10Realizing that if Reagan's plans work, it will give the U.S. an overwhelming strategic advantage.
04:17The Soviets have to act.
04:19On the 15th of November, 1988, the Russians launch one of their own shuttles into orbit for the first time.
04:27And the Americans are stunned to see it's better than theirs.
04:31One thing that really impressed me, and the fact that it was unmanned, that was really significant.
04:40Not only can Buran be flown remotely, it can carry more than its American counterparts.
04:47Their orbiter didn't carry the main engines to orbit.
04:51They threw them away with the booster vehicle.
04:55We looked at some of the things that they did, and we thought, wow, that was pretty smart.
04:58Maybe we should have designed the vehicle like they did.
05:00But the cost of matching NASA's fleet with five shuttles of their own sets the Soviets back $30 billion.
05:10They discovered something that we had discovered, and that was that it's pretty expensive to operate.
05:16And it isn't just the shuttles the Russians are trying to keep up with.
05:21There are new American warplanes, ships, and submarines as well.
05:26We just ran them out of money.
05:28Our technology, our capabilities, they just couldn't keep up with us.
05:33The Russians face financial ruin.
05:35Within a year of the Buran's flight, the Berlin Wall comes down, and the Soviet Union starts to collapse.
05:44After flying a Buran just once, the fleet is abandoned.
05:49The Russians are forced to go back to using conventional rockets.
05:53They hoard what money they had, and it was scarce, into trying to build and support the MIR space station.
06:01The focus now for the Russians is using their MIR space station to master long-term spaceflight.
06:09To keep their shuttle program alive, NASA has to come up with a new purpose for them.
06:14After the Challenger disaster, the shuttles are believed to be too risky to carry out any mission that can be done using conventional rockets.
06:30All this talk of flying all the commercial satellites, all the military satellites, that all went away.
06:36And so, to justify our continued existence, we had to launch a lot more scientific satellites, and do more scientific missions.
06:46NASA knows the shuttles have to deliver a big scientific breakthrough.
06:52And they hope launching this, the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built, will do it.
06:59Three, two, one, and liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe.
07:11People were really excited about the idea that this was going to be this incredible new instrument that would be able to unlock the secrets of the universe.
07:20NASA depended on capturing the public's imagination for funding.
07:24They desperately needed it to be a success.
07:29NASA depended on its own.
07:31Max, go.
07:32E or S, go flight.
07:34EPA, we're go.
07:36This is Mission Control Houston.
07:39Discovery, go for Hubble release.
07:43Flying 380 miles above the Earth, higher than any shuttle has ever flown before, Discovery flawlessly deploys the giant telescope.
07:55Thank you for a good day.
07:56Three weeks later, Hubble beams back its first images of distant stars.
08:03It's one of these situations where I see it, but I can't believe my eyes.
08:12The images were blurry.
08:14You know, this is a billion-and-a-half-dollar telescope, and it can't focus straight.
08:20Hubble's optics are the wrong shape, which effectively leaves the telescope nearsighted.
08:28Really embarrassing, obviously, to the agency, to the nation, you know, to all the people who were involved with it.
08:35It was a disaster.
08:37NASA's reputation is once again in tatters.
08:41It became a touchstone for everything wrong with NASA.
08:47It's hard to imagine anything more humiliating.
08:50It was a really stupid error.
08:53It was something which they could and should have checked.
08:57American politicians are furious.
09:00The Senate committee told us,
09:02NASA, if you are not able to do what you say you can do to repair Hubble and get it back in good condition,
09:09there's a good possibility that funding will be cut.
09:12But NASA realizes there is much more to do than just correcting Hubble's faulty lens.
09:18A host of other components will also need replacing.
09:21Repairing the telescope will be the most complex mission NASA has ever attempted.
09:27To fix Hubble, NASA selects seven of their most experienced astronauts.
09:40This mission was going to require five spacewalks of a degree of complexity far greater than anything that NASA had ever done before.
09:49And could you roll me a little bit more upright, please?
09:52Okay.
09:53For the next 11 months, the astronauts plan and practice the dozens of intricate procedures they'll perform on the telescope in space.
10:02Continue to come forward.
10:04We spent about 400 hours underwater. Tremendous amount of training.
10:08The repairs are so complicated, the fear is the astronauts will run out of power and oxygen before they can all be completed.
10:19To help them train, NASA makes a giant inflatable telescope, complete with an inflatable astronaut.
10:27Every aspect of the mission is carefully timed to ensure it can be done before the astronauts' supplies are exhausted.
10:38We spent an awful lot of time talking about what if.
10:41What if this happens? What if that happens?
10:43I knew we had to be ready for anything.
10:48Finally, on December 2, 1993, three years after Hubble launched, the astronauts are ready for their 11-day mission to repair it.
11:00Before they leave, the head of NASA gives them a stark warning.
11:05He looked at us and he said,
11:07I hope that you realize that the future of NASA's human spaceflight depends on the success of your mission.
11:14Like, thank you, sir. Like, we didn't know this.
11:17At 4.27 a.m., the Shuttle Endeavour blasts off.
11:22Lift off of the Space Shuttle Endeavour to service the Hubble Space Telescope.
11:27Endeavour races to rendezvous with the telescope orbiting 380 miles above the Earth.
11:34My big role was going to be to get us in the right position to be able to capture the telescope.
11:40Traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, the Shuttle joins Hubble in orbit.
11:46Commander Dick Covey has to fly close enough to grab the telescope with the Shuttle's robotic arm.
11:52When you get close to the telescope, it's intense. You're making very precise maneuvers.
11:58One wrong move will send the telescope spiraling out of orbit and destroy it.
12:04So we're looking through the top windows of the orbiter until it gets to a point where it transitions low enough to the telescope or a robotic arm to grab it.
12:14One wrong move will send the telescope to the telescope.
12:26One wrong move will send the telescope to the telescope.
12:30East End Endeavour has a firm handshake with Mr. Hubble's telescope.
12:35We copy that, Covey, and there are smiles galore down here. Great work up there, you guys.
12:41And we were very, very happy when we finally got the telescope captured.
12:47Now we have five days of spacewalks that the whole crew is going to start focusing on.
12:52Mission Specialist Story Musgrave and Jeff Hoffman go through the first steps of getting ready for their spacewalk.
12:58The first task for the astronauts is to replace some of Hubble's delicate instruments housed deep inside the telescope.
13:06We had to open these big doors and I basically pushed Story underneath and I would undo the bolts and he would pull out the unit, hand me the old one, I'd hand him the new one.
13:17With limited oxygen and power supplies, Mission Control focuses on sticking to the timetable.
13:24I'll never forget that first spacewalk. I was determined to stay on the timeline, do what I needed to do.
13:31After almost eight hours, the astronauts managed to replace all the faulty instruments.
13:36And it worked perfectly just the way it had done, so we were really feeling pretty good.
13:42All that's left is for Hoffman to close the telescope doors.
13:46It's not closing. The doors aren't closing right.
13:51I won't use all the words which went through my mind because we're on television here.
13:56But, you know, this is the most complicated mission that NASA has ever undertaken and I can't get the doors closed.
14:05I mean, what is going on?
14:09If Hubble's doors remain open, the sensitive electronics inside will be destroyed by the extreme conditions of space.
14:18Despite eleven months of preparation, NASA's engineers didn't plan for this.
14:24They kept sending us suggestions from the ground. We were describing the problem but it was clear that they didn't quite get it because none of the things that they suggested worked.
14:34Engineers on the ground are out of ideas. Everything hinges on the astronauts finding a solution.
14:41Let's try to get the bottom. Let me get the bottom coming in.
14:45Well, Story came up with the idea to take a strap to be able to act as another hand.
14:51To put it in a place where it could hold part of the doors together while they worked on the other areas that get it to latch.
14:58But the concern is, if the strap is pulled too tight, the delicate telescope could be irreparably damaged.
15:07The people who were in charge of Hubble were worried because this thing can exert up to 2,000 pounds of force.
15:13And I think they had these visions of Hubble collapsing like an aluminum beer can.
15:19With oxygen supplies running out, Mission Control has no choice.
15:25They have to let the astronauts try to use the strap to force the doors shut.
15:30As the flight director, I made a decision to tell Story, go do it.
15:35If you've got a way to do it, do it.
15:38All right.
15:45I think we got the door closed.
15:48All right.
15:50Finally, Hubble's doors are firmly shut.
15:54The first marathon eight-hour spacewalk is a success.
15:59Good work, guys.
16:01And that was a huge amount of relief in the control center because we got back on track.
16:07Keep going forward. Steady right.
16:10Over the next four days, the team completes a record-breaking 35 and a half hours of spacewalks.
16:17Okay, you gotta go for release.
16:20And they managed to finish all the repairs to the telescope with just a few hours of oxygen and power to spare.
16:27Looks good to me.
16:29But it will be another six weeks before the astronauts know if their mission has been a success.
16:36January 13, 1994, NASA releases the new data from Hubble.
16:51I remember just being desperate to see what it was going to look like.
16:57When the images emerge, they are extraordinary.
17:04I'm not an astronomer, but I said, wow, man, we have fixed this thing.
17:08Hubble's spectacular pictures transform our understanding of the universe.
17:14I was looking at a huge amount of galaxies in that one picture.
17:19Crystal clear.
17:20I mean, you could see the shapes.
17:22You could tell that they were galaxies.
17:24They looked like the creations of some psychedelic artists.
17:27That was one of the great days of our lives.
17:34The most complex shuttle mission ever attempted has been a success.
17:40NASA's reputation is salvaged.
17:43But sending a shuttle to repair the $1.5 billion telescope cost NASA another billion dollars.
17:50The shuttle's future is far from secure.
17:571994.
17:58The U.S. has a new president and a new threat to the program.
18:03President Clinton is concerned about the shuttle's spiraling costs.
18:08The Clinton administration told us that they considered the space shuttle program very expensive.
18:15And it nearly got canceled.
18:17The shuttle's salvation comes from an unlikely place.
18:21Russia.
18:22Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians have been struggling to keep Mir, their prized space station, in orbit.
18:31The Russian space program was on its knees, absolutely starved of funds, and in danger of collapsing completely.
18:40President Clinton is warned, if the Russian space program ends, it can have grave security implications for the U.S.
18:50There's a lot of concern that the Russian rocket scientists were going to start building missiles for rogue states.
18:56There was this feeling that it would be in the interest of the United States to engage the Soviet space program personnel.
19:05And what better way to do that than by a joint project?
19:10The U.S. offers Russia a deal.
19:13The shuttles will fly regular supply missions to keep Mir going.
19:17In return, the Russians have to let U.S. astronauts onboard their space station to carry out experiments.
19:25No country on Earth had greater experience of a long-duration space flight than the Russians.
19:32And America wanted a piece of that as it looked ahead to building its own space station.
19:37The Russians agree to the American proposal.
19:40And in an historic move, NASA sends a team of astronauts to Star City just outside Moscow for training.
19:48Britain's only shuttle astronaut, Michael Fole, is one of them.
19:55A lot of military American astronauts felt this was .
20:02This was not something we should be doing.
20:05And when I met Russian instructors, they were disgusted with their government.
20:10They did not want to give us their crown jewels.
20:13They did not want to tell us how their spaceship was built.
20:16But the Russian and American governments are determined to have their astronauts work together.
20:22Former U.S. Navy fighter pilot Robert Hoot Gibson is in charge of picking the crew for the first shuttle mission to Mir.
20:31The press kept asking me, are you going to assign yourself to the Mir docking?
20:35And I said, absolutely not.
20:37I had trained to shoot down Russian MiGs and had been a participant in this Cold War.
20:45But NASA has other ideas.
20:48On June 27, 1995, Hoot finds himself in the driver's seat, in the first shuttle scheduled to dock with the Russian space station.
21:02220 miles above the Earth, Hoot guides the shuttle Atlantis towards Mir.
21:10It was the most complex, it was the most demanding mission that I ever got to fly.
21:17A special adapter has been fitted to the shuttle to allow it to dock with the Russian space station.
21:24At 9 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the two spacecraft connect.
21:30It just went off like clockwork.
21:34Everything worked perfectly. Everything went just fine.
21:38It's the first time a shuttle has ever docked with another spacecraft.
21:42When Hoot opens the hatch, he makes history.
21:48Vladimir Džurov, the Mir commander, one of those Russian fighter pilots that I had been training to shoot down all those years.
21:56And now the two of us, Cold War warriors, shook hands.
22:02And the President of the United States that day said,
22:07this handshake means the Cold War is over.
22:11So I'm fond of telling people that, hey, I'm the person who ended the Cold War.
22:16The docking of the shuttle Atlantis with the Mir space station heralds a new era of international cooperation in space.
22:31NASA plans to send a shuttle to Mir every four months.
22:34But a series of accidents on board the Russian space station fill the NASA astronauts with dread.
22:42I was worried.
22:44They had had a fire on board the Mir, a very bad fire, almost caused them to abandon the Mir station.
22:50Determined to use Mir to help them understand the effects of spending long periods in space, NASA pushes ahead.
22:58Three months after the fire, Michael Fole will serve his stint on the space station.
23:05Looking at the Mir as we approached it, I was just thinking, I've got to steel myself to do the hardest thing I've ever done in my life,
23:11get through four months on the Mir station.
23:14Life on Mir is a million miles away from the highly organized world of the shuttles.
23:21You're in a tunnel complex. You're like a mole.
23:24And because the Mir had been there for 13 years at that point, they'd never really thrown stuff away.
23:31It was extraordinary.
23:33Michael's job on board is to conduct experiments for NASA.
23:38A month into his stay, his worst fears come true when Mir collides with an unmanned Russian supply module.
23:47We'd had a space collision, a lot of loss of power, a depressurization.
23:52Basically, the situation had changed dramatically from one that we'd expected to surviving.
23:59As the Russian cosmonauts assess the damage, Michael is stuck on the ailing space station until the next shuttle arrives.
24:08When finally the space shuttle approaches, I'm just thinking, that is so beautiful.
24:16The shuttle is a gorgeous-looking vehicle in space.
24:20And as you see it coming up to save you, all of that emotion kind of washes over you.
24:26And I had tears in my eyes as it came up closer and closer.
24:31And, of course, I'm excited as can be to see my new crewmates who are going to take me home.
24:38Serviced by the shuttles, Mir is repaired and survives until 2001 when it is finally taken out of orbit and sent crashing into the Pacific Ocean.
24:51For NASA, the Russian space station has served its purpose.
24:55Mir provided a stepping stone towards NASA's true ambition.
25:02They built the space shuttle with the hope that one day they might build a space station.
25:08At the start of the new millennium, NASA preps the shuttle fleet to begin construction on a 450-ton space station.
25:16It was a huge and really, really important endeavor.
25:23Working 200 miles above the Earth, the shuttles are going to build the most expensive machine ever created.
25:32NASA had always had ambitions to build a space station.
25:36And the shuttle was the vehicle through which that could be made possible.
25:40When completed, the space station will be enormous.
25:43For NASA, the shuttle fleet will finally be doing what it has been designed for.
25:55A shuttle to carry men and equipment to orbiting space stations is one of NASA's goals for this decade.
26:02Since the early 1970s, NASA's dream has been to use the shuttles and a space station for an even more ambitious project.
26:11The shuttle's role in exploration would be as a ferry to the space station where the great explorers would take off to the moon and Mars and other destinations in the solar system eventually.
26:24But as the costs soar, NASA is forced to concede it can't afford to build a space station of its own.
26:31They realized that a better way of making this program real was to make it international.
26:38And so the International Space Station Program was born.
26:41Otherwise known as the ISS, America joins 14 other countries, including Russia, Japan and Britain, to share the cost of the $150 billion project.
26:51Over the course of the next decade, the space station will be built in sections and carried into orbit piece by piece by the shuttles.
27:01One of the wonders is that you can get 16 different countries with its own engineers working in those countries designing really complicated space equipment that comes together only once and that's in space.
27:18Starting in December 2000, the first shuttles head into orbit to begin assembling the huge structure.
27:29The space shuttle carries a robotic arm and that was essential for delivering these modules that are part of the International Space Station core systems.
27:38And so we would never have the International Space Station today without the space shuttle.
27:44Over the next 16 shuttle missions, the space station starts to take shape.
27:50It's kind of like a Lego game. You put the first piece up and you keep adding on.
27:57By 2003, the permanently manned space station is half-built.
28:01To complete construction, NASA schedules an additional 30 shuttle flights.
28:09On January 16, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia prepares to blast off on a rare science-only mission that will not dock with the ISS.
28:21Led by Commander Rick Husband, the crew will spend 16 days in orbit.
28:26For four of them, this will be their first time in space.
28:29Seven, we have a go for main engine start.
28:36Three, two, one. We have booster ignition and lift-off of space shuttle Columbia with a multitude of national and international space research experiments.
28:51The launch appears to go perfectly.
28:53But the next day, a standard review of the launch footage shows something alarming.
29:02There was video evidence of a debris strike on the wing.
29:06And some of the engineers had been off looking at the video, which was not very good.
29:11I'm trying to draw some conclusions.
29:17The video shows a piece of lightweight foam insulation breaking away from the shuttle's fuel tank.
29:24The concern is it could have hit the shuttle's vital heat-proof tiles.
29:28A tile is not designed to be impacted by anything. Not water, not debris, not a bird, not anything that's in the atmosphere.
29:41During re-entry, the underside of the shuttle is exposed to temperatures twice as hot as lava.
29:47If the foam has damaged a tile, the consequences could be catastrophic.
29:54We knew that if we would lose a tile there, we could lose the entire vehicle.
29:59I mean, it was just that straightforward.
30:02The Columbia crew, unaware of what has happened, continues with their mission.
30:06On board the partially completed International Space Station is U.S. astronaut Ken Bowersox.
30:21He can't see the shuttle, but he can talk to the crew.
30:25It was almost like being home, to hear their voices, to hear what they were doing.
30:29We started off talking about our different missions, and it sounded like typical NASA speak.
30:33Everybody's been busy with all kinds of different experiments.
30:38I'll let KC kind of tell you some of the things she's been doing with the combustion module real quick.
30:42One of the crew members, Laurel Clark, came up and said,
30:45Hey, enough of that. Let's talk about our families, how your family's doing,
30:48and switched the whole tone of the conversation. It was really sweet.
30:52Don, I was kind of wondering how your twins are doing. How's that going?
30:57They seem to remember me. They know who I am.
31:00But as Columbia's mission progresses, Ken starts to sense mission control is worried about the shuttle.
31:08We sort of felt that the gaze of Houston had moved from us over to STS-107.
31:13We just noticed a little less intensity on the part of the ground controllers.
31:19Back on the ground, NASA has been carefully analyzing footage of the phone strike.
31:24Engineers felt it was a glancing blow, and they had some mathematics that said it probably was not critical.
31:35This isn't the first time this has happened.
31:37Foam falling off the tank occurred on almost every flight. It was so common that people barely remarked on it at all.
31:50NASA concludes it's unlikely the foam caused any serious damage to the shuttle, and Columbia is cleared for re-entry.
31:58Columbia, Houston, good burn, no trim required.
32:04After a successful 16-day mission, the crew prepares for what should be a routine landing.
32:11The guidance officer confirming that Columbia is right on track toward a landing at the Kennedy Space Center at 8, 16 a.m. Central.
32:17At first, all seems fine.
32:21But 10 minutes into re-entry, NASA's ground controllers noticed that temperature sensors in the shuttle's left wing have failed.
32:32Flight, Max?
32:34Go ahead, Max.
32:36FYI, I've just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle, hydraulic return temperatures.
32:42There is no commonality.
32:44No commonality. Copy. Thank you.
32:45Instrument malfunction is not unusual. Mission control isn't concerned until suddenly...
32:53In Flight Ecom?
32:54Ecom.
32:55I've got four temperature sensors on the bond line data that are off-scale low.
32:59More sensors start failing all over the shuttle.
33:03In Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your lab.
33:08Then, shuttle commander Rick Husband abruptly cuts off mid-sentence.
33:12Flight controllers are continuing to stand by to regain communications with the spacecraft.
33:13Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check.
33:14Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check.
33:19The body language that we could see down there, and some of the voices we were hearing, and the voice of the crew, and the voice of the crew, and the voice of the crew, and the voice of the crew.
33:25The flight controllers are continuing to stand by to regain communications with the spacecraft.
33:33Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check.
33:35The body language that we could see down there, and some of the voices we were hearing, and the communication, eh, something wasn't right. You could tell.
33:52Flight, I'd like to stay where we're at.
33:59See them go erratic for a little bit before they went away, so I do believe it's instrumentation.
34:05Okay.
34:06Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check.
34:08Flight 01, are you expecting tracking?
34:09One minute to go flight.
34:10Ten minutes before the scheduled touchdown, there is still no sign of Columbia.
34:27The flight, the NAACS officer reports no tracking data of any objects.
34:38Okay.
34:41When you can't communicate with the vehicle, and it's not there, then it's, it's gone.
34:52Then, television news coverage shows what appears to be Columbia breaking apart in a shower of flames.
35:09GC flight.
35:10GC flight.
35:11GC flight.
35:12Flight GC.
35:13Lock the doors.
35:14Copy.
35:16John walked behind me, and I said, I said, John, what's, what's happened?
35:21And I'll never forget this.
35:22He said, we lost them.
35:32My fellow Americans, at nine o'clock this morning, mission control in Houston lost contact with our space shuttle Columbia.
35:42A short time later, debris was seen falling from the skies above Texas.
35:49The Columbia's lost.
35:52There are no survivors.
35:57What is left of the shuttle Columbia is taken back to NASA for analysis.
36:03I remember going to visit the Columbia debris, and when I saw it for the first time, the thing that made the biggest impression on me was the window frames.
36:13And thinking that I had sat behind those window frames on Columbia, on an entry, and just seeing the melted edges of the metal frame, I mean, I can still see that image.
36:24Investigators are brought in to find out why Columbia burned up on re-entry.
36:34Evidence points to a hole in the shuttle's thermal protection system as the cause.
36:39All attention turns back to the video of the launch.
36:44Investigation board determined we're zeroing in on lightweight foam insulation on the external tank.
36:51Enhancing the launch footage reveals that the foam insulation from the fuel tank didn't strike the fragile part of the shuttle's wing at all.
37:01It hit the wing's leading edge, which is made from a super strong, high-tech material called carbon-carbon.
37:09So a piece of foam hits the leading edge, how could that cause something to fail that's probably as strong as steel?
37:16To NASA, it seems impossible that a lightweight piece of foam could have penetrated one of the toughest parts of the shuttle.
37:24Right now, it just does not make sense to us that a piece of debris would be the root cause for the loss of Columbia and its crew.
37:33There's got to be another reason.
37:36But accident investigators aren't convinced.
37:39They force NASA to test the leading edge of the wing by smashing blocks of foam into it.
37:45They've actually fired it from a cannon at pieces of the leading edge to see what would happen.
37:52They discover a piece of lightweight foam fired at a speed of 500 miles per hour easily punches a hole in the wing.
38:05Instead of this being a sponge hitting the leading edge, it was a brick.
38:11That was it. Everybody knew it then. There's no other question about it.
38:14NASA is forced to admit they had been wrong all along.
38:19In four simple words, the foam did it.
38:22It ultimately led to the destruction of the orbiter and the loss of the crew.
38:26For the second time in the shuttle's history, a crew didn't make it back alive.
38:33The loss of another seven astronauts underlines how dangerously fragile and hard to maintain the shuttles are.
38:41NASA is forced to consider grounding its three remaining shuttles permanently.
38:47The Columbia accident happened and there was talk of not flying the shuttle again.
38:52But in a historical sense, you know, any great endeavor like this has come with casualties.
39:00You don't want to see people, you know, die.
39:04But if we're going to do some great things, we're going to take some risks.
39:11NASA decides, despite the inherent danger, there is one project the shuttles should complete before they are retired.
39:20The International Space Station.
39:23Orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, the ISS is only half built.
39:28The remaining sections of the multi-billion dollar project are still on the ground.
39:33The only way to get them into orbit is on the shuttles.
39:37There was no other vehicle available in the world that could carry those large pieces into space.
39:46We would have had to trash those and build a completely different set of space station hardware
39:53that would have taken many, many, many more years.
39:57In July 2005, NASA prepares the shuttle fleet for flight.
40:02They estimate it will take another five years and 21 shuttle missions
40:07to finish assembling the giant space station.
40:11Among the astronauts getting ready to go is Barbara Morgan.
40:1721 years earlier, in a blaze of publicity, Barbara was selected as the backup for school teacher Krista McAuliffe,
40:25who was to be NASA's first ordinary citizen in space.
40:29When that shuttle goes, there might be one body.
40:32But there's going to be ten souls that I'm taking with me. Thank you.
40:36That's great.
40:39After months of training together, in 1986, Barbara watched Krista and the rest of her crew perish
40:48as Challenger exploded.
40:52NASA asked if I would continue on in Krista's shoes when the shuttles were ready to fly safely again,
41:00and NASA was ready that I would fly on a shuttle mission.
41:05Quitting her teaching job, Barbara becomes a professional astronaut.
41:10So even though the going on was difficult...
41:12And liftoff!
41:14I felt it was just really, really important that we keep exploration open.
41:21Now Barbara finds herself working on the most ambitious building project ever attempted in space.
41:29So we were a construction crew. We got to help build the International Space Station.
41:34You know, it's not fun and games. It's fun and really, really hard work.
41:39Over the coming years, thanks to the shuttles, the ISS doubles in size.
41:45If we were to bring it back down to Earth and lay it out on a standard football field,
41:51it would slightly spill out over the edges.
41:53By the end of the decade, the International Space Station is almost complete.
41:59The final liftoff of Atlantis.
42:02July 15, 2011, the space shuttle Atlantis blasts off and heads to the ISS for its final mission.
42:11I made sure that I was there to watch Atlantis on that last flight.
42:15It was a very much bittersweet day. I think everyone had tears in their eyes. I did.
42:28Thirty years earlier, the shuttles were symbolic of the Cold War.
42:32Now, they are ending their days as great symbols of global cooperation.
42:38I think people look at it as a technological thing when it's really a sociological triumph.
42:45Since the first crew arrived at the turn of the millennium,
42:49over 200 astronauts from 18 different nations have served on board the ISS.
42:56I think it is a zero gravity, United Nations, and it works a hell of a lot better than the one in New York City.
43:10After clocking more than half a billion miles in orbit, the era of the space shuttle is over.
43:16A ship like no other, its place in history is secured. The space shuttle pulls into port for the last time.
43:23Although they were never as cheap or as safe as NASA had hoped,
43:27in the end, the space shuttles proved to be a giant leap towards a much bigger goal.
43:34Now we have new generations working on reusable spacecraft that will get us much farther.
43:40What we were doing was laying one of the bricks for the road that was going to lead humanity out into our solar system.
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