‘My father died in the Columbia space shuttle – it felt like Nasa betrayed him’

The first sign was the countdown clock. On Feb 1 2003, nine-year-old Kaycee Anderson was in the crowded bleachers by Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre, watching the seconds tick down towards zero – then start climbing back up again. The perfectly blue sky seemed to highlight the absence of the Columbia space shuttle, due to return to Earth that Saturday morning with her father, Mike, and the six other astronauts on board. Instead of a sonic boom and the orbiter approaching, all of a sudden, “people were on the phone talking in urgent tones, and then they were getting in vans”, Kaycee, now 30, remembers. “That’s when I knew, this isn’t normal.”

Along with her mother, sister and the rest of the astronauts’ families, they were bundled into a van, driven to the Space Centre, and told that the worst had happened. Minutes from when they should have landed to a hero’s welcome, the shuttle had broken up at 190,000ft, sending burning metal and human remains plummeting to the ground in east Texas. The shuttle’s disintegration as it breached the planet’s barrier had been broadcast on live television as the families stood staring at the sky, among the last to know their loved ones’ fate.

Twenty-one years on from flight STS-107, it remains among the worst space disasters in history, charted in painful detail in Columbia: The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth, a three-part BBC documentary series beginning Monday (Feb 12). By the time of its 28th and final mission, Columbia – dubbed “the world’s greatest electric flying machine” – had spent more time in space than any other shuttle. All the more galling, then, that the incident could have been avoided completely.

By Charlotte Lytton.

Full story at Yahoo News.