[Alberta's Child]

There's no way that shuttle would be moving sideways like that at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour without rotating and gyrating out of control. I first thought it was the same thing that you did, but after going through this at length on another thread I'm convinced that what you are seeing here is not the details of an actual object, but a distortion in the video image caused by an out-of-focus object.

[fuente]

Well going sideways is a little strong. The S turns used for braking and rotating the leading edges for heat dissapation purposes, involves a small bank to the right and a small bank to the left. When an aircraft turns, it really kinda slides sideways, meaning the trajectory vector is more toward the path of original momentum, than the orientation of the vessle. It was also at the beginning of this bank turn to the right (leading edges to the left) when the disaster struck.

[finnman69]

No way is this a close up of the space shuttle....wrong shape. 'Tail' is way to wide proportionally to the width of the main fuselage.

Camera distortion from the camera iris..

Camera iris.

Check out this thread