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<p>CAPE CANAVERAL -- A rushed launch of a rescue shuttle. Two orbiters drifting in tight formation at 17,500 mph. A series of harrowing spacewalks to move astronauts from one crippled shuttle to one that could bring them safely back to Earth.</p>

April 22, 2003 3,000 Amateurs Offer NASA Photos of Columbia's Demise Associated PressContrails from the Columbia are seen in a video image taken by two Dutch military pilots training at Fort Hood, Tex., on Feb. 1. This widely circulated image, purported to be of the shuttle Columbia, is actually from the 1998 movie "Armageddon." By JOHN SCHWARTZ OUSTON, April 19 - Dan McNew thought he had shot the home movie of a lifetime. He had aimed his digital video camera at the shuttle Columbia as it returned to earth on Feb. 1; living near Dallas, in the path of...

Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 10:24:29 -0800 From: Jim Warren Subject: Autodesk's founder reports gross errors by Limbaugh, CNN, Snopes Cc: [Snopes and a whole bunch of CNN circular file email addresses; Mr. Warren doesn't seem to know the news biz very well --DMTW] [If you know John, you know him to be a most ardent stickler for facts. Here, John is not reporting hearsay; he's reporting about what's happened on his own server, and images he provides thereon. --jim] At 12:34 AM +0100 3/29/03, John Walker wrote: Subject: Sniping at Snopes.comAlmost everybody's experienced the phenomenon of encountering a description...

March 9 — As the space shuttle Columbia was breaking apart over Texas on Feb. 1, one of the shuttle's pilots may have attempted to take control of the spacecraft, ABCNEWS has learned. On re-entry, the shuttle normally is controlled by on-board computers. But recovered data from the last seconds of flight indicates that one of the pilots, commander Rick Husband or Wille McCool, may have attempted to disengage the auto pilot in what would have been a futile effort to regain control of Columbia, sources working with investigators told ABCNEWS. Astronauts are taught to take control of the shuttle...

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) -- The board investigating the Columbia tragedy said Tuesday it wants to know more about a mysterious object that almost certainly fell off the shuttle and was flying alongside the spacecraft during its second day in orbit. Meanwhile, NASA said late Tuesday night that a videotape from inside Columbia's cockpit has been recovered from the wreckage and shows four of the astronauts just before their ship began experiencing trouble.Thirteen minutes of tape were preserved; the rest was burned. The tape ends four minutes after the shuttle's atmospheric entry, while the shuttle is still over the Pacific...

Board: Shuttle Lost Parts Over Calif. SPACE CENTER, Houston - Space shuttle Columbia began losing pieces over the California coast well before it disintegrated over Texas, the accident investigation board reported Tuesday, finally confirming what astronomers and amateur skywatchers have been saying from Day One. But board member James Hallock, a physicist and chief of the Transportation Department's aviation safety division, said the fragments were probably so small they burned up before reaching the ground. He said the conclusion that the space shuttle was shedding pieces a full six minutes before it came apart over Texas was based on images...

ASTRONOMY/SPACE ALERT FOR SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Brian Webb, KD6NRP Ventura County, California E-mail: kd6nrp@earthlink.net Web Site: http://home.earthlink.net/~kd6nrp 2003 February 12 (Wednesday) 20:00 PST ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SPACE SHUTTLE REENTRY OBSERVATIONS In response to my request for observations of the February 1, 2003 Columbia reentry, I have received numerous reports. The following is a compilation of all of the usable accounts received. These reports have been edited for brevity and clarity. Many observers may sound upbeat about the disaster, but this is the result of my taking their comments out of context. Also, the location listed under an observer's name is that from which...

NASA Releases Tape of Final Mission Control Conversation From Columbia Flight The Associated Press SPACE CENTER, Houston Feb. 11 — Engineers in Mission Control never lost their composure even as they lost hope that space shuttle Columbia would make it safely home.Conversations between the flight controllers, released Tuesday, suggests the engineers were waiting helplessly at Mission Control while Columbia came apart on the threshold of space, scattering debris across two states and killing seven astronauts.Flight director Leroy Cain quickly shifted his attention from landing the craft at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to saving computer data that might...

People in the News LITTLE ROCK (AP) - Former President Bill Clinton will debut with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra on the March 25 program "Let Freedom Ring," a celebration of the American spirit that pays tribute to the seven Columbia astronauts. Clinton will narrate Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait," which includes excerpts from speeches by Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The orchestra will perform Gustav Holst's "Jupiter," the fourth movement of Holst's seven-movement suite "The Planets," to honor the astronauts who died when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart before landing on Feb. 1. Foreman native...

New York Times Week in Review From Excitement to Horror: Columbia's Last Flight Online By TOM KUNTZ The 1937 Hindenburg airship disaster was carried live to a large radio audience. The 1986 space shuttle disaster happened live on network television before millions of stunned viewers. Almost from the beginning, the 9/11 attacks were broadcast live worldwide. Last weekend's shuttle disaster also unfolded live, but the primary medium was arguably not radio or television. It was the Internet. A small audience of space enthusiasts learned of trouble in real time by tuning in to mission control in Houston via NASA...

Check out some of the experiments they were doing www.globalsecurity.org/space/library/report/2003/sts107-overview.pdf

"Wow." That was astronaut Tammy Jernigan's stunned reaction last night when she viewed a photo of what appears to be space shuttle Columbia getting zapped by a purplish electrical bolt shortly before it disintegrated Saturday morning. Former astronaut Tammy Jernigan "It certainly appears very anomalous," Jernigan told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We sure will be very interested in taking a very hard look at this." The photo was one of five captured by an amateur astronomer in San Francisco who routinely snaps pictures of shuttles when they pass over the Bay area. The pictures were taken just seven minutes before...

Crew members of the Space Shuttle Columbia were concerned about the orbiter's damaged left wing according to United States Senator George Allen. (Republican-Virginia)One of the crew members, Mission Specialist David Brown, sent e-mail messages to his brother Doug during the mission, Allen said. In those e-mails, David Brown said that the crew took pictures of the left wing because they were concerned about it, Allen said.The Senator was only repeating information he recieved from Doug Brown, said his spokeswoman, Carrie Cantrell. There was no phone listing for Doug Brown's home in Arlington and he could not be reached today. A...

Meteorite 'may have hit shuttle' Nasa says a small meteorite or piece of man-made space junk may have struck the Columbia shuttle causing it to crash. Even a tiny scrap of debris grazing the shuttle could have damaged thermal tiles just enough to start a chain reaction. The comments by Milt Heflin, the space agency's flight director, cast doubt on the lead theory that a piece of foam insulation damaged the craft during blast off. "Did we take some hit? That's a possibility. Something was breached," he has told the Los Angeles Times. William Ailor, president of Aerospace Corporation, said...

Southern N.M. facility might have information on Columbia WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE (AP) — Monitoring systems at the White Sands Test Facility near Las Cruces could contain information about Saturday’s Columbia space shuttle disaster. The facility includes NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, which records and transmits all data sent from space shuttles to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Ron D. Dittemore. shuttle program manager for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said Monday from Houston that he would send a team to White Sands to try to extract extra information. ‘it might just be that there’s a...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Sprites and elves dancing on thunder clouds have been captured by cameras on the space shuttle Columbia. The sprites, which are red flashes of electricity shooting up from thunderclouds 13 miles (20 km) into the ionosphere, and elves, which are glowing red doughnut shapes radiating 190 miles (300 km), were photographed Sunday by astronaut Dave Brown on the sprite hunt's first orbit. Columbia and a crew of seven astronauts are on a 16-day science mission that began Thursday. The study of sprites is part of an Israeli experiment known as MEIDEX that includes the first...

<p>U.S. spy satellites are taking high-resolution photographs to help locate debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia, Defense Department officials said yesterday.</p> <p>The images of the doomed spacecraft's flight path are being used by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pinpoint pieces of the shuttle that disintegrated when returning from space Saturday, said Defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.</p>

TELEVISION CNN's Brown plays through shuttle story Anchor decides to stay on the links during disaster follow-up, a decision which infuriates executives.By Elizabeth JensenTimes Staff Writer February 4 2003 NEW YORK -- Tom Brokaw was snorkeling off the Virgin Islands Saturday morning when he saw the boat's captain, 40 feet away, frantically waving. Two planes and less than nine hours later, just before 3 p.m. PST, he was on the air anchoring NBC's Columbia space shuttle coverage from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The lead anchors for ABC and CBS made it on the air too, but not CNN's Aaron Brown, whose...

On Saturday, I set three alarms for 6 in the morning. But when I turned on the television, I was puzzled by the relative silence at Mission Control. Though landing time was approaching, there was little activity. The realization dawned as slowly for me, a veteran astronaut, as for everyone else. There was no immediate or decisive announcement, only a slow recognition that a catastrophe had occurred. I didn't know these astronauts. But I know what they were doing, because I've done it. Astronauts face danger all the time. It's a job where danger is a basic assumption. But you...

No shuttle replacements seen for a decade 5 February 2003 01:40 By Chris Stetkiewicz SEATTLE, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Aviation experts believe NASA will not replace the lost space shuttle Columbia for about 10 years, sticking to a schedule that may force the agency to rely more on Russia to supply the International Space Station. Building a replica shuttle would be too costly, leaving a next-generation "orbital space plane" due to enter service around 2010 as the earliest possible relief for the remaining three shuttles, which could keep flying for decades to come, according to experts advising NASA and the...