Columbia: Space Shuttle Disaster (2008)
2011; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1548-9922
Autores Tópico(s)Space exploration and regulation
ResumoColumbia: Space Shuttle Disaster (2008) Written and directed by Gilles Cayette, Produced by Frank Eskenazi for Nova Distributed by PBS www.pbs.org 54 minutes No flight that takes its crew from zero to Mach 24 in a matter of minutes can truly be called routine, but STS-107 - the 107th mission of the space shuttle program, flown in late January 2003 - came close. Like dozens of shuttle missions before it, STS-107 was devoted entirely to science. As mission commander Rick Husband and pilot Willie McCool monitored Columbia's around-the-world in-90-minutes orbit, the other five members of the crew carried out eighty different experiments in the laboratory modules bolted into its payload bay. There would be no spacewalks, no docking with the International Space Station, and no need for the fifty-foot robot arm, which had been left behind to save weight. Even the chunks of insulating shed by the she external fuel tank at liftoff seemed (at the time) routine. Every shuttle flight had suffered foam at launch and returned to Earth with small dings and gouges in the tiles of its heat shield. Sixteen minutes before its scheduled landing in Florida, as Columbia streaked through the Earth's atmosphere over New Mexico, things began to go terribly wrong. Air, heated to 1600 degrees Celsius by the friction of reentry, penetrated the leading edge of the left wing where a two-pound block of insulating had struck, and cracked, the carbon-fiber heat shield. Columbia's slow death was foretold by failing sensors, marked by the loss of all communication, and confirmed by observers in Texas who watched a cloud of debris trail flame across the sky. Flight director Leroy Cain quietly told his team at Mission Control: Lock the doors ... no calls outside this room . . . prepare to preserve your data. The Columbia disaster seemingly has less to offer a would-be filmmaker than the Challenger disaster seventeen years earlier. There is no close-up footage of the shuttle's final moments, no dramatic late-night argument over whether or not to launch, and no obvious figure (like teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe on Challenger) for viewers to identify with. Columbia: Space Shuttle Disaster, an installment in the long-running PBS science series Nova, turns these challenges into advantages. It makes no effort to profile the seven members of the crew (preferring to make Columbia its principal character) and resists the tendency to show the accident itself over and over. Instead, it devotes most of its running time to setting the disaster firmly in context. …
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