> The meeting moved on without taking any formal action. Atlantis’ debris strike would pose no roadblock for Endeavour’s mission—just as foam never had held up a flight in the past. However, NASA would make sure its paperwork was in order. The hazard report would be looked over to be certain its wording more precisely reflected the nature of the foam threat.

> NASA’s public affairs staff churned out dozens of fact sheets, color brochures, and feature stories touting the scientific value of the research. But it was a tough sell. The experiments seemed second-tier to many outside observers. It was not that any one experiment represented demonstrably bad science. But given the half-billion-dollar cost of a shuttle flight, critics argued the price tag far outweighed the potential benefits. Even some in the shuttle program privately questioned the value of Columbia’s research.

> Columbia carried 13 rats, eight garden orb weaver spiders, five silkworms and three cocoons, four Medaka fish eggs, three carpenter bees, 15 harvester ants and an assortment of fish, mostly because students wanted to see how they would behave when weightless. One student experiment later attracted potshots from critics. Called “Fun with Urine,” the idea was to test the feasibility of urine-based paint as a possible way to redecorate future spacecraft, and thus stave off depression, on long-duration voyages.

> Crater analyses, like most of Boeing’s other shuttle production and operations tasks, had been done for years at the company’s Huntington Beach office. But responsibility for that and many other shuttle operations officially had moved from California to Houston earlier that month in an efficiency and cost-cutting move. As a result, Boeing engineer Paul Parker, who had been trained on Crater but had used the program only twice before, was assigned to help perform the analysis. Despite his inexperience, he knew enough about Crater to have concerns. The foam block that hit Columbia was estimated to have a volume of 1,200 cubic inches. That was at least 400 times greater than the largest foam cylinders used in impact tests to develop Crater.

> NASA engineers decided to simply remove the ramps and to install electric heaters to prevent ice buildups. The massive fittings that anchor the two struts holding the nose of the shuttle to the external tank—fittings that used to be buried inside the foam ramps—will be fully exposed on all future flights ( )

On February 1, 2003. the unthinkable happened. The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated. This book is a collection of dozens of exclusive interviews, never-before-published documents and recordings of key meetings obtained by the authors. The story behind the disaster.