Death comes quickly in space, unless it comes very slowly. The crew of the shuttle Challenger is thought--or hoped--to have suffered little. Crew members of Apollo 13, had they not made it home, would have needed days to breathe up all their air and suffocate. Ever since the crack-up of the shuttle Columbia last month, NASA has wanted to know how the astronauts on that doomed ship met their end--believing that the precise sequence of events on the crew decks would reveal a lot about the precise sequence of breakdowns throughout the ship.
Slowly, investigators are piecing together the answers. Space-agency...