Camerawoman Clark mugs for a self-portrait. The shirt-sleeve crew was suited up for re-entry
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For 5 sec. after that, only computer data streamed down, and then all contact was lost. Finally, 25 sec. later, the ship crackled back online for just 2 sec., but the data packed into that brief burst told a chilling tale. According to the readings, the ship was in a flat, counterclockwise spin, moving at 20 per second, meaning it would complete a full rotation in 18 sec. Actually, Columbia was probably twirling faster than that, but 20 per second is as much as its systems could record, given that that's more than the ship could take. The data also suggest that Husband switched the spacecraft from autopilot to manual, evidently fighting to stabilize his spacecraft. There was no "Oh, shoot" this time.
"Motion like that is almost instantaneous," says Thagard. "You'd try to take manual control, but there may have been no time to do more than mutter an expletive. Once it's got that far, you've probably lost it."
Henricks, however, is not so sure things happened that quickly. "For 15 or 20 seconds Husband would probably have been struggling to regain control of the orbiter," he says. "It would have been hair-raising because he knew survival wasn't likely."
It's Thagard's quicker scenario that most people hope — and increasingly believe — is the right one. The frantic, final howl from Columbia's computers ended 4.826 sec. after 9 a.m. E.T., and NASA does place the disintegration of the vehicle within the next 20 sec. The official timeline, however, is in its 14th revision, and it will probably change again, perhaps eliminating the 20-sec. death spiral. If the end indeed came so fast, it would be one small mercy in a day otherwise devoid of it.