In Shuttle Video, No Signs of Danger

They were cruising along at 25 times the speed of sound, more than 500,000 feet above the South Pacific. By then, there was little to do but enjoy the ride and rediscover the simple pleasures of life on Earth -- like gravity.

At 7:45 a.m. CST on Feb. 1, astronaut William C. McCool, the pilot of the space shuttle Columbia, picked up a cardboard page of his flight manual and then let go.

During the previous 16 days, the page would have hovered in front of him, suspended in a zero-gravity state. This time, the page fell, landing on the console of the cockpit and suggesting in the gentlest of ways that gravity was settling back in, and that the Columbia was almost home.

“We’re getting some Gs!” McCool said through his headset.

The exchange was captured on a 13-minute video taken by a camera mounted inside the cockpit and recovered in surprisingly good condition in a Palestine, Texas, field last month.

Of more than 250 reels of film taken during the mission, this is believed to be the only footage that survived the disintegration of the shuttle, said astronaut Scott Altman, a former Columbia commander and one of the NASA officials investigating the accident.

NASA released the video Friday afternoon, nearly a month after Columbia broke apart, killing McCool and six other astronauts.

The video does not assist in the investigation, NASA officials said. It ends abruptly at 7:48 a.m., when the Columbia was flying southwest of San Francisco Bay at an altitude of 250,000 feet. That was four minutes before officials at Mission Control in Houston detected the first signs of trouble and 11 minutes before NASA lost all communication with the shuttle.

Just one glitch is captured on the video. At about 7:40 a.m., either McCool or Columbia’s commander, Rick D. Husband, appears to have bumped a navigation instrument, temporarily overriding the shuttle’s autopilot system, one NASA official said. Mission Control can be heard on the video telling Husband to perform an “Item 27” -- astronaut lingo for turning the autopilot back on.

“Oh, shoot,” Husband said on the video, matter-of-factly, while pressing a button to his right.

That is not considered significant, NASA officials said Friday. Sensors indicate that the autopilot system had firm control of the craft and that the shuttle was flying perfectly at that point.

“It’s like a lot of footage that you see on descent for every other flight,” NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe told reporters Friday. There appears to be, he said, “absolutely nothing amiss.”

The video provides a measure of assurance to the NASA community, NASA officials said.

The crew has the appearance of children in a candy store of the cosmos, and it is clear that the astronauts died doing what they loved, the official said.

The tape captured some of the last-minute tasks the astronauts carried out.

They are seen gulping down as much water as they can to combat the ill and dehydrating effects of atmospheric descent.

At one point, unable to turn his head because he has his helmet on, McCool held up a small mirror to read gauges behind him. And all the astronauts seemed to struggle a bit while putting on their gloves, which seal and pressurize their space suits, a standard part of the reentry process.

But with computers guiding them home, the astronauts, most of whom had never been in space before this mission, spent much of the time admiring the view.

At one point, U.S. mission specialist and astronaut Laurel B. Clark gasped while filming through a window over her head, as bursts of hot gas popped in bright bursts of red and orange. The bursts are routinely seen during reentry.

“It’s going pretty good now,” McCool said through his headset. “It’s pretty neat. Bright orange, yellow, all around the nose.”

“We’re starting to see some swirl patterns,” Husband replied.

Investigators now believe a breach in the space shuttle’s shell had begun to open at that point, unbeknownst to the astronauts.

The breach apparently allowed superheated gas known as plasma to penetrate the left wing, destroying the hardware inside and ultimately destroying the shuttle, killing the crew.

Investigators released a photograph of a piece of the left wing, also recovered on the ground in Texas, showing significant damage to 13 tiles designed to protect the space shuttle during reentry. The photo, released Thursday, suggests that the breach may have occurred on or near the the shuttle’s left landing-gear door, which is considered one of the weakest spots in the craft’s armor.

“This is amazing,” McCool said about 12 minutes into the tape. “It’s really bright out there.”

“Yep,” Husband replied. “You definitely don’t want to be outside now.”

Clark and astronaut Kalpana Chawla can be heard laughing at the remark. The tape ends less than a minute later.

“In watching it, you know what they don’t know,” O’Keefe said. “It’s unbelievable. It’s a very emotional piece because of what you already know -- that they don’t know.”

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Times staff writer Nick Anderson in Washington contributed to this report.