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This is the story of columbia, this video will be a bit different from the ones ive done. Long time viewers of the channel will find this video very similar to the ones that i used to do when this channel was starting out, im going to play videos of the space shuttle cause this video required a lot of research. With that out of the way let get to the video ever since i was a little child I was fascinated with the space shuttle. When I was 7 i literally read everything I could about the space shuttle get my hands on and the destruction of columbia hit me hard. This video will be a deep dive into what happened on that fateful day. You see im a nerd and all the documentaries that ive watched never really go into the technical details of into what happened as she reenetred earths atmosphere for the last time and that is what this video will be. Just to clarify I’m not really going to talk about what happened on launch which caused the crash of columbia because thats been talked about ad nauseum. This will be a minute by minute run down of what went down and hopefully you learn something new about columbia that you didnt know before. we need to start at the top. For the sake of simplicity the video will be divided into 5 phases, phase one is from 09:15:30 am GMT time to 13:44:09 pm. This deal with the prep work that was done prior to reentry. We join space shuttle columbia as she is preparing to start the descend down to the runway at kennedy. We have a pretty good idea of whats happening in the orbiter at this point as we recovered tapes from the orbiter that survived the fall to the earth. So there was footage and we were able to see what everyone was up to in the orbiter. On the moring of re entry day they were busy putting things away and prepping the orbiter to land. 45 minutes before the retro rockets would be fired to bring columbia back down the commander and the pilot began to run through checklists needed. Then at 1 pm and 15 minutes and 30 seconds GMT time the de orbit burn occurred, the burn wasnt that long, this slowed the orbiter down just enough that its path now took it into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. They were now on their way down. AT 1:36 and 4 seconds the commander accidentally bumped the rotational hand controller. This wasnt that big of a deal and happened all the time because, the crew were wearing these bulky suits and gloves and sometimes you bumped into things, its not the end of the world and the crew recovered from it pretty quickly. This is where phase two starts, from 1:44 and 9 seconds, this is when the shuttle reached its entry interface point. We have even more data sources for this phase, ground based recording devices now could start to see columbia streaking into the atmosphere and the OEX recorder, columbias equivalent of a flight data recorder was recording sensor data, we also had transmissions from the shuttle itself to piece together what was happening onboard. At this point the shuttle was doing what was known as roll reversals, this is basically where the shuttle banks from side to side, in a way its a way to mitigate the heat that would be starting to build up on the shuttle as it entered the earths atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, think mach 25. But unknown to the crew of the columbia she was starting to shed pieces, but it was nothing serious enough that the crew would have noticed. As columbia entered the earths atmosphere the leading edge of the wings and the nose were experiencing temperatures that reached 2800 fahrenheit. Now on a normal renetery the TPS or the thermal protective system would well protect the shuttle but due to the gaping hole in columbias wing that the protective system was not doing a whole lot of protecting. Superheated gasses were now being funneled into the left wing of columbia at unimaginable speeds. The wing of the space shuttle was starting to lose its properties. This would not be good. At 1:49 and 32 seconds GMT a roll to the right was made to manage energy, Then at 1:51 and 46 seconds the first sign of trouble, the shuttle was starting to yaw a bit to the left, the yaw values were still within limits of previous shuttle flights but this was concerning