'I think they would rather not know. Wouldn't it be better to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than know there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?' How Columbia crew died in ignorance

Shuttle was returning from a 16-day science mission when it broke apart over Texas in 2003

NASA employee Wayne Hale said mission control made decision not to tell crew of danger



NASA has revealed that the Columbia crew were not told that the shuttle had been damaged and they might not survive re-entry.



The seven astronauts who died will be remembered at a public memorial service on the 10th anniversary of the disaster this Friday at Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

The shuttle was headed home from a 16-day science mission when it broke apart over Texas on February 1, 2003, because of damage to its left wing.

Ten years ago, experts at NASA's mission control faced the terrible decision over whether to let the astronauts know that they may die on re-entry or face orbiting in space until the oxygen ran out.



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Doomed: The crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia (left to right) are David Brown, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, William McCool and Ilan Ramon

Disaster: Debris from the space shuttle Columbia streaks across the sky over Tyler, Texas, Saturday on February 1, 2003 Explosion: The shuttle came apart and left flaming contrails across the sky minutes after re-entry

Those on the ground decided that it would be better if the crew were spared knowledge of the risks.

There was no way to repair any suspected damage - the crew were far from the International Space Station and had no robotic arm for repairs. It would have taken too long to send up another shuttle to rescue them.

Wayne Hale, who went on to become space shuttle program manager, has written on his blog about the fateful day.

Mr Hale writes: 'After one of the MMTs (Mission Management Team) when possible damage to the orbiter was discussed, he (Flight Director Jon Harpold) gave me his opinion: ''You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS (Thermal Protection System).'

'"If it has been damaged it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?"'

When Mission Control had it confirmed that the shuttle had broken up over Texas, Flight Director Leroy Cain ordered the room on lock-down and all computer data saved for later investigation.



VIDEO Tragic space shuttle Columbia accident in 2003 ...

Unaware: The Columbia crew were kept in the dark by Mission Control that they were more than likely heading for disaster

All seven on board - David Brown, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, William McCool and Ilan Ramon - were known to be dead within minutes.



Following the crash, low-level engineers at Johnson Space Center revealed that they had tried to alert NASA senior staff about problems with the shuttle.



The investigation into the Columbia disaster revealed that a piece of foam the size of a briefcase was the physical cause of the accident. It had smashed into the shuttle's wing during take-off and left a hole in the protective tiles, leaving the shuttle vulnerable on re-entry.



Failure: An investigation following the crash found that Columbia had been damaged by a piece of foam on blast-off

Mr Hale is the only person at NASA who publicly accepted blame, according to ABC .



NASA flights resumed two years later and the shuttles were retired in 2011.

As the memorial takes place on Friday, 12 children will remember the parents they lost. A decade later, the youngest is now 15 and the oldest is 32.



The oldest son of Columbia's pilot is now a Marine captain with three young children of his own.



The son of astronaut Dr Laurel Clark, Iain Clark is a young man on the cusp of college with a master's rating in scuba diving and three parachute jumps in his new log book.

His mother loved scuba and skydiving. So did her flight surgeon husband and Iain's dad, Dr Jonathan Clark, who since the accident, has been a crusader for keeping space crews safe.

Neurologist Dr Clark told the Associated Press: 'It's tough losing a mom, that's for sure. I think Iain was the most affected.

'My goal was to keep him alive. That was the plan. It was kind of dicey for a while. There was a lot of darkness - for him and me.'

Clark's wife and the six other astronauts were killed in the final minutes of their 16-day scientific research mission aboard Columbia.

Clark, now 59, said he turned to alcohol in the aftermath of Columbia. If it wasn't for his son, he doubts he would have gotten through it.

'He's the greatest kid ever,' Clark said in a phone interview from Houston. 'He cares about people. He's kind of starting to get his confidence, but he's not at all cocky.'

Iain is set to graduate this spring from a boarding school in Arizona; he wants to study marine biology at a university in Florida.

'His life is like about as idyllic as you could imagine, considering all ... he's been through,' said Clark, who is still protective of Iain's privacy. He would not disclose where Iain attends school but he did provide a few snapshots.

Mother and son were extremely close.

After the accident, Iain insisted to his father: 'I want to invent a time machine.' If he could go back in time, the child reasoned, he could warn his mother about the fate awaiting her.

'He asked me why she didn't bail out, that kind of stuff, because he knew she had been a parachutist,' Clark recalled.

Oversight: NASA space shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore holds a piece of insulation foam to describe how a piece of insulation hit the underside of the shuttle during the craft's liftoff and ultimately caused its crash

Father and son were among the astronauts' families waiting at the Kennedy runway for Columbia that early Saturday morning. Once it was clear there had been trouble, the families were hustled to crew quarters, where they got the grim news.

Rona Ramon's sharpest memory about that fateful day is how 'the joy and the longing' to see her husband return from space turned so quickly into anguish.



'I just looked up at the sky and said, ''God, bring him back to me.'''

Her husband, already a heroic military pilot, became Israel's first spaceman on the flight.

Clark hastily came up with a plan: Disappear with his son as soon as they got back home to Houston. Grab the dog, the car and as much money as possible. Then, 'drop off the grid'.

But that didn't happen. A few years went by before father and son finally made their escape. Clark bought a house in Arizona, keeping a small apartment in Houston as he went from working for NASA at Johnson Space Center, to a teaching job at Baylor College of Medicine and an adviser's position at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute.

Blast-off: The space shuttle Columbia during lift-off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on January 16. The crew never returned home

Clark won't divulge his exact whereabouts, even now. He moves every few years. He has a girlfriend, but doesn't see himself remarrying.

'I don't ever want to go through losing a wife again,' he explained.

Clark remains bitter over the 'really bad people' who came after him in Houston for money and favors, spurred by NASA's $27million settlement in 2007 with the Columbia families.

'I just looked up at the sky and said, ''God, bring him back to me.''' Rona Ramon

'There was a lot of grief. There was a lot of sorrow. There was a lot of destructive behavior. There were a lot of people taking advantage of you,' he said.

But Clark holds no grudges against NASA, neither the agency as a whole nor the managers who, during the flight, dismissed concerns from low-level employees about the severity of damage to Columbia's left wing. It was gouged by a piece of insulating foam that peeled off the fuel tank at lift-off.

Clark learned of the foam strike during the mission, while working a shift in Mission Control. Like so many others, Clark wishes he'd done something.

But no one knew during the flight how badly Columbia was damaged. And no effort was made to find out while there still was time to consider what would have been a risky rescue attempt by another shuttle.

Surviving the actual breakup, during re-entry, was deemed impossible by all involved. At 210,000 feet going Mach 15, it was 'much, much worse than anything we had ever planned for,' Hale wrote in his blog earlier this month.

Tragedy: It is ten years since the seven members of the Columbia crew perished after the shuttle was irreparably damaged on blast-off

For four years after the Columbia accident, Mr Clark assisted a NASA team that looked into how the astronauts died and how they might have survived.

For Clark, it was about 'trying to find something good out of something bad. I kind of threw my heart and soul' into crew survival issues and, most recently, the faster-than-the-speed-of sound, stratospheric jump by Felix Baumgartner. Clark was the medical director for the Red Bull-sponsored feat last fall in New Mexico.

The tragic end to NASA's 113th shuttle flight prompted President George W. Bush to take action. He announced in 2004 that the three shuttles left would stop flying in 2010 once they finished delivering pieces of the International Space Station. The shuttles resumed flying with new safety measures in place and eked out an extra year, ending on No. 135 in 2011.

The only way out of the Columbia darkness, for Clark, has been to move forward.



'It doesn't mean I don't miss Laurel or have remorse about what happened,' he said. 'But you cannot be living in this kind of grief-stricken mode. ... Laurel would kick my ass if that happened to me.'

'If it has been damaged it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know.'

Flight Director Jon Harpold

The shuttle commander's widow, Evelyn Husband Thompson, finally feels free to start giving back, now that her youngest, Matthew, is 17.



She wanted to focus first on her two children and then on her marriage five years ago to Bill Thompson, a widower she met through church. Bill provided the crucial male role model that Matthew so desperately needed following the accident, she said.

Now, his mother said, 'he enjoys his private life'.

'It was tough. Overnight, my children were thrust into this international stage,' Thompson said. Having the last name 'Husband' drew grief-stricken stares for the longest time in Houston, home to Johnson Space Center.

'With the mercy of time, people really don't recognize it as much as they once did,' she said.

Her new passions, each purposefully low-profile: her neighborhood YMCA where Husband once coached children, a ministry for widows at her church, and a Christian organization that helps fatherless boys.

'These three areas right now just fit me to a T, and I know that they would really please Rick,' Thompson said this week.

'We just still miss Rick so much,' she said. 'The sweet part of it is that we have made it 10 years, that God has been faithful in our lives, and we have been able to find joy in the midst of a lot of sorrow.'

Daughter Laura, 22, is working on a master's degree in theology. Matthew is a high school sophomore.



The entire family, as well as close friends, will gather at Kennedy for Friday's memorial service, which also will honor the seven astronauts who perished during the January 28, 1986, lift-off of Challenger and the three killed on the launch pad in the January 27, 1967, Apollo 1 fire.

Thompson is a featured speaker. Anderson's widow, Sandra, also plans to attend.

The two women, who attended the same church with their late husbands, remain close. The rest of the Columbia families have drifted apart, Thompson noted, but they all have a common goal.

'Try to find a way to have beauty come out of the ashes,' she said. 'You just want to feel like you're making a difference.'

She is one of two Columbia spouses who have written memoirs about their loved ones. Kalpana Chawla's husband, Jean-Pierre Harrison, who also has remarried, published a biography titled The Edge of Time in 2011.



Clark is in Israel this week, taking part in an annual space conference held in honor of Ramon. Of all the Columbia families, he feels closest to Rona Ramon.



She became a grief counselor after her second family tragedy. The Ramons' oldest of four children, Asaf, died at 21 when his jet crashed in an Israeli training accident in 2009. One surviving son is a combat soldier in Israel; another is studying music in college. Her daughter is 15.

One of McCool's three sons is also in the military, a captain in the Marines.

Reminders of Columbia's dead are everywhere - including up in the sky.

Everything from asteroids, lunar craters and Martian hills, to schools, parks, streets and even an airport (Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport) bear the Columbia astronauts' names.



Two years ago, a museum opened in Hemphill, Texas, where much of the Columbia wreckage rained down, dedicated to 'remembering Columbia'.

About 84,000 pounds of that wreckage - representing 40 percent of NASA's oldest space shuttle - are stored at Kennedy and loaned for engineering research.

The tragedy has made Clark and his son more spiritual.

'He's a really good kid and I wonder — you always wonder — would he have been this way if he hadn't lost somebody so dear in his life.

'Maybe this was Laurel's gift to him.'