alienation news

Astronauts had '90 seconds of hell' as shuttle broke up

Investigators were focusing more closely on the desperate effort of Columbia's automatic control system to hold the speed of the spacecraft stable despite an increasing amount of wind resistance from the left wing.
Teams were intensifying efforts to recover the final data from the spacecraft. Pieces of debris have been found in Arizona and California, indicating that disintegration began before the shuttle reached east Texas, where most of the wreckage fell.