What the flight controllers did not know was that, more than a week earlier, the piece of foam debris—weighing less than two pounds—had struck the orbiter with the force of a rifle bullet, smashing a hole six inches long through the brittle carbon-carbon heat shielding on the edge of the wing. In the quarter of an hour the shuttle had spent falling through the atmosphere, first nose-up and then riding the series of steep, banked turns designed to shed speed high in the atmosphere, a jet of superhot gas had surged through this gap—and, undetected by Mission Control or the crew—begun melting the
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