Garan and an NTSB technician spent hours playing back the tapes, which in many cases were charred or damaged. Most were either blank or contained data from the scientific experiments in Columbia’s Spacehab module. As midnight approached, Garan phoned Houston to report that he had seen nothing relevant to the accident investigation. After the call, he discovered that there was one more tape to check. He began playing it, and within a few seconds, he froze. It was the cockpit video of Columbia’s reentry. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck,” Garan said, “because we didn’t know how long the
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