Roger, uh, drank…”
It is 8:59:32 a.m. in Florida on February 1, 2003, when the radio transmission of Rick Husband, captain of the space shuttle Columbia, suddenly cuts off in the middle of a sentence.
Operators at NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston were not immediately concerned about this loss of signal.
They expect at this time a short cut, the time of a handover between the antennas of a satellite and those, on the ground, of the Kennedy space center, in Florida, where the shuttle must go to land a quarter of an hour later.
At the NASA press center, not far from the landing strip, the journalists who wait do not understand why the radio silence lasts, and no explanation is given to them.
The concern rises.
At 9:02 a.m., two minutes after Captain Justin Ray's last words,
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