Nasa’s Space Shuttles, which flew for three decades, reached breathtaking highs, but also some terrible lows.<\/p>\n
In 1986, the Challenger spacecraft suffered a catastrophic failure seconds after launching, killing all seven crew members on board.<\/p>\n
And in 2003, the Columbia shuttle broke up in the skies over Texas at the end of its mission, killing its crew of seven as well.<\/p>\n
A piece of insulating foam on Columbia’s fuel tank broke loose during launch, damaging the heat shield with devastating results.<\/p>\n
Columbia was unable to withstand the fiery re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrating as the world watched on in horror.<\/p>\n
Collins shakes her head at the memory of the disaster, and of the friends whose lives were lost.<\/p>\n
But with her job as commander, she had to pick up the mantle – she was to be in charge of the shuttle’s following flight.<\/p>\n
Did she think about quitting at that point?<\/p>\n
“People throughout the shuttle programme were counting on the commander to stick with it,” she says quietly.<\/p>\n
“I think quitting the mission would have been the opposite of brave\u2026 and I wanted to be a brave leader. I wanted to be a confident leader. I wanted to instill that confidence in other people.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nasa’s Space Shuttles, which flew for three decades, reached breathtaking highs, but also some terrible lows. In 1986,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-91079","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}