I was quite young and still at school when the Columbia shuttle disintegrated on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. 9/11 had happened not long ago and there was war in Afghanistan and Iraq so it kinda passed me by, but I do remember the footage taken from the ground of the suttle breaking up. It's one of those images that stays with you (like the planes on 9/11 or the challenger disaster, even though I was not alive for the latter I remember seeing it on TV when I was young and the memory is very vivid).
This short series does a fantastic job of telling the story of what happened, with footage of both technical aspects of the shuttle program and also the human stories of the crew and their families. We see what they saw as they walked along the gantry into the shuttle, and as they are being strapped in. We experience the wait between this moment and the moment the engines burst into life as they start their journey into space.
This series is also a study of safety failure in a complex system. As is almost always the case, catastrophic failure was caused by multiple connected events in multiple different sub-systems, and there was not enough hollistic thinking about the shuttle and what was expected from it as a whole. The world has changed a lot in the last 20 years, and a lot of work has been done to improve safety in complex systems (including at NASA itself), but this program shows so well the human cost when things go wrong.
I highly recommend you watch this series, it's fantastic, extremely sad, and "not a minute is wasted throughout the three hours" (The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth review, Lucy Mangan, The Guardian)
