Marc Flemming
Renovator
offline
Registered: Jan 2003
Local time: 11:25 AM
Location: Santa Cruz
Posts: 3663
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I received those images in an email yesterday. I did research that took really only about 30 seconds to discover what I had guessed.
The images are not the Space Shuttle Columbia. They are screenshots from a 1998 blockbuster film.
Snopes has the following to say:
Claim: Photographs show the explosive destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Status: False.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2003]
Quite hard to believe this; these are amazing! Attached are pictures of the Shuttle Explosion from an Israeli Satellite in space.
Origins: These are not photographs of the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke up over the western United Stated during re-entry on 1 February 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard. This is another example of still frames of movie effects being passed off as real photography.
These images are frames from the special effects-laden opening sequence of the 1998 whammy film Armageddon in which the Space Shuttle Atlantis is destroyed by the leading edge of debris from an comet-enclosed asteroid, thereby alerting NASA to the problem that an Earth-bound doomsday asteroid is a mere 18 days from smashing into our planet.
Even if these images were not recognizable as still frames from a theatrical movie, they could still be dismissed as "actual photographs of the Columbia's destruction" because:
- The Columbia did not "explode" all at once as depicted here. It disintegrated over hundreds of miles as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere and travelled across the western United States on approach to its scheduled landing site in Florida.
- The images shown here depict a shuttle in orbit. The Columbia disaster occurred when the ship broke up while it was streaking through the atmosphere at 12,000 MPH during re-entry, well after it had left orbit.
- There was no photographic instrument in space (on in "Israeli satellite" or elsewhere) -- trained on the shuttle at exactly the right moment -- to capture the type of images shown here.
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03-18-2003 07:34 AM
Somebody sent me those pics end of last week which I'm ashamed to say I forwarded on 
