99% Of Data Recovered From Space Shuttle Columbia Hard Disk

Well, when they say you have to pulverize a hard disk in order to make sure no one is able to recover the data, they're not kidding.

Apparently a 400 MB Seagate hard drive being used for scientific data recording aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia when it crashed in 2003 was recovered from a dry lake bed and 99% of its contents were recovered.

Yikes.

That actually put me in mind of something I was thinking as I was watching the news of the Columbia recovery efforts.

I mean, particularly from Capricorn One I always got the impression that if you lost a heat shield you'd pretty much burn to vapor.

Apparently not so.

Of course you had the mess recently with a Soyuz spacecraft basically re-entering UPSIDE DOWN and the crew certainly shaken but none the worse for wear.

Of course Columbia seemed in some ways more like a commercial airliner crash than a spaceship coming back to Earth - what with severed heads still inside helmets littering Texas roadways and whatnot.

Now we have a hard drive with 99% intact data recovered.

Fortunately, in order to spare one's credulity, the article does mention that there were two other hard drives recovered from Columbia, but they were so badly damaged no usable information could be retrieved.

Yep ... looks like you need nuclear explosives to "shred" your data these days, people ...