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20 Years Ago: Remembering Columbia and Her Crew
"My fellow Americans, this day has brought terrible news, and great sadness to our country ... The Columbia is lost; there are no survivors."
On February 1, 2003, millions around the globe watched as the Space Shuttle Columbia re-entered Earth's atmosphere after its 113th flight — and suddenly burst apart in midair. Hours later, President George W. Bush addressed the nation and NASA vowed to complete a thorough investigation.
They discovered that just 80 seconds after the shuttle's launch on January 16, a single piece of foam insulation had broken off the shuttle tank and damaged the Columbia's left wing. And though NASA officials initially dismissed the severity of the accident and believed the shuttle could survive the damage, the opening allowed intense wind and heat to enter the wing and rip it apart from within as the shuttle re-entered Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven crew members on board. Investigators furthermore concluded that the disaster could have been avoided if the astronauts had been alerted to the damage sustained during the launch — and they could have stayed in orbit for two more weeks and been rescued by another shuttle instead of attempting a re-entry that they didn't even know was doomed from the start.
Go inside the heartbreaking story of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster by clicking the link in our profile.
On February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere over Texas and Louisiana, killing all seven astronauts on board. It was the second Space Shuttle mission to end in disaster, after the loss of Challenger and crew in 1986.
The mission, designated STS-107, was the twenty-eighth flight for the orbiter, the 113th flight of the Space Shuttle fleet and the 88th after the Challenger disaster. It was dedicated to research in various fields, mainly on board a module inside the shuttle. During launch, a piece of the insulating foam broke off from the Space Shuttle external tank and struck the thermal protection system tiles on the orbiter's left wing. Similar foam shedding had occurred during previous Space Shuttle launches, causing damage that ranged from minor to near-catastrophic, but some engineers suspected that the damage to Columbia was more serious. Before reentry, NASA managers had limited the investigation, reasoning that the crew could not have fixed the problem if it had been confirmed. When Columbia reentered the atmosphere of Earth, the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to penetrate the heat shield and destroy the internal wing structure, which caused the orbiter to become unstable and break apart.
After the disaster, Space Shuttle flight operations were suspended for more than two years, as they had been after the Challenger disaster. Construction of the International Space Station (ISS) was paused until flights resumed in July 2005 with STS-114. NASA made several technical and organizational changes to subsequent missions, including adding an on-orbit inspection to determine how well the orbiter's thermal protection system (TPS) had endured the ascent, and keeping designated rescue missions ready in case irreparable damage was found. Except for one mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, subsequent Space Shuttle missions were flown only to the ISS to allow the crew to use it as a haven if damage to the orbiter prevented safe reentry; the remaining orbiters were retired after the ISS was finished.
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