Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

by Michael D. Leinbach

The four hundred–page crew survival investigation report, released in 2008, confirmed that the accident was not survivable. Rather than the CAIB’s general finding that plasma intrusion caused the left wing to fail, the survivability study presented a detailed analysis and timeline of how Columbia actually broke up. The proximal cause of the accident was the loss of hydraulic pressure after the system was breached by plasma in the left wing. This caused the ship’s control surfaces to stop responding to steering commands. Columbia went into a flat spin. The crew knew their ship was in trouble. They tried to save it after it went out of control, during a period that lasted at most thirty seconds. The ship broke up due to aerodynamic forces, starting with the left wing. A breach in the crew module caused it to depressurize rapidly, shortly after the body of the ship came apart. The crew lost consciousness almost instantaneously. They did not even have time to lower their helmet visors.