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August 20 - August 24, 2022
Quality inspector Pat Adkins said: “You can’t actually put into words exactly how you feel about a spacecraft. You use it, you learn it—you know where all its little idiosyncrasies and scars are. You know its weak spots, its strong points. They were all different. If you talk about a mission and don’t talk about the spacecraft like an eighth member of the crew, it’s like trying to tell the story of Star Trek without the Enterprise.” We all knew how he felt. Columbia was just as “alive” to us as the people who flew her.
The photos of the tank were never downlinked. If engineers on the ground had seen the photos, they would have immediately noticed that a large piece of foam—about the size of a carry-on suitcase—was missing from the area at the base of the left side of the strut connecting the orbiter’s nose to the tank.
In one of the most confounding breakdowns of the management process for STS-107, the MMT refused to issue a formal request for images.
Lower-level engineers at KSC and at Boeing’s shuttle design offices in Huntington Beach, California, adamantly insisted that the foam impact had damaged the RCC. Some refused to certify that the vehicle was safe to come home. The MMT noted and then overruled their objections. The discussions were not even reflected in the MMT’s meeting minutes.
“Prove to me that it’s not safe to come home” demonstrates a very different management culture than does “prove to me that it is safe to come home.” The former attitude quashes arguments and debates when there is no hard evidence to support a concern. It allows people to talk themselves into a false sense of security. The latter encourages exploration of an issue and development of contingencies.
After refining the radar data, the analysts determined that a slow-moving object, about the size of a laptop computer, gradually drifted away from the shuttle. Its slow motion implied that it was probably not a piece of space junk or a meteor. Further tests showed that the radar properties of the object were a close match for a piece of RCC panel—possibly part of the wing’s leading edge. It appeared to separate from the shuttle after several thruster firings that changed Columbia’s orbital orientation.
The added mass of the Spacehab module meant that STS-107 would be the heaviest shuttle ever to return from orbit. That would make her reentry hotter than usual, even if everything went as planned.
Pressure to keep on schedule had combined with a complacency brought about by so many past mission successes. The same conditions were present for Apollo 1 and Challenger. And once again, a crew would pay with their lives.
Columbia had come apart in a “catastrophic event” 181,000 feet above Corsicana and Palestine, southeast of Dallas, traveling more than 11,000 mph. As the vehicle broke up, lighter pieces decelerated quickly and floated to earth. Denser objects like the shuttle’s main engines continued along a ballistic path at supersonic speed until they impacted the ground farther east. Each one of the tens of thousands of pieces of debris produced its own sonic boom as it passed overhead.
The strength of the astronauts’ religious convictions also surprised Lane at first. Then he realized that if these people “strap a million pounds of dynamite to their butts for someone else to light, they’d better have mighty deep faith.”
“Figure out who’s in charge by observing the scene. Then go up to that person and say, ‘What three things are biting you on the ass?’ And then you make it your goal to fix those three things. Then you’re part of the team.”
Workers reacted emotionally to the recognizable structures of the shuttle that came back from the field.
The mood on the hangar floor could be very somber at times. Every once in a while, someone would recognize a piece from a system they had previously worked on and then would break into tears.
There was no way to predict when or where it would happen—but at some point, even the most hardened engineer or technician would break down when confronting a piece of wreckage and thinking about what it represented to them personally and to the crew.
On May 1, NASA announced that only one single failure scenario would explain all of the evidence contained in the debris, the OEX recorder, the telemetry received in Houston, and the videos provided by the public and other sources. Something—most likely the collision with the foam from the external tank—caused a breach in the leading edge of the left wing.
The mystery of Columbia’s demise had been conclusively solved.
In the end, Columbia’s debris represented hope for the future of the program.
Every piece of debris moved the reconstruction team closer to their goal: We will find the problem, fix it, and move forward in their honor
The shock of immersion back into “normal life” and the less hectic work pace allowed months of pent-up feelings to surface. Grief, guilt, and anger were the predominant emotions.
The anniversaries of all three of NASA’s fatal spacecraft accidents fall within a one-week period between January 27 and February 1. Sean O’Keefe designated the last Thursday in January as an annual NASA Remembrance Day for the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia.
The crew—“demonstrating excellent systems knowledge by taking actions not simulated in training”—had attempted to get the hydraulic systems working again after the ship lost control. Melroy said, “They were our heroes. Somehow, it made it easier to bear, knowing they were not helpless, but instead were fighting to save the vehicle in their last moments—right up to the end.”
The four hundred–page crew survival investigation report, released in 2008, confirmed that the accident was not survivable.
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.
Selected artifacts from Columbia toured all of the NASA centers in 2008 to reinforce the agency’s safety culture. “It’s not to point fingers or lay blame,” Ciannilli said, “but people need to understand why it’s important for every single person to be vigilant every day. You can tell them that, and sometimes it doesn’t sink in. But after people see the debris, they say, ‘Wow—I really get it now.’”
The investigators blamed the loss of Columbia as much on NASA’s politics and culture at the time as on hardware failure.
The CAIB documented how NASA had permitted the “normalization of deviance” to put both Challenger’s and Columbia’s crews in harm’s way.
As with Challenger, the agency’s culture eroded over time into one of “prove to me why it’s not safe to fly.” It created a fear to speak up and be a dissenting voice, which ultimately stifled debate and killed the crew.
the CAIB quietly asked us to determine if there might have been an opportunity to launch a rescue mission to save Columbia’s crew, had we known that the ship was doomed.
It had been already too late for a rescue.
Columbia’s STS-107 accident did not end the Space Shuttle Program. However, it informed the decisions that did.
Had it not been for America’s commitments to its international partners to complete the ISS, the Space Shuttle Program could very well have ended with the loss of Columbia. Building the ISS was a matter of international treaty.
While the space shuttle was being recertified for flight, NASA moved forward with a new “Vision for Space Exploration,” announced by President George W. Bush on January 14, 2004. The Vision called for completing the ISS and retiring the space shuttle by 2010. Meanwhile, NASA would develop the new Constellation Program, which included expendable launch vehicles and the Crew Exploration Vehicle (Orion), which was a capsule like Apollo, but on a larger scale.
Implementing the space shuttle safety recommendations took two years. Meanwhile, the International Space Station remained manned, albeit with small crews who launched to and returned from the ISS aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Discovery finally lifted off the launchpad—907 days after the Columbia accident. Trouble ensued almost immediately.
While Discovery was still in space, NASA declared a moratorium on future shuttle flights until the foam shedding problem was resolved.
NASA realized that it was an engineering issue—not human error in applying the foam—which had caused the foam shedding problem.
STS-121—the second post-Columbia return-to-flight mission—launched on July 4, 2006. The external tank only lost a minor amount of foam, and it occurred after the most critical time during ascent to orbit. The flaw that had doomed Columbia was finally fixed.
With Constellation canceled and the shuttle winding down, NASA was in a bind. The Commercial Crew program was born, calling for private companies to build vehicles and operate flights to the ISS under NASA charter. However, the program was still in its infancy, and the first commercial crew flights were at least four years away. NASA decided to extend the Space Shuttle Program with one final mission to carry supplies, equipment, spare parts, and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the ISS.
With no new system to transition into, opportunities for contractors to stay in the space program were scarce. Layoffs began the next day. This had a far-reaching effect on the teams that developed over the thirty-year life of the Space Shuttle Program. Losing this extraordinary expertise was a casualty whose impact cannot be fully appreciated until the time comes to rebuild it.
The Columbia accident, with the loss of its seven crew members and the two searchers, was a profound tragedy, but many people felt that divine intervention prevented things from being worse than they were.
