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

by Michael D. Leinbach

The CAIB documented how NASA had permitted the “normalization of deviance” to put both Challenger’s and Columbia’s crews in harm’s way. The Challenger accident was the result of a known systems issue in the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters that had not been corrected. There had been partial burn-through of the O-rings on several previous missions—including the second flight of the space shuttle—but the details of the problem and the potential catastrophic outcomes never came to the attention of the launch decision makers. Lower-level engineers and managers did not allow the issue to be brought forward. Their desire to meet the launch manifest—and each organization not wanting to be the reason for standing down—trumped sound engineering practices of full and open discussion. Human and organizational failures doomed Challenger just as surely as the O-ring failure. Similar conditions led to the Columbia accident. Foam shedding from the external tank was not within the design specifications for the space shuttle, but it had happened repeatedly over the years. Based on the shuttle’s demonstrated ability to survive hits from launch debris, managers justified continuing to fly while pursuing a new design. A mission four months before Columbia’s flight also suffered damage from external tank foam, and yet the issue was not even addressed at Columbia’s flight readiness review.