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June 20, 2024
Columbia, being the first shuttle built, weighed more than her sister ships. After building Columbia, NASA determined that an orbiter’s aft structure did not have to be as beefy. Consequently, Columbia didn’t get some of the more sexy assignments due to her lower performance capability compared to the other orbiters. Still, she flew all her missions exceptionally well.
It will be a long time from now, if ever, that we see another vehicle with such an astounding capability.
I was confused and alarmed. I looked up at the clouds and turned to Wayne Hale, NASA’s former ascent and entry flight director, and asked him, “What do you think?” He thought for a moment and responded with a single word: “Beacons.”
She had a different tile pattern and air lock, and she carried instrumentation that the other orbiters lacked. She was eight thousand pounds heavier than her sister ships. The differences were subtle, but they were significant enough that technicians who serviced the other three orbiters sometimes became frustrated if they were called over to work on Columbia. She developed a reputation at Kennedy for being the beloved black sheep of the fleet.
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.”
Robert Hanley was at the pad, monitoring activities during the TCDT. He asked the KSC photographer to take a picture of him with the crew. That photo became one of Hanley’s most cherished keepsakes.
To thwart potential terror attacks, we kept Columbia’s scheduled launch time a secret in the weeks leading up to the mission. We had even briefly considered a scheme dubbed Operation Yankee, which would have entailed a surprise liftoff one day in advance of a publicly announced launch date.
That intensity went to a whole new level for me when I received a call on the secure line from the air force. Their tracking radar showed an unidentified object due south of the launch complex, heading due north. Estimated time of arrival at the launchpad area: T-0. Holy shit. This is it. We’re under attack.
I got on the comm loop with Rick Husband and said, “If there ever was a time to use the phrase, ‘Good things come to people who wait,’ this is the one time. From the many, many people who put this mission together: Good luck and Godspeed.”
Columbia’s nose rocked forward several feet in reaction to the off-center impulse from the engines and buildup of thrust two hundred feet below. The instant the shuttle rocked back to vertical again—6.6 seconds after main engine ignition—the twin solid rocket engines fired. Explosives shattered the hold-down bolts at the same moment, and Columbia leaped into the clear blue sky.
It was later determined that the unidentified object on radar was a cluster of Mylar party balloons with a small, empty metal box—about the size of a clock radio—dangling underneath. Riding on the winds, the balloons dipped into and out of radar coverage. They were found two days later on the shore of the Banana River approximately five miles south of the launchpad.
Standard procedure called for the tank photos to be transmitted to the ground at the end of the first day’s operations. However, the Columbia crew had a busy day ahead of them configuring the experiments aboard Spacehab. 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.
What particularly caught their eye, however, was footage from one camera showing what appeared to be a large piece of foam falling off the tank 81.7 seconds into the flight. It fell toward the Columbia’s left wing and then disintegrated into a shower of particles. The foam had clearly struck the orbiter, but it was impossible to tell from the images exactly where it had impacted or how bad any damage might be.
Ann Micklos, who represented her thermal protection system team during the video review recalled that “people’s jaws dropped. You could have heard a pin drop in that room when we saw the foam strike. We watched it on the big screen again and again and again, trying to understand where the foam impacted the orbiter.”
NASA’s ingenious heatshield for the shuttle consisted mostly of a system of silica tiles, which not only insulated the vehicle’s structure, but actually radiated heat away from the shuttle.
The tiles could not be applied as a single unit or even a few large pieces, because the orbiter’s airframe had to flex during launch and reentry as it encountered air resistance. So, the tile system ended up being a mosaic of thousands of tiles, each approximately six inches square and each with a unique shape.
Some engineers tried unsuccessfully several times to convince their colleagues that RCC was less forgiving than tile, but their objections largely went unappreciated.
Ross was recalling his experience as a crewman on Atlantis’s STS-27 mission, where hundreds of the orbiter’s tiles were heavily damaged during launch, and missing tile created a hole in the heatshield that nearly burned through on reentry.
Atlantis held the distinction of being the most heavily damaged spaceship ever to survive reentry.2
The engineer presenting the issue to the MMT was new to his position. The MMT pressed him on data to back up his conclusions about potential damage to Columbia—in essence, “prove to us there’s a problem.” He responded that the team needed more data to make an accurate assessment.
It was not public knowledge at the time, but NASA had reached out to the intelligence community to take images of Columbia in orbit and determine if other tiles were missing in critical areas not visible to the crew.
In one of the most confounding breakdowns of the management process for STS-107, the MMT refused to issue a formal request for images.
In essence, the reasoning was: “You don’t have enough data on the problem to warrant getting the intelligence community involved.” And yet there was no way for the team to gather more data without the intelligence imagery.
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.
Complacency and past experience lulled us into believing that the shuttle would get her crew home safely—just as she had done more than one hundred times previously—despite the knocks and dings.
The crew was not even told about the foam strike until January 23—one week into the mission—and then only to prepare them for a question that might arise in an upcoming press conference.
Mission Control sent an email to Rick Husband and Willie McCool informing them about the hit and immediately downplaying any worries: “Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry.”3
Had that arm, with its multiple television cameras, been available, the crew could have scanned the top and front of the wing for damage.
The MMT flatly declared that there was no “safety of flight” issue involved—that is, no risk for reentry. Any damage to the thermal protection system would just be a turnaround maintenance problem for the next mission once Columbia was back on the ground.
Unfortunately, the open bay doors obstructed the view of the front half of Columbia’s wing, where the foam was thought to have struck the ship. The resolution of the AMOS cameras was probably not good enough to have captured wing damage anyway.
That same day—the seventeenth anniversary of the Challenger accident—Rick Husband and his crew paused to remember the crews of Challenger and Apollo 1. Husband said, “They made the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives in service to their country and for all mankind. Their dedication and devotion to the exploration of space was an inspiration to each of us and still motivates people around the world to achieve great things in service to others. As we orbit the Earth, we will join the entire NASA family for a moment of silence in their memory. Our thoughts and prayers go to their families as
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Early in the postmortem of the Columbia accident, SSN analysts went back over their tracking data to see if they had obtained any information about Columbia and any objects that might have collided with her in orbit. The analysts noticed that another object was in the same orbit as Columbia beginning on the second day of the mission.
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.
Theories about the object and its origin were debated at length during the accident investigation, but its exact nature and possible relevance to Columbia’s demise will never be known.
Again, no one knew anything about this object during the mission. Could this information have changed the course of events? That will also never be known.
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.
These orange “pumpkin” suits could provide protection and oxygen in case the cabin lost pressure during reentry or the crew had to make an emergency bailout.2
She would come in to Kennedy’s Shuttle Landing Facility—the SLF—one of the world’s longest runways.
Launch and Entry Flight Director LeRoy Cain and his Flight Control team in Houston were managing the last stages of the flight. They monitored telemetry from the vehicle and communicated with the crew.
Columbia’s automated flight control system ran all aspects of the flight during reentry, banking and rolling the orbiter to control its speed and energy profile during the period of maximum heating. Rick Husband would take the control stick only in the final couple of minutes of the approach and landing sequence.
Other than one blown tire and one touchdown just short of the runway—fortunately, at the dry lake bed at Edwards—there had never been a problem with the previous 111 shuttle landings.
Streaking across the predawn sky at 15,500 mph and at an altitude of 230,000 feet, Columbia was a fast-moving, breathtakingly bright “star” followed by a beautiful glowing pink and magenta trail of ionized oxygen. Transiting the sky in only a minute, the shuttle blazed off to the southeast over Nevada and Utah.
He did not know that he was among the last of the NASA family to see Columbia in flight.
At almost precisely the same time Hanley watched Columbia fly over California, flight controllers in Houston began receiving unusual telemetry readings from the orbiter. Temperature readings from four sensors in Columbia’s left wing began to rise. Then the sensors went dead within a few seconds of one another at 8:53. At 8:58, as Columbia crossed the New Mexico-Texas line, the tire pressure readings in Columbia’s left landing gear started to look unusual. Then those sensors also dropped off-line.
Columbia was above Dallas at 8:59:32 when Commander Rick Husband’s communication to Mission Control was cut off mid-word. Mission Control also stopped receiving telemetry from Columbia at that instant.
However, this blackout lasted much longer than expected. After a few minutes, Mission Control’s astronaut communicator, Charles Hobaugh, attempted to raise Columbia several times. His repeated calls of “Columbia, Houston, comm check” went unanswered. Long periods of silence ticked by between his calls.
House windows vibrated so intensely that people feared the glass would shatter. Knickknacks fell from shelves and dressers. The nonstop booms lasted several minutes, shaking US Forest Service law officer Doug Hamilton’s brick house to its foundations. Absolutely convinced that it was Judgment Day, he opened his front door and prepared to meet Jesus.
Columbia had come apart in a “catastrophic event” 181,000 feet above Corsicana and Palestine, southeast of Dallas, traveling more than 11,000 mph.
