Twenty years ago this Wednesday — on Feb. 1, 2003, at 8:48:39 a.m. EST — a sensor in the space shuttle Columbia's left wing first recorded unusual stress as the orbiter and its seven crew members headed back to Earth.
From the archives: Watch CBS News coverage of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003, in the video above.
And so, at 8:53:26 a.m., Columbia crossed the coast of California, right on schedule, at an altitude of 44 miles while traveling 23 times the speed of sound.Space enthusiasts across the western United States would capture dramatic video of Columbia's dawn descent, including unusual changes in the shuttle's white-hot plasma trail along with flare-like points of light separating and falling away. No one knew at the time what, if anything, the light show might mean.
But an engineering analysis based on software modeling for much smaller impacts indicated the foam strike did not pose a"safety of flight" issue. Senior managers ruled out asking for spy satellite imagery that might, or might not, have allowed a more thorough analysis. "And Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your last," astronaut Charles Hobaugh called up from Houston.As engineers would later learn, Columbia veered out of control in the seconds that followed and broke apart 38 miles above central Texas while traveling at 18 times the speed of sound. All seven astronauts, unconscious moments after the crew cabin lost pressure, were killed by blunt force trauma when the cabin came apart in the hypersonic airflow.
The Columbia disaster, like Challenger before it, triggered agency-wide soul-searching as the accident investigation proceeded. As was well known, every shuttle flight included foam hits to the orbiter's heat shield even though the agency had a clear-cut rule in place forbidding debris strikes. The rule was never strictly enforced and NASA eventually came to look at foam shedding as an"acceptable risk."
On October 31, 2002, NASA managers met at the Kennedy Space Center for a flight readiness review to discuss the shuttle Endeavour's planned launch on the next space station assembly mission. Despite what some viewed as a somewhat suspect"flight rationale," the flight readiness review ended with formal clearance to launch. Endeavour's flight did not suffer any significant foam damage and when NASA managers met on January 9, 2003, for Columbia's readiness review, foam shedding was not on the agenda.
Needing to keep space station crew and cargo flights on track after the shuttle's retirement, NASA turned to private industry to develop for-profit freighters and space taxis to deliver supplies and to ferry astronauts to and from the lab complex.
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