On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia shatters on entering the atmosphere over Texas, killing all seven crew members on board.
The ColumbiaThe mission’s 28th space mission, designated STS-107, was originally scheduled to launch on January 11, 2001, but was repeatedly delayed for various reasons for nearly two years. Columbia finally launched on January 16, 2003, with a crew of seven. Eighty seconds after launch, a piece of foam insulation detached from the shuttle’s propellant tank and struck the edge of the left wing of the shuttle.
Cameras focused on the launch sequence revealed the foam collision, but engineers were unable to determine the location and extent of the damage. Although similar incidents have occurred in three previous shuttle launches without causing critical damage, some space agency engineers have estimated that damage to the wing could lead to catastrophic failure. Their concerns were not addressed within two weeks Columbia went into orbit because NASA management believed that even though major damage had been done, there was not much that could be done to remedy the situation.
READ MORE: Space exploration: timeline and technologies
Columbia returned to Earth’s atmosphere on the morning of February 1. It wasn’t until 10 minutes later, at 8:53 a.m. – when the shuttle was 231,000 feet above the California coast and traveling at 23 times the speed of sound – that the first indications of trouble came. begin. As the heat-resistant tiles covering the leading edge of the left wing were damaged or missing, wind and heat entered the wing and caused it to explode.
The first debris began to fall to the ground in West Texas near Lubbock at 8:58 a.m. A minute later, the last communication from the crew was heard, and at 9 a.m., the shuttle disintegrated over northeastern Texas, near Dallas. Residents of the area heard a loud boom and saw smoke trails in the sky. Debris and the remains of the crew have been found in more than 2,000 locations across eastern Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. To compound the tragedy, two pilots aboard a search helicopter were killed in a crash while searching for debris. Strangely, the worms that the crew had used in a study that were stored in a can on board the Columbia survived.
In August 2003, a commission of inquiry released a report which found that this would have been possible either for the Columbia the crew to repair the damage to the wing or to save the crew from the shuttle. The Columbia could have remained in orbit until February 15 and the already planned launch of the shuttle Atlantis could have been moved as early as February 10, leaving a short window to repair the wing or bring down the crew of the Columbia.
The day after the Columbia disaster, the space shuttle program was put on hold until July 16, 2005, when the space shuttle Discovery was put into orbit.
READ MORE: Space Shuttle Challenger disaster
