20th anniversary of the Columbia shuttle tragedy

Feb. 1 () –

This February 1st marks the 20th anniversary of the NASA Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy. Its seven crew members died when the ship disintegrated upon re-entry into the atmosphere.

On this day in 2003, during the launch of Columbia’s twenty-eighth mission STS-107, a piece of foam insulation detached from the space shuttle’s external tank and struck the left wing.

Minor damage from foam detachment occurred on most previous shuttle launches, but some engineers suspected that the damage to Columbia was more severe. NASA administrators limited the investigation into the incident, reasoning that the crew could not have fixed the problem.

But when the shuttle re-entered the atmosphere, the damage caused by hot atmospheric gases penetrating and destroying the internal structure of the wing, causing the spacecraft to become unstable and gradually break up. After disintegrating, remains of the space plane fell scattered over Texas and Louisiana.

After the disaster, space shuttle flight operations were suspended for more than two years, similar to the aftermath of the Challenger crash, Wikipedia reports.

The construction of the International Space Station (ISS) was suspended; the station relied entirely on the Russian Federal Space Agency for resupply for twenty-nine months until shuttle flights resumed.

Technical and organizational changes were made, including the addition of a thorough in-orbit inspection to determine the status of the shuttle’s thermal protection system after ascent, and keep a designated rescue mission ready in case irreparable damage is found.

With the exception of one last mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, subsequent missions were just transfers to the ISS for the crew to could use it as a “safe haven”.

The crew consisted of Commander Rick D. Husband, Pilot William C. McCool, Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson, Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut; and mission specialists Kalpana Chawla (born in India), David M. Brown, and Laurel Blair Salton Clark.