'Every day at NASA, we have an opportunity, we have a duty, to carry the memories of those that we lost and carry their dreams onward and upward,' NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told agency employees.
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 to close out a successful 16-day science mission.
But 16 days earlier, 81.7 seconds after liftoff, a briefcase-size chunk of lightweight foam insulation had broken away from Columbia's external tank as the spacecraft accelerated through 1,500 mph. 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.
In a dramatic test, engineers used an air cannon to fire a piece of external tank foam at a wing leading edge mockup at the same angle and velocity as the one that damaged Columbia. The impact blasted a hole in the mockup's leading edge, conclusively proving the lightweight insulation could cause catastrophic damage in a worst-case scenario.
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.
They couldn't guarantee the upcoming flight would be free of significant foam debris, but the external tank team concluded Endeavour's was"safe to fly with no new concerns ." Along with recommended technical and management changes, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board told NASA it must"conduct a vehicle recertification at the material, component, subsystem, and system levels" if the agency wanted to fly the shuttle past 2010, an undertaking that would have been enormously expensive.
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