On the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia was coming home. STS-107 had been a sixteen-day research mission, with the seven astronauts working in shifts around the clock on more than eighty science experiments. Columbia was sixteen minutes from its scheduled landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida when it broke apart in the skies over Texas and Louisiana. Commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, mission specialists Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark, and payload specialist Ilan Ramon — the first Israeli astronaut — were all killed.
The damage that doomed Columbia had been done sixteen days earlier, at the very start of the mission. Columbia lifted off from Launch Complex 39-A on January 16, 2003, and 81.7 seconds into the flight a piece of insulating foam broke away from the left bipod ramp of the external tank — the fitting that attached the tank to the orbiter — and struck the leading edge of the left wing. Engineers who studied the launch films saw the strike and spent days analyzing it, but requests for satellite imagery that might have shown the damage were never carried through, and managers concluded the foam strike was a routine maintenance issue rather than a threat to the crew. Foam had been shedding from the tank, and striking orbiters, for as long as the shuttle had flown.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, chaired by retired Admiral Harold W. Gehman Jr., determined the physical cause in its report of August 2003: the foam had breached a reinforced carbon-carbon panel on the left wing’s leading edge — the heat shield that protected the wing during re-entry. As Columbia re-entered the atmosphere, superheated air entered the breach and melted the wing’s internal aluminum structure. The orbiter lost control and broke up at an altitude of about 203,000 feet, traveling at eighteen times the speed of sound, scattering debris across East Texas and into Louisiana.
The board’s second verdict was the harder one, and it deliberately echoed the Challenger investigation seventeen years before. The organizational causes of the accident, the board found, were rooted in NASA’s history and culture: years of resource constraints and schedule pressure, a foam-shedding problem that had been gradually accepted as a normal risk instead of a safety-of-flight concern, and a management structure in which engineers’ doubts were not heard. In the board’s judgment, the agency’s organizational failures had as much to do with the loss of Columbia as the foam itself.
The recovery that followed was the largest ground search in American history. More than 25,000 searchers walked over two million acres of East Texas and Louisiana, recovering some 84,000 pieces of Columbia — roughly 38 percent of the orbiter by weight — along with the remains of all seven astronauts. Two of the searchers — Texas Forest Service employee Charles Krenek and contract pilot Jules “Buzz” Mier Jr. — were killed when their helicopter crashed in the Angelina National Forest in March 2003.
The shuttle fleet was grounded for two and a half years while the tank was redesigned to stop the foam shedding, a boom-mounted inspection system was developed so crews could survey the heat shield in orbit, and NASA’s safety organization was rebuilt. The shuttle returned to flight with Discovery on July 26, 2005. Columbia’s recovered debris is stored at the Kennedy Space Center, where it remains available to researchers studying how spacecraft fail — and how organizations allow them to.