Columbia broke up over Texas during re-entry on February 1, 2003, killing all on board. Anderson, all mission specialists and Ilan Ramon, payload specialist representing the Israeli Space Agency. Husband, mission commander Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist and William C. The crew of Space Shuttle Columbia's mission STS-107. 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. It was 8:59:32 a.m.Īs 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. But again, the transmission was interrupted. "And Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your last," astronaut Charles Hobaugh called up from Houston. Husband called down to mission control, presumably to ask about the tire pressure, but his transmission was cut off. 5 minutes and 45 seconds after that initial reading was stored in the data recorder - the first indication of trouble showed up in telemetry reaching flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston: a loss of temperature readings from hydraulic lines in Columbia's left wing.įour minutes later, Columbia's backup flight computer displayed a message in the cockpit indicating a loss of left main landing gear tire pressure readings. Using a hand-held video camera, astronaut Laurel Clark recorded the pink glow out Columbia's cockpit windows as the shuttle began encountering the heat of re-entry high above the Pacific Ocean. In any case, commander Rick Husband, pilot Willie McCool, mission specialists Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, David Brown and Israeli guest astronaut Ilan Ramon were unaware of any problems as they returned to Earth, marveling at the pink glow out the cockpit windows as atmospheric friction built up in the moments before that first unusual sensor reading. Senior managers ruled out asking for spy satellite imagery that might, or might not, have allowed a more thorough analysis. Three frames from a NASA tracking camera show foam separating from the shuttle Columbia's external tank (left), tumbling toward the left wing just under the orbiter's nose (center) and then emerging from under the wing as a cloud of debris.Įngineers could not determine exactly where the foam had hit, and Columbia was not equipped with a robot arm to enable an inspection in space.īut an engineering analysis based on software modeling for much smaller impacts indicated the foam strike did not pose a "safety of flight" issue. Later analysis would show the foam impacted the underside of the left wing at a relative velocity of more than 500 mph, instantly disintegrating. Tracking cameras showed the foam disappearing under the shuttle's left wing and emerging an instant later as a cloud of fine particles. The roar of liftoff shattered the still of night over the Kennedy Space Center and surrounding marshlands, and briefly turned the dark skies bright as day as Endeavour arced out over the Atlantic Ocean on its way to orbit.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. Endeavour's three main engines burned more than 500,000 gallons (1.9 million litres) of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen on the sprint to orbit, assisted by two solid rocket boosters that were jettisoned on the way up. In addition to a storage module for Japan's double-decker bus-sized Kibo space laboratory, the main part of which will be hoisted to space in late May, Endeavour is carrying a Canadian-built two-armed robotic system, called Dextre. That will be the longest visit to the orbital outpost, a $100-billion project that is finally living up to its multinational billing with the addition last month of a European space laboratory and now Japan's. Endeavour's crew is scheduled to spend 16 days in orbit - and 12 days at the space station. Soaring on a white pillar of light on a rare night launch, the newest of NASA's three remaining shuttles reached orbit and a top speed of just over 17,000 miles per hour (28,000 km per hour) around eight minutes after liftoff. space shuttle Endeavour blasted off from its Florida home port on Tuesday to deliver the first part of a huge Japanese laboratory to the International Space Station.
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