On February 1st, 2003 space shuttle Columbia broke apart with reentering the earth's atmosphere. Columbia's 28th space mission was supposed to launch on January 11th, 2001, but was delayed many times for a number of reasons for over to years. It finally launched on January 16, 2003. The space shuttle contained seven crew members. Only eighty seconds into the launch, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the shuttle propellant tank and hit the shuttle's left wing. Cameras focused on the launch showed that a piece of foam hit the shuttle but the engineers couldn't figure out where. Similar incidents have occurred three times before and hadn't caused critical damage but the engineers feared that the incident could cause a disaster. Columbia spent two weeks in orbit and they didn't do anything to fix the damage since there wasn't much they could do. On February 1 Columbia re-entered the earth's atmosphere. Ten minutes later the first signs of looming disaster appeared. Because the heat-resistant tiles covering the left wing had been damaged or were missing, wind and heat entered the wing and destroyed it. Debris began to fall over Texas. One minute later the last communication from the seven crew members was the heart. At 9 am the shuttle disintegrated over Texas, killing all seven crew members, including Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli to go to space. Weirdly enough, worms that the crew had stored aboard the shuttle survived. In August of 2003, an investigation into the disaster began. The investigation revealed that it would have been possible for the crew to have repaired the damage done to the wing or that it would have been possible for the crew to have been rescued from the shuttle before the disaster. The shuttle could have stayed in orbit until February 15 and the already planned launch of another shuttle could have been moved up to February 10, giving them a short period of time to either fix the shuttle or get rescued. After the Columbia disaster, the space shuttle program was grounded until July 26, 2005. That year the space shuttle Discovery, the program's 114th mission, was launched. In July of 2011, the shuttle program completed its final mission flown by Atlantis.
https://www.history.com/topics/space-exploration/columbia-disaster
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ReplyDeleteThis post was really interesting to read, as it went in depth into a disaster that isn't widely remembered. Scary how something as insignificant as a small piece of foam could destroy a 7 billion dollar spacecraft. Additionally, it's hard to picture what went through the astronauts' heads while the shuttle was re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, knowing that they would probably die in a couple of minutes.
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https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/33208-nasa-space-shuttles-cost-museum-worth.html
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I didn't know about this disaster at all before I read this. It is so scary how something so insignificant could bring in so much damage and suffering. I can't imagine being one of the astronauts on that shuttle.
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