So I have already covered the Challenger Disaster, where the Challenger Space Shuttle Broke apart on launch and killed all 7 crew members in 1986. But I thought that I would also cover another Space Shuttle disaster which happened less than 20 years later.
On February 1, 2003, the Columbia Disaster was reentering orbit when the shuttle disintegrated killing all 7 crew members and grounding all space shuttle flights for the next 2 years. An investigation was launched and it was concluded that the shuttle broke apart due to hot atmospheric gases penetrating the heat shield and destroying the internal wing structure. After that, the shuttle began to lose control and break apart.
During the launch, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the external tank and struck the left wing of the orbiter. While this had happened before and the shuttle had safely landed, this time it proved to be fatal. NASA, later on, came under a great amount of scrutiny by both Congress and the media when the public learned that NASA had previously known about this problem. While many engineers in NASA knew about the foam strike and wanted to investigate it as well as the Department of Defense offering to use their spy satellites to take a picture of the wing, those higher up in NASA still denied the offer. Therefore during the reentry, the heat shield was penetrated and the shuttle broke apart all while going over Mach 18 instantly depressuring and knocking out the crew before they died. The debris was spread out over 300 miles and took thousands of volunteers to try and gather all the pieces. The only survivors of the crash were a group of 1-millimeter worms who were sealed inside aluminum containers.
Following the disaster, NASA sent search and rescue teams to Texas but later confirmed that day that the Challenger had been destroyed and its crew lost. After the disaster, NASA decided to do checks at the ISS for shuttle damage while still in orbit in order to prevent another disaster like this from happening. The disaster also convinced the Columbia Accident Investigation Board that a new shuttle was needed and suggested that this version had now become obsolete.
https://www.history.com/topics/space-exploration/columbia-disaster
https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html
This was a very informative article, its suprising to see NASA being so stubborn about an issue as large as this. Safety should become the main priority so it isn't as shock that this model was reigned obsolete after the Columbia Disaster.
ReplyDeleteI based on your post, space travel can be very risky but rewarding. The smallest miscalculations could lead to extremely large accidents. However, it shows how far engineers have come because of how much humans have accomplished in space. They have been accurate enough to build an International Space Station.
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