“Colombia, this is Houston […] We didn’t get the last (message)…”. Response from Captain Rick Husband: “Received, mm…”.
Columbia just sent its final message. Communication with Earth is abruptly cut off. Minutes later, the bolide, which was scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida 15 minutes later, disintegrates in an orange glow visible 61 km below it. A rain of red-hot metal falls on parts of Texas and Louisiana.
Seven astronauts die in the explosion
“It’s bright orange, yellow, around the nose” of the shuttle
A video cassette later found among the rubble immortalized them, carelessly taped to the shuttle’s portholes, ten minutes before the accident. Images turn hazy and then black four minutes before Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, begins to detect problems with Columbia’s instrumentation. “It’s bright orange, yellow, all around the shuttle’s nose,” one of them comments. Columbia then enters the atmosphere and surrounds itself with a very high temperature plasma ball. Then everything happens very quickly. According to NASA’s final report, the crew barely had time to realize the presence of a problem before losing consciousness under the influence of cabin depressurization. With the result we know.
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America in shock
We are convinced that the management practices of the Space Shuttle program (Columbia) were as much a cause of the accident as the insulation that hit the left wing. The Thirteen Investigators of the Committee of Inquiry (CAIB)
Witnessed live on television, the disaster traumatized America, which was already doubting its space program. The authorities are launching investigations to clarify the causes of the accident. Seven months later, the 250-page report by the Board of Inquiry’s (CAIB) thirteen investigators points to NASA’s responsibility.
Launch from Columbia, January 16, 2003.
NASA AFP Archive
Columbia entered service in 1981 and took off from Cape Canaveral in mid-January 2003 on its 28th flight, an in-orbit science mission. According to the investigation, 81.7 seconds after takeoff, a piece of insulation – a thermal insulation foam – detached from the main tank and hit the edge of the left wing. The fragment weighs only a hundred grams, but the shock with a relative speed of several hundred kilometers per hour damaged the thermal protection system. Despite repeated requests for technicians to inspect, the schedule is maintained as is.
The Columbia crew during atmospheric re-entry.
NASA screen/video capture
Sixteen days later, this same breakthrough admits very hot gases (more than 1,000 degrees) produced by the shuttle’s friction with the upper layers of the atmosphere. The left wing’s aluminum structure began to melt and then broke. The report also notes that the current astronaut protection system includes a parachute, but it must be operated manually. NASA recommends automatic opening systems for the future.
Debris from Colombia, February 3, 2003.
AFP archive
The end of the space shuttles
The Columbia blast has the effect of slowing down Washington’s investments in space and marks the end of the American space shuttle program, the last flight of which will be on July 21, 2011 with Atlantis.
A memorial to the Columbia victims at the Space Center in Houston, Texas February 7, 2003.
AFP archive
As pioneers, the United States was the first to construct a reusable space shuttle capable of launching large satellites into low orbit and returning them to Earth. Six shuttles have been designed since 1976. Of all the nearly 2,000-ton spacecraft built by NASA, only the Endeavor, Atlantis, and Discovery remain today. Exhibited in American museums, they were retired in 2010 due to their age.
For almost ten years, until the first launch of the Crew Dragon C206 capsule by the private company SpaceX on May 30, 2020, named by astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken in honor of the shuttle Endeavor, Russia is the only one in the Is able to go back and forth to the International Space Station (ISS) with their Soyuz spacecraft.