space shuttle columbia disaster start date

The shuttle fleet was grounded for two and a half years and it sparked a major shift in American space flights. It was the second shuttle disaster after the Challenger explosion of 1986 which also killed the crew and led to sharp criticism of the safety culture at NASA. She was a woman of 'rare courage and fortitude who had broken away from tradition to fulfil her dream', he said.Its space program suffered a catastrophic setback when all seven astronauts were killed when the shuttle broke up on re-entering the Earth's atmosphere 20 years ago on February 1, 2003. In a memorial meeting in New Delhi yesterday, the head of India's space agency paid tribute to Kalpana Chawla, the Indian-born astronaut who died. On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia was reentering Earths atmosphere after a two-week routine mission when it exploded, killing all seven astron. There are believed to be more than 1 million objects within 1,200 miles of Earth's surface, including tools left behind by astronauts, pieces of rocket motors and debris from defunct satellites. Milt Heflin, Nasa's flight director, told the Los Angeles Times: 'Did we take a hit? That's a possibility. Investigators will also study footage of Columbia breaking up, shot from a military helicopter.Ī Nasa official put forward another theory, suggesting that a small meteorite or piece of man-made space junk may have hit Columbia while it was still in orbit, damaging the thermal tiles. The search for wreckage and clues as to what might have caused the shuttle to break up above Texas, has been expanded to Arizona and California where debris could provide evidence of the earliest stages of the disaster. The Times suggested that if water soaked into insulation or cracks around it, it could have created significant ice when the tank was filled with supercold hydrogen and liquid oxygen the day before the launch. For 23 of those days Cape Canaveral received four times the usual amount of rain, drenching the foam insulation around the 15-storey-high external tank. The New York Times reported yesterday that Nasa officials had confirmed that Columbia sat on its launching pad for 39 days -more than two weeks longer than usual. Nasa maintains that similar events during launch have occurred before without causing catastrophic problems. The primary goal of shuttle mission 51-L was to launch the second Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-B).

space shuttle orbiter Challenger, shortly after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 28, 1986, which claimed the lives of seven astronauts.

A report from Nasa engineers, two days before the doomed attempt at re-entry, warned that it could have left a 30in by seven-and- a-half-inch area of damage.īut the technicians decided that it did not present a danger to the craft. Challenger disaster, explosion of the U.S. The study, conducted by experts at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University, and financed by Nasa, also identified ice that builds up on the external fuel tank as potential debris that could strike the tiles and cause serious damage.įootage of Columbia's takeoff showed a piece of insulation foam, possibly covered with ice, peeling away from an external fuel tank and striking the left wing. It was the left wheel well where the first increases in heat were detected during Columbia's descent. I can't explain it, it's hell, hell in the sky.'īody parts have been recovered including remains of Ramon and a piece of fabric carrying a Star of David that will be sent to Israel for burial.įurther allegations that Nasa might have been able to prevent Saturday's accident came from a 1990 study, which warned that protective tiles around the shuttle's wheel wells were particularly vulnerable to damage. 'It's very difficult, as if I'm with them and I try to imagine what they went through. 'These seconds are always spinning around in my head,' he said. Eliezer Wolferman, the father of Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli in space, said in a radio interview that he was haunted by thoughts of his son's last few moments.

Space shuttle columbia disaster start date