“Roger, uh, bu…” -Col. Rick Husband, Flight Commander of STS-107, Space Shuttle Columbia

Today, February 1st, 2018 at 13:59 UTC, exactly when this was posted, marks 15 years since NASA Mission Control in Houston lost contact with the Space Shuttle Columbia as it broke up over the United States during re-entry after its mission to low Earth orbit. They orbited for 15 days, 22 hours, 20 minutes and 32 seconds. The crew contained 5 Americans, 2 on their second spaceflights, 3 on their first, as well as the first ever Female Indian astronaut on her second spaceflight and the first ever Israeli astronaut on his first spaceflight.

This was the second Space Shuttle disaster. It was also the last spaceflight incident that lead to the death of its Astronauts as well and the first and only one during my life.

The Space Shuttle Columbia mission, Space Transport System-107 (STS-107), carried the SPACEHAB research module with many experiments to be run there, both commercial and governmental experiments from the ESA and NASA. Additionally, there were 11 other payloads that were being carried and used in orbit.

During the launch, there was a piece of foam that broke off during launch and hit the left wing of the orbiter that damaged the heat shield. The heat shield on the bottom of the Orbiter is a reusable, non-ablative heat shield that would protect the Orbiter from the immense heat that is produced during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. When the foam damaged the heat shield on the left wing, it allowed and caused gasses in the atmosphere to heat up the wings unprotected internal structure which made it unstable and eventually breaks apart into hundreds of thousands of pieces.

Generally, for the public, this shuttle mission was as routine and basically “boring” as it could be. They were not launching or repairing satellites, transporting crew or gear to the International Space Station or anything that someone outside the hardcore space community would be excited about. It was simply a science mission, fly to space, fall around the earth for a couple of weeks and once they were done, glide back home and return the data to the people on the ground to carry out the following analysis and studies on the experiments they ran while in space.

Unfortunately, this wouldn’t go down as the 112th successful, an unexciting but ultimately successful, Space Shuttle mission and instead it is remembered as the 2nd catastrophic failure of a Space Shuttle and put a halt to all Space Shuttle missions for over two years. During these two years, there were investigations on everything that went wrong and the ISS had to rely entirely on ROSCOSMOS(The Russian Space Agency) for personnel and gear transport for over 29 months while the Space Shuttles were all grounded with all launches put on hold.

The next launch of a Space Shuttle would be STS-114, Space Shuttle Discovery at the end of July 2005. That missions had 3 jobs, Fight safety tests, an ISS resupply, and more scientific tests.

Space Shuttle Program

The Shuttle program was originally supposed to run for about 15 years but like with many things in space exploration and travel it was extended well beyond the 15 years and finished after 30 years of service. The shuttle managed to accomplish many things despite the immense criticism that was laid upon it. Obviously, it did a lot for studying and scientific experiments in Low Earth Orbit but the most memorable and valuable thing, in my, and many others opinions that was accomplished by the shuttle was the launch, repair and general service of the Hubble Space Telescope(HST). If the HST was launched traditionally, on the top of a rocket and deployed that way. There would have been massive troubles attempting to repair the mirror to make it properly focused. With the Space Shuttle, it was much simpler to travel to space, park nearby the telescope grab it and repair the mirror. Without the Shuttle program there would have been, at best, a significantly longer delay between deployment and repair, if the repair would have even been possible and without this repair mission, the Hubble telescope would have been relatively useless for the deep space observations and all the brilliant images that it is known for.

The initial goal of the Space Shuttle was to be a reusable vehicle to maintain the United States space capabilities after the Saturn V rocket had served its purpose and was seen as too powerful for the new goals of the United States following the crewed lunar missions. The reusability was supposed to allow for a planned 12 launches a year for 15 years and it was expected to cost $54 Billion total with about $54 Million per flight, however, the extended 30 years, the program ended up costing $196 billion and close to about $450 Million per flight.

Like many things with space travel, the Space Shuttle was over budget and behind schedule. The is something that started early and continued throughout the whole program leading to much criticism.

Me and the Shuttle

Yes, the Space Shuttle had a lot of issues, almost from day one, actually, some would argue that the Space Shuttle program had issues from the moment that someone first had the idea. With or without its problems, it was the first space vehicle of my life. I missed the Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo programs, there wasn’t a lot of information and coverage of the Russian Soyuz missions and so the Space Shuttle was what I grew up with and romanticized about. When I dreamt as a kid about being in space, I imagined piloting this stubby short-winged plane strapped to the side of a huge orange tube that just looked weird but it was a spaceship and it would have been my spaceship. It was a plane and unlike an Apollo capsule, it glided through the air for a relatively soft landing on a runway instead of just smashing into the water like a normal capsule would in the past and as we will see, in the future.

The future

Since the 2011 retirement of the Shuttle, the United States has still not regained its capability to launch crew into space. Relying for the last 7 years on the Russian Soyuz rocket to get our astronauts to the International Space Station. NASA has many plans to regain the space fairing capabilities of the United States with the Commercial Crew program but that is facing many setbacks and will not get off the ground until at least 2019 at the earliest.

More about Columbia

The Atlantic has an article about the Space Shuttle Columbia called Columbia’s Last Flight which is one of the best articles I have ever read on any topic and it goes in depth about what was happening behind the scenes and during the investigations after the incident and it is an absolute must read for anyone interested.