Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: SPECIAL EDITION: Columbia

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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: February 1, 2013 7:36:49 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: SPECIAL EDITION: Columbia - 10 Years Later (Feb. 1, 2013)...

KYLE NOTE: In no way shall I try to capture every story of today for this 88-page "special edition." Seems there's something about the 10^th year separating a tragedy that especially grabs the attention of the press for some reason. But maybe it's because Columbia is the most recent, the most memorable. But we don't forget any loss, really. No matter how much time passes…
-KjH

Columbia – Ten Years Later
Friday – February 1, 2013

Columbia (STS-107) February 1, 2003
"Hail Columbia" & crew (in memory 10 years ago today)

HEADLINES AND LEADS

Columbia's 7 astronauts were close, diverse crew

Marcia Dunn - Associated Press

The seven astronauts who died aboard space shuttle Columbia 10 years ago were husbands, fathers, wives and a mother. Military pilots, doctors and engineers. Born in the United States, Israel and India. "It's amazing to me how cohesive they were with the diverse backgrounds that they had," said the widow of Columbia's last commander, Evelyn Husband Thompson. "They had a genuine affection for each other that was just tremendous. And they had fun together. I mean, what a blessing at whatever job you're in, to have fun with your co-workers," she said in a phone interview from Houston this week.

"It broke up! The shuttle broke up!": Remembering Columbia

William Harwood - CBS News

As some might reckon it, the beginning of the end for NASA's space shuttle program came 10 years ago Friday, at 8:48:39 a.m. EST on Saturday, Feb. 1, 2003. That's when strain gauge V12G9921A, a sensor in the shuttle Columbia's left wing, began registering a small but unusual increase in stress as the spaceplane descended from orbit to close out its 28th mission. Twenty seconds later, a temperature sensor followed suit. Over the next few minutes, a shuttle data recorder captured a cascade of alarming sensor readings and failures on the left side of the spacecraft that clearly indicated a rapidly unfolding catastrophe.

Ten years since loss of space shuttle Columbia

Marcia Dunn - Associated Press

He was just 8 when NASA lost the space shuttle Columbia and he lost his astronaut mom. Now, 10 years later, Iain Clark is a young man on the cusp of college with a master's rating in scuba diving and three parachute jumps in his new log book. His mother, Dr. Laurel Clark, loved scuba and skydiving. So did her flight surgeon husband and Iain's dad, Dr. Jonathan Clark, who since the Feb. 1, 2003 accident, has been a crusader for keeping space crews safe. Altogether, 12 children lost a parent aboard Columbia. The youngest is now 15, the oldest 32. One became a fighter pilot in Israel, just like his father, and also died tragically in a crash. The oldest son of the pilot of Columbia is now a Marine captain with three young children of his own. The commander's daughter is a seminary student.

Space shuttle Columbia's second life - as a cautionary tale

Irene Klotz - Reuters

Space shuttle Columbia's flying days came to an abrupt and tragic end on February 1, 2003, when a broken wing gave way, dooming the seven astronauts aboard. Although Columbia now lies in pieces, its mission is not over. The recovered wreckage, painstakingly retrieved from Texas and Louisiana for months after the accident, was preserved for a unique archive and education program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Columbia still vivid for Texans who saw, heard debris hit

Mike Tolson - Houston Chronicle

The first day of February 2003 broke cool and clear over most of Texas - a perfect Saturday morning without a cloud in sight or a breeze to speak of - so there was scant reason to look up … until there was. The sun had barely topped the treeline when people in the Piney Woods heard what some later described as a sonic boom. It was 8 a.m. Those who instinctively gazed into the morning sky noticed a sudden strangeness. Some saw a streaking flash of light, others a vapor trail or odd wisp of a cloud. Something was going on, albeit more than 39 miles above them.

10 years after Columbia disaster, reflections on lessons learned, remaining risks

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

Space shuttle landings were supposed to be routine. And until Feb. 1, 2003, they were — at least to most Americans. Much like the 1986 Challenger disaster, that expectation of normalcy was a big reason why Columbia's disintegration over the southwestern United States so shocked and horrified the nation. Adding to that agony was the eventual realization that, once again, human failings were a root cause of why seven astronauts were dead.

NASA marks 10th anniversary of Columbia disaster
Agency learned management lessons from investigation of Columbia explosion 10 yrs ago

William Welch - USA Today

Ten years ago Friday, a crowd of several hundred people gathered at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the anticipated landing of space shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven following 16 days in space. The craft and its occupants never arrived. "All of a sudden we realized things were not as they were supposed to be,'' recalls Wayne Hale, retired shuttle program manager. "We were in a state of shock, quite frankly.''

10 years later, loss of Columbia and crew has changed NASA forever

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

Ten years ago today, NASA astronaut Jerry Ross was in a convoy at the north end of Kennedy Space Center's shuttle runway, awaiting the scheduled 9:16 a.m. arrival of Columbia and its seven-member crew. Eileen Collins, set to command the nation's next shuttle mission just a month later, was at home in Houston watching live NASA TV coverage of Columbia's atmospheric re-entry with her son, Luke, age 2 at the time. Then 16 minutes before touchdown, as Columbia soared over Texas, Mission Control lost telemetry and voice communications with the orbiter. Soon tracking data also disappeared.

Space Shuttle Columbia Launched on Tragic Mission 10 Years Ago

Mike Wall - Space.com

NASA's space shuttle Columbia blasted off 10 years ago Jan. 16 on a mission that turned out to be the last for the orbiter and its seven-astronaut crew. Columbia broke apart upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003. The tragic accident destroyed the shuttle, claimed the lives of all seven astronauts aboard and signaled the beginning of the end for NASA's venerable shuttle program, which retired in July 2011 after 30 years of orbital service.

For NASA, a Somber Week of Space Disaster Anniversaries

Tariq Malik - Space.com

This week marks a somber time for NASA, with the anniversaries of three U.S. spaceflight disasters recalling the memories of those astronauts who made the ultimate sacrifice in the pursuit of space exploration. On Friday, NASA will pause to honor the memories of the three astronauts killed in the Apollo 1 fire of 1967, the seven astronauts killed in the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986, and the seven astronauts who died when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003. This year's Day of Remembrance ceremony is especially poignant — it will mark the 10th anniversary of the Columbia disaster that led to the end of the space shuttle program.

Remembering The Brightest Lessons From NASA's Darkest Days
Three worst tragedies all happened this week-- 46, 27 & 10 years ago

Rebecca Boyle - Popular Science

The days between January 27 and February 1 are the most difficult week of the year for NASA. The annual space program shiva, honoring the three disasters that claimed 17 astronauts' lives, is always fraught with emotion and regret. But it's also a time to think about what those astronauts were doing and why, and that means it's also a time to be proud, and to remember what we have learned since their loss.

How the Columbia Shuttle Disaster Changed Spacecraft Safety Forever

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

Ten years after the devastating Columbia space shuttle accident that took the lives of seven astronauts, NASA is building a new spacecraft that will take humans farther into space than ever before, and will incorporate the safety lessons learned from the disaster that befell the agency Feb. 1, 2003.

NASA, Texas towns mark Columbia disaster

Matt Smith & John Zarrella - CNN

It started as a dot -- a bright, white star that raced across the Southwest. Over Texas, the dot became a streak that thickened, then spawned smaller streaks -- "little sparkles," Linda Steed recalled. Then came the sound -- "a big, rolling boom," she said. "The dog started barking like crazy." A decade ago, 200,000 feet above Steed's driveway in Nacogdoches, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on re-entry. All seven astronauts aboard died. Friday, NASA marks the anniversary with tributes to the crew of Columbia and 10 other astronauts lost in the space agency's two previous fatal accidents -- the 1986 explosion that destroyed Columbia's sister ship Challenger, and the launch pad fire that killed Apollo 1's three-man crew in 1967. All three anniversaries fall within a week -- the Apollo fire on January 27, Challenger on January 28 and Columbia on February 1.

Texas town has its memories – but no memorial

Scott Powers - Orlando Sentinel

As NASA officials gather to commemorate the Columbia disaster – in front of a memorial to the seven-member crew of the space shuttle at Kennedy Space Center – the residents of Nacogdoches, Texas, will have their own ceremony. But they still don't have a memorial. Ten years ago, death and destruction literally rained down on the small towns, forests, lakes, swamps and farms of East Texas after Columbia disintegrated during re-entry on its final mission. In places like Palestine, Nacogdoches, San Augustine and Hemphill, Texas, the efforts to recover debris – some as big as a landing gear or nose cone, others as small as a bolt or a shard of insulating tile -- became an intimate part of people's lives for months. Miraculously, not a single person was hit by the debris.

The crew of the space shuttle remains in East Texans' memories

Dave Berry - Tyler Morning Telegraph

When the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated 35 miles overhead that Saturday morning, rattling our house, my wife rushed in to say something had exploded. Eerie howls of a family of coyotes, usually quiet that early, were replaced by barking neighborhood dogs as an unsettling crackling noise faded away. No smoke appeared on the horizon, just a dirty streak across the southern sky. CNN was reporting NASA had lost contact with the shuttle. In minutes, they announced that Columbia was overdue and "could not possibly be flying." We knew the worst had happened. Editors don't have the luxury of watching and grieving. Within minutes, a dozen calls were made or fielded. Assignments Editor Danny Mogle was rounding up journalists and heading them to the office. Most were already on the way.

Part 1
Columbia's Final Flight - 'Just a Research Mission'

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org

Early in the spring of 2001, the mission of STS-107 first sparked my interest, for two reasons. One was the fact that its seven-strong crew was relatively inexperienced—like that of Challenger, none had flown more than once in space—and the other was that it represented the first "stand-alone" scientific research flight performed by the shuttle for several years. With most of the missions around it devoted to International Space Station construction, Commander Rick Husband's flight seemed oddly out of place. "Why do you want to write about that one?" came the reply from the magazine Spaceflight, when I proposed an article on STS-107. "It's just a research mission?" Nonetheless, Spaceflight graciously supported my request to interview Husband and the article was published in October 2001. More than a decade later, I am glad that I took such an interest in STS-107, the final flight of Columbia and a mission which suddenly and drastically altered humankind's trajectory in space as few other missions have ever done, for better and for worse.

'Rick was worth it':
Amarillo astronaut's family reclaims private life in wake of public tragedy

Karen Smith Welch - Amarillo Globe-News

Evelyn Husband-Thompson had to steel herself to do the interviews she would inevitably be asked to do in the days approaching the 10th anniversary of the space shuttle Columbia tragedy. Ten years ago today, Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry over Texas, killing 45-year-old Amarillo astronaut Rick Husband, the mission commander, and his six-member crew.

Astronaut's father recalls Space Shuttle Columbia disaster

Adam Young - Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

From the teachers who protected children in the halls of Sandy Hook Elementary last month to the astronauts who perished in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster nearly 10 years ago, Barry McCool said he knew they had one defining character in common. "We're talking about heroes here," McCool said. "We have a lot of heroes today. I happen to be lucky enough I have one I can call my son."

Columbia pilot's parents recall crash 10 years ago

Associated Press

One morning nearly 10 years ago, Barry McCool watched his son's space shuttle fly more than 40 miles above his Las Vegas home. He went back inside to watch a live computer feed from Houston, home of NASA's Mission Control. It wouldn't be long until Columbia landed in Florida. But it never did. The shuttle piloted by his son William McCool disintegrated high over Texas during its descent back to Earth. All seven crew members died on Feb. 1, 2003.

Part 1
10 years ago: America lost seven heroes; McCool's lost oldest son
Remembering Lubbock's Willie McCool and the shuttle Columbia crew

Terry Greenberg - Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

Barry McCool watched his son's spacecraft fly past more than 40 miles above his Las Vegas home. It was early morning, Feb. 1, 2003. He went back in the house. His television carried the news. On his computer, he watched a live feed from NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston. It wouldn't be long until Space Shuttle Columbia — piloted by his son, Willie McCool — landed in Florida. It never did.

Israeli astronaut's widow carries on after tragedy
It's a day Israelis will never forget: when national pride abruptly turned to national tragedy

Aron Heller - Associated Press

It's a day Israelis will never forget: Feb. 1, 2003, when national pride abruptly turned to national tragedy. People gathered around their TV screens to watch the anticipated return of Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, from a 16-day journey in space aboard the American Columbia shuttle. A hero's welcome awaited, but as people watched the live broadcast, unbelieving, the shuttle craft disintegrated upon re-entering the atmosphere, killing Ramon and his six crewmates. For Ramon's widow, Rona, it was the first in a pair of cruel blows. Six years later, her oldest son, Asaf, who had followed in his father's footsteps to become an Israeli air force fighter pilot, was killed in a training accident.

Space draws Israeli students in memory of Ramon
Visitors inspired by Israeli astronaut who died aboard Columbia

Jennifer Sangalang - Florida Today

What's one way to get students interested in pursuing science and technology? Send them to the Kennedy Space Center. About 44 Israeli high school students and three teachers from Bersheva, Israel, are visiting Brevard through Feb. 6 as part of an exchange program. They attend the same school, Makif Gimel, that Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon graduated from. Had he lived through the shuttle Columbia tragedy, which marks its 10th anniversary on Friday, Ramon would have spread the message in Israel about the importance of science and technology. These kids and others before them in this program will do that in his honor.

How Worms Survived NASA's Columbia Shuttle Disaster

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

When the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated upon re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board, NASA scientists expected that the 80 science experiments aboard the shuttle were destroyed as well. But in the days after the tragic Columbia shuttle disaster on Feb. 1, 2003, scientists began realizing that wasn't the case. Various salvageable experiments were recovered from the wreckage, including a live group of 1 millimeter-long roundworms, or nematodes, known as Caenorhabditis elegans.

Tragedy's lessons continue to teach

John Kelly - Florida Today (Commentary)

Ten years later, the lessons of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven astronauts resonate. NASA will focus its efforts on honoring the fallen explorers, and that's appropriate. Commander Rick Husband and his crew are heroes for the cause of space exploration, and their sacrifice is worthy of remembering. Also worth remembering a decade after the accident and another decade from now are these lessons, since those charged with making space flight as safe as possible for humans must be diligent in dealing with known safety issues:

Remembering the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia

Sen. John Cornyn - Houston Community Newspapers (Commentary)

Ten years ago this week, on February 1, 2003, America and the world received the tragic news that Mission Control at Johnson Space Center had lost contact with the Space Shuttle Columbia while it was crossing the heavens at nearly 15,000 mph. At approximately 9:00 a.m., within seconds of the last communication received from the Columbia crew, residents in Texas and Louisiana reported hearing a loud noise and seeing debris falling from the skies. When the shuttle failed to land on schedule at 9:16 a.m., NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe notified President George W. Bush and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. The flag mounted on the countdown clock at Kennedy Space Center was lowered to half-staff. Soon after, the President ordered the nation's flags to fly at half-staff and in a live television address, alerted the nation, "The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home."

Ten years later east Texas remembers Columbia

Beth Kassab - Orlando Sentinel

Ten years later, the moment I remember most about the Columbia shuttle tragedy took place in a Sunday school class at First Baptist Church in tiny Alto, Texas. The half-dozen congregants silently passed around photos of pieces of the space shuttle that fell there the day before, when Columbia broke up as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. A piece of metal the size of a shoe box in a woman's front yard. A scrap of what looked like scorched heat shield, in the middle of a country road. There was a deep reverence as volunteer firefighter Jeff Duplichain shared the photos he had taken of the debris he helped catalog.

Remembering space shuttle Columbia
10 years ago, shuttle Columbia met its fiery end over Texas skies. We pause...

Houston Chronicle (Editorial)

Why is it that the most awful events never fail to remind us precisely where we were and what we were doing - right down to the smallest detail - when they burst in on life's quotidian? Pearl Harbor was that moment for the Greatest Generation. For baby boomers, it was the Kennedy assassination. And for Americans older than their late teens in 2013, especially Houstonians, the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia, 10 years ago, is seared in memory.

If Space Shuttle Is Doomed, Do You Tell the Crew?

Seth Borenstein - Associated Press

A NASA top official wrestled with what he thought was a hypothetical question: What should you tell the astronauts of a doomed space shuttle Columbia? When the NASA official raised the question in 2003 just days before the accident that claimed seven astronauts' lives, managers thought — wrongly — that Columbia's heat shield was fine. It wasn't. Columbia, NASA's oldest shuttle, broke apart over Texas 10 years ago Friday upon returning to Earth after a 16-day mission. But the story of that question — retold a decade later — illustrates a key lesson from the tragedy, says Wayne Hale, a flight director who later ran the shuttle program for NASA. That lesson: Never give up. No matter how hopeless.

Columbia tragedy: "I think the crew would rather not know."

Eric Berger - Houston Chronicle's SciGuy

Friday marks the 10th anniversary of the disintegration of space shuttle Columbia. To mark this somber event, one of the central figures in the shuttle program, Wayne Hale, has been writing a series of lucid blog posts about his recollections of the tragedy, the causes that led to it, and much more. At the time of the launch, Hale was training to become Launch Integration Manager, and in 2005 he became the space shuttle Program Manager. Wayne has graciously agreed to let me cross-post some of his work here as a guest blog post, and I will be doing so during the next couple of days. This post talks about the space agency's review (or lack thereof) concerning the tile damage sustained during liftoff…

And finally, an article from the New York Times dated April 13, 1981 – the day after Columbia launched on STS-1…

Bringing the Craft Back Down: A Time of High Risk

John Noble Wilford - New York Times (April 13, 1981)

APE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Getting a spaceship up is a task of near-maximum risk and anxiety. All the fire, thunder and vibration carry a message of manifest peril. But getting a spaceship down can be equally risky, and never more so than in the case of the space shuttle Columbia. If a significant number of the spacecraft's heat-protective tiles are missing or damaged, the consequences may be unpredictable. But if the tiles are sound, the Columbia's descent will be a remarkable feat of engineering enterprise and precision.
__________

COMPLETE STORIES

Columbia's 7 astronauts were close, diverse crew

Marcia Dunn - Associated Press

The seven astronauts who died aboard space shuttle Columbia 10 years ago were husbands, fathers, wives and a mother. Military pilots, doctors and engineers. Born in the United States, Israel and India.

"It's amazing to me how cohesive they were with the diverse backgrounds that they had," said the widow of Columbia's last commander, Evelyn Husband Thompson.

"They had a genuine affection for each other that was just tremendous. And they had fun together. I mean, what a blessing at whatever job you're in, to have fun with your co-workers," she said in a phone interview from Houston this week.

A brief look at the seven Columbia astronauts and their families:
___

Commander Rick Husband, 45, an Air Force colonel from Amarillo, Texas, who was making his second space shuttle flight. Wife Evelyn lives in Houston with 17-year-old son Matthew, a high school sophomore, and new husband Bill Thompson. Daughter Laura, 22, is a seminary student pursuing a master's degree in theology. The ordeal, and the family's faith in God, prompted Evelyn to write a memoir about Rick in 2004 titled "High Calling."
___

Co-pilot William McCool, 41, a Navy commander from Lubbock, Texas, who was making his first space shuttle flight. Wife Lani and three sons, now in their 20s and 30s. The oldest, Sean, is a Marine captain with three children of his own. Middle son Christopher is a photographer who works with high school debate teams, according to family. The youngest, Cameron, is finishing a master's degree in fine arts in New York.
___

Flight engineer Kalpana Chawla, 40, an Indian-born engineer who was making her second space shuttle flight. Husband Jean-Pierre Harrison remarried and has a young son. He runs a publishing company in Los Gatos, Calif., and, in 2011, wrote what he calls the authoritative biography of his first wife, "The Edge of Time." He reveals how Kalpana's birthdate was misrepresented to be a year earlier than it actually was, so she could start school sooner at her insistence.
___

Payload commander Michael Anderson, 43, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force from Spokane, Wash., and one of NASA's few early black astronauts. It was his second flight; he traveled to Russia's Mir space station in 1998. Wife Sandra still lives in Houston. Daughters Kaycee and Sydney are now 19 and 21.
___

Dr. Laurel Clark, 41, a Navy captain and medical doctor from Racine, Wis., who was making her first space shuttle flight. Husband Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon. Son Iain, 18, will graduate from boarding school in Arizona this spring. Clark has dedicated himself to improving space crew safety, and helped bring skydiver Felix Baumgartner back alive from a 24-mile-high jump from the stratosphere last fall.
___

Dr. David Brown, 46, a Navy captain and medical doctor who grew up in Virginia and was making his first space shuttle flight. He was single.
___

Ilan Ramon, 48, a fighter pilot who became the first Israeli in space with Columbia's launch. Wife Rona lives in Israel. Their oldest son, Asaf, became a fighter pilot like his father and died, at age 21, in a 2009 training accident. One surviving son is a combat soldier in Israel; another is studying music in college. The youngest, a daughter, is 15. Rona Ramon went back to school after her son's death. She works as a grief counselor.

"It broke up! The shuttle broke up!": Remembering Columbia

William Harwood - CBS News

As some might reckon it, the beginning of the end for NASA's space shuttle program came 10 years ago Friday, at 8:48:39 a.m. EST on Saturday, Feb. 1, 2003.

That's when strain gauge V12G9921A, a sensor in the shuttle Columbia's left wing, began registering a small but unusual increase in stress as the spaceplane descended from orbit to close out its 28th mission. Twenty seconds later, a temperature sensor followed suit.

Over the next few minutes, a shuttle data recorder captured a cascade of alarming sensor readings and failures on the left side of the spacecraft that clearly indicated a rapidly unfolding catastrophe.

It played out in a brutal rush. Just 10 minutes and 53 seconds after that initial strain gauge reading, as the shuttle streaked across the heartland of America, commander Rick Husband was cut off in mid transmission, presumably when the spaceplane veered out of control at Mach 18, breaking apart less than a minute later.

It was 9:59:32 a.m. It would take another two-and-a-half minutes or so for the harsh reality of Columbia's demise to reach the Kennedy Space Center where family members, NASA managers, the ground support team, reporters and photographers were standing by for the shuttle's homecoming.

I was covering Columbia's re-entry from the CBS News bureau at the Florida spaceport, polishing up a post-landing mission wrap-up story that I planned to post to the web within a few minutes of touchdown.

Listening to NASA television in Florida, I had no idea the shuttle was in trouble. I had heard Husband's interrupted transmission, but air-to-ground drop outs were not unexpected during shuttle entries. Still, this one seemed to be lasting longer than usual and I was beginning to feel a bit anxious.

Then, at 9:02 a.m., Justin Ray, a reporter with Spaceflight Now, forwarded an instant message from Stephen Clark, a space enthusiast (now veteran space reporter) who was watching Columbia fly overhead southeast of Dallas.

I will never forget that message and the sudden chill that settled over me as I read it:

Clark: O M G!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Clark: DUDE OMG

Clark: It broke up!

Clark: The shuttle broke up!

Ray: He's in Texas

Harwood: What!!!

Harwood: Are you serious?

Ray: Yes

Ray: North of Houston

For a moment, I couldn't move. Clark was a veteran shuttle watcher and I did not doubt his observation. I simply stared at the computer screen for a few seconds, coming to grips with what those words meant, thinking of Husband and his crew, wondering if they were still alive but fearing the worst.

As it turned out, the astronauts almost certainly were already dead, killed by rapid decompression when the crew module broke away from the fuselage and disintegrated high above central Texas.

Over the days, weeks and months that followed, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board uncovered a now-familiar history of external tank foam insulation problems, management miscues and poor internal communications that contributed to the mishap.

As we would learn during the course of the investigation, Columbia sustained its fatal wound 16 days earlier when a briefcase-size chunk of foam insulation fell away from a so-called bi-pod ramp on ship's external tank 81.7 seconds after liftoff.

The lightweight foam slowed rapidly in the supersonic flow and the shuttle, racing skyward at more than 1,500 mph at that point, ran into it at a relative velocity of about 545 mph. The impact blasted a large hole, possibly 6 inches across or wider, in one of the protective heat shield panels making up the left wing's leading edge.

The reinforced carbon carbon making up the shuttle's nose cap and wing leading edge panels experiences the most extreme heating during re-entry, some 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit during the 15-minute zone of "peak heating" just after the orbiter falls back into the discernible atmosphere.

Put simply, the gaping hole in Columbia's wing was not survivable. From that perspective, the beginning of the end was the foam strike and not its inevitable consequence.

But some believe Columbia's crew could, in fact, have been saved if NASA management had recognized the severity of the problem soon enough to mount an emergency rescue flight.

Engineers analyzing launch photography clearly saw the foam fall from the tank. But they could not see where it struck. From the tracking camera's perspective, the debris disappeared below the left wing and emerged as a cloud of white powder. There was no question it had hit the wing. The question was where? And how much damage had it caused?

A few alarmed shuttle engineers lobbied NASA management to ask the Air Force or the National Reconnaissance Office to aim a spy satellite at the shuttle for a detailed photo inspection. But NASA managers in Florida and Texas rebuffed those efforts and settled instead for an in-house analysis based on computer modeling and past experience.

The engineers assigned the task ultimately concluded the foam strike did not represent a "safety of flight" issue. NASA's Mission Management Team, while concerned about what repairs or modifications might be required for downstream external tanks, dismissed the incident as a concern for Columbia.

And besides, the common wisdom went, without a robot arm and some kind of repair kit, there were no viable options to repair serious heat shield damage. As MMT Chairman Linda Ham famously said at one point, "it's not really a factor during the flight because there is not much we can do about it."

Ham later came under intense criticism during the course of the accident investigation for her quick, seemingly uncritical acceptance of the foam strike analysis.

But Ham did not act in a vacuum and there were many engineers and managers up and down the chain of command who had an opportunity to lodge an objection. While concerns were raised in some quarters, no one stood up and publicly challenged the conclusions of the engineering analysis.

And by that point, as a NASA's analysis would later show, there was nothing Ham or the MMT could have done to save the crew.

While it was theoretically possible to launch the shuttle Atlantis on a rescue mission, it would have required an almost instant awareness of the severity of the problem with Columbia, a decision to commit a second shuttle to flight before the cause of the first failure was known and a willingness to cut corners to get Atlantis off the ground before Columbia ran out of power and air.

And even then, it would have required an enormous amount of luck, with no delays due to technical snags or even bad weather.

But it was theoretically possible, and many within the program regret to this day that NASA did not at least make an attempt. I don't believe it had any realistic chance of success, but as others have said before me, not even trying guaranteed it.

In any case, focusing on the MMT misses the mark. The underlying problem was NASA management's misunderstanding of the severity of the general threat posed by the external tank's insulation.

And they had plenty of warning.

As the Columbia investigation documented, every shuttle flight included foam hits to the orbiter's heat shield even though the agency had a clear-cut rule in place forbidding debris strikes. The rule was never strictly enforced and NASA eventually came to look at foam shedding as an "acceptable risk."

But concern about the foam ramped up in October 2002, just two flights before Columbia's, when a piece of insulation the size of a mailbox broke away from the shuttle Atlantis' external tank seconds after liftoff. The debris slammed into insulation covering an attachment ring at the base of a solid-fuel booster leaving a crater 4 inches wide and 3 inches deep.

It was a close call. The foam struck just six inches away from a critical electronics box used to relay commands to the booster from the shuttle's flight computers.

Engineers quickly traced the missing foam to one of two bi-pod ramps where insulation was built up around the bases of two struts used to hold the nose of the orbiter to the tank.

On Oct. 31, 2002, NASA managers met at the Kennedy Space Center for a flight readiness review to discuss the shuttle Endeavour's planned launch on the next space station assembly mission. Attended by senior managers and engineers, the FRR was a formal assessment of the shuttle's ground processing, mission planning and any technical issues that required resolution before proceeding with launch.

The foam loss during Atlantis' launch earlier that October was just one of several technical issues on the table and the chairman of the meeting, Bill Readdy, a former shuttle commander serving as NASA's associate administrator for space flight, cautioned everyone to be vigilant.

But during the subsequent discussion, tank managers and engineers argued that problems with Endeavour's tank were no more or less probable than with earlier tanks built the same way. There was no clear evidence anything was wrong with the next tank in the sequence and while foam shedding was common, the loss of large pieces was rare.

While they couldn't guarantee no such shedding during the upcoming flight, the external tank team concluded Endeavour's ET was "safe to fly with no new concerns (and no added risk)."

Despite what some viewed as a somewhat suspect "flight rationale," the FRR ended with formal clearance to launch. Endeavour's flight did not suffer any major foam damage and when when NASA managers met on Jan. 9, 2003, for Columbia's FRR, foam shedding was not on the agenda.

In that context, then, the beginning of the end came on Halloween 2002 when participants in Endeavour's FRR agreed to keep flying shuttles before gaining a thorough understanding of the bi-pod foam issue.

In "Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia," co-author Mike Cabbage and I were struck by the arguments, beliefs and good intentions of smart, well-meaning engineers and managers who nonetheless missed something that seemed painfully obvious with 20-20 hindsight.

This is not meant as a criticism of the shuttle team. The system was enormously complex and distinguishing the forest from the trees was not always trivial. I certainly can't say I would have come to a different conclusion with the same information.

But to me, that FRR is where the shuttle program's fate was sealed.

"I look back on it now and say that was one of the things we really missed as an agency," we quoted then shuttle Program Manager Ron Dittemore in "Comm Check." "We had a presentation that was not thoroughly discussing the risk. And four center directors, program management, contractors and NASA -- the associate administrator for spaceflight and the associate administrator for safety for the agency -- said it was OK.

"Looking back on it, that was a critical juncture where we as an agency -- at the highest levels of our headquarters management and our program management and our contractor management and our team sitting in that room -- had a problem that was not thoroughly discussed. And we pressed forward."

The impact of Columbia's destruction still reverberates across the space program.

In recommendation No. 27, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board told NASA it must "conduct a vehicle recertification at the material, component, subsystem, and system levels" if the agency wanted to fly the shuttle past 2010, an undertaking that would have been enormously expensive.

Instead, in January 2004 President Bush told NASA to retire the shuttle fleet after completing the International Space Station. The idea was to free up money for new rockets and spacecraft needed to build Antarctica-style moon bases in the early 2020s.

But the Constellation moon program was never adequately funded and the Obama administration decided it was not affordable. Instead, a sharp change of course was ordered.

NASA was told to help private industry develop for-profit space taxis to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. At the same time, NASA was to continue development of the Constellation program's Orion crew capsule, focusing on a variety of deep space targets instead of bases on the moon.

NASA hopes to launch an unmanned test flight of the Orion spacecraft next year. The first commercial space taxi could blast off as early as 2015, with NASA chartered flights to and from the station starting around 2017.

But all of that depends on funding and political support in today's deficit-focused climate is uncertain at best. In the meantime, NASA is paying the Russians more than $60 million a seat to launch U.S. astronauts to the station.

It is a situation that I could never have imagined when I drove to Florida in 1981 to cover Columbia's launch on the second shuttle mission for the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon.

I went on to cover 129 of NASA's 135 shuttle missions, first with United Press International and then with CBS News. And like many who came to know the ins and outs of the space shuttle, the people who made it fly and the men and women who risked their lives to ride it, I was awed by the technical achievement it represented.

I understood there was little margin for error. I covered Challenger's final flight 27 years ago and like everyone associated with the program, I knew the shuttle was a dangerous machine to operate.

But I loved the sheer majesty of the endeavor.

I can still picture Atlantis disappearing into low clouds as it rocketed away on the 135th and final shuttle mission, feeling our building vibrate as the shock wave and a wall of sound rolled across the press site 3 miles from the pad.

I can still remember agreeing with a co-worker after Atlantis reached orbit that America needed a safer, less expensive, more up-to-date spacecraft.

And I can still remember adding, "but by God, we'll miss it when it's gone."

Ten years since loss of space shuttle Columbia

Marcia Dunn - Associated Press

He was just 8 when NASA lost the space shuttle Columbia and he lost his astronaut mom.

Now, 10 years later, Iain Clark is a young man on the cusp of college with a master's rating in scuba diving and three parachute jumps in his new log book.

His mother, Dr. Laurel Clark, loved scuba and skydiving. So did her flight surgeon husband and Iain's dad, Dr. Jonathan Clark, who since the Feb. 1, 2003 accident, has been a crusader for keeping space crews safe.

Altogether, 12 children lost a parent aboard Columbia. The youngest is now 15, the oldest 32. One became a fighter pilot in Israel, just like his father, and also died tragically in a crash. The oldest son of the pilot of Columbia is now a Marine captain with three young children of his own. The commander's daughter is a seminary student.

"It's tough losing a mom, that's for sure. I think Iain was the most affected," said Clark, a neurologist. "My goal was to keep him alive. That was the plan. It was kind of dicey for a while. There was a lot of darkness — for him and me."

Clark's wife and six other astronauts — Commander Rick Husband, co-pilot William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, Dr. David Brown and Israeli Ilan Ramon — were killed in the final minutes of their 16-day scientific research mission aboard Columbia.

The space shuttle, with a wing damaged during launch, ripped apart in the Texas skies while headed for a landing at Kennedy Space Center. NASA will remember the Columbia dead at a public memorial service at Kennedy on Friday morning.

Clark, now 59 and long gone from NASA, said he turned to alcohol in the aftermath of Columbia. If it wasn't for his son, he doubts he would have gotten through it.

"He's the greatest kid ever," Clark said in a phone interview from Houston with The Associated Press. "He cares about people. He's kind of starting to get his confidence, but he's not at all cocky."

Iain is set to graduate this spring from a boarding school in Arizona; he wants to study marine biology at a university in Florida.

"His life is like about as idyllic as you could imagine, considering all ... he's been through," said Clark, who is still protective of Iain's privacy. He would not disclose where Iain attends school, but he did provide a few snapshots.

Mother and son were extremely close.

After the accident, Iain insisted to his father: "I want to invent a time machine," If he could go back in time, the child reasoned, he could warn his mother about the fate awaiting her.

"He asked me why she didn't bail out, that kind of stuff, because he knew she had been a parachutist," Clark recalled.

Father and son were among the astronauts' families waiting at the Kennedy runway for Columbia that early Saturday morning. Once it was clear there had been trouble, the families were hustled to crew quarters, where they got the grim news.

Rona Ramon's sharpest memory about that fateful Feb. 1 is how "the joy and the longing" to see her husband return from space turned so quickly into anguish. "I just looked up at the sky and said, 'God, bring him back to me.' "

Her husband, already a heroic military pilot, became Israel's first spaceman on the flight.

Clark hastily came up with a plan: Disappear with his son as soon as they got back home to Houston. Grab the dog, the car and as much money as possible. Then, "drop off the grid."

But that didn't happen. A few years went by before father and son finally made their escape. Clark bought a house in Arizona, keeping a small apartment in Houston as he went from working for NASA at Johnson Space Center, to a teaching job at Baylor College of Medicine and an adviser's position at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute.

Clark won't divulge his exact whereabouts, even now. He moves every few years. He has a girlfriend, but doesn't see himself remarrying.

"I don't ever want to go through losing a wife again," he explained.

Clark remains bitter over the "really bad people" who came after him in Houston for money and favors, spurred by NASA's $27 million settlement in 2007 with the Columbia families.

"There was a lot of grief. There was a lot of sorrow. There was a lot of destructive behavior. There were a lot of people taking advantage of you," he said.

But Clark holds no grudges against NASA, neither the agency as a whole nor the managers who, during the flight, dismissed concerns from low-level employees about the severity of damage to Columbia's left wing. It was gouged by a piece of insulating foam that peeled off the fuel tank at liftoff.

Clark learned of the foam strike during the mission, while working a shift in Mission Control. Like so many others, Clark wishes he'd done something.

But no one knew during the flight how badly Columbia was damaged. And no effort was made to find out while there still was time to consider what would have been a risky rescue attempt by another shuttle.

Surviving the actual breakup, during re-entry, was deemed impossible by all involved. At 210,000 feet going Mach 15, it was "much, much worse than anything we had ever planned for," former NASA shuttle manager and flight director Wayne Hale wrote in his blog earlier this month.

For four years after the Columbia accident, Clark assisted a NASA team that looked into how the astronauts died and how they might have survived.

For Clark, it was about "trying to find something good out of something bad. I kind of threw my heart and soul" into crew survival issues and, most recently, the faster-than-the-speed-of sound, stratospheric jump by Felix Baumgartner. Clark was the medical director for the Red Bull-sponsored feat last fall in New Mexico.

The tragic end to NASA's 113th shuttle flight prompted President George W. Bush to take action. He announced in 2004 that the three shuttles left would stop flying in 2010 once they finished delivering pieces of the International Space Station. The shuttles resumed flying with new safety measures in place and eked out an extra year, ending on No. 135 in 2011.

The only way out of the Columbia darkness, for Clark, has been to move forward. "It doesn't mean I don't miss Laurel or have remorse about what happened," he said. "But you cannot be living in this kind of grief-stricken mode. ... Laurel would kick my ass if that happened to me."

The shuttle commander's widow, Evelyn Husband Thompson, finally feels free to start giving back, now that her youngest, Matthew, is 17. She wanted to focus first on her two children and then on her marriage five years ago to Bill Thompson, a widower she met through church. Bill provided the crucial male role model that Matthew so desperately needed following the accident, she said.

Now, his mother said, "he enjoys his private life."

"It was tough. Overnight, my children were thrust into this international stage," Thompson said. Having the last name "Husband" drew grief-stricken stares for the longest time in Houston, home to Johnson Space Center. "With the mercy of time, people really don't recognize it as much as they once did," she said.

Her new passions, each purposefully low-profile: her neighborhood YMCA where Husband once coached children, a ministry for widows at her church, and a Christian organization that helps fatherless boys.

"These three areas right now just fit me to a T, and I know that they would really please Rick," Thompson said in a phone interview Tuesday.

"We just still miss Rick so much," she said. "The sweet part of it is that we have made it 10 years, that God has been faithful in our lives, and we have been able to find joy in the midst of a lot of sorrow."

Daughter Laura, 22, is working on a master's degree in theology. Matthew is a high school sophomore. The entire family, as well as close friends, will gather at Kennedy for Friday's memorial service, which also will honor the seven astronauts who perished during the Jan. 28, 1986, liftoff of Challenger and the three killed on the launch pad in the Jan. 27, 1967, Apollo 1 fire.

Thompson is a featured speaker. Anderson's widow, Sandra, also plans to attend.

The two women, who attended the same church with their late husbands, remain close. The rest of the Columbia families have drifted apart, Thompson noted, but they all have a common goal.

"Try to find a way to have beauty come out of the ashes," she said. "You just want to feel like you're making a difference."

She is one of two Columbia spouses who have written memoirs about their loved ones. Kalpana Chawla's husband, Jean-Pierre Harrison, who also has remarried, published a biography titled "The Edge of Time" in 2011.

Clark is in Israel this week, taking part in an annual space conference held in honor of Ramon. Of all the Columbia families, he feels closest to Rona Ramon.

She became a grief counselor after her second family tragedy. The Ramons' oldest of four children, Asaf, died at 21 when his jet crashed in an Israeli training accident in 2009. One surviving son is a combat soldier in Israel; another is studying music in college. Her daughter is 15.

One of McCool's three sons is also in the military, a captain in the Marines.

Reminders of Columbia's dead are everywhere — including up in the sky.

Everything from asteroids, lunar craters and Martian hills, to schools, parks, streets and even an airport (Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport) bear the Columbia astronauts' names. Two years ago, a museum opened in Hemphill, Texas, where much of the Columbia wreckage rained down, dedicated to "remembering Columbia."

About 84,000 pounds of that wreckage — representing 40 percent of NASA's oldest space shuttle — are stored at Kennedy and loaned for engineering research.

The tragedy has made Clark and his son more spiritual.

"He's a really good kid and I wonder — you always wonder — would he have been this way if he hadn't lost somebody so dear in his life.

"Maybe this was Laurel's gift to him."

Space shuttle Columbia's second life - as a cautionary tale

Irene Klotz - Reuters

Space shuttle Columbia's flying days came to an abrupt and tragic end on February 1, 2003, when a broken wing gave way, dooming the seven astronauts aboard.

Although Columbia now lies in pieces, its mission is not over.

The recovered wreckage, painstakingly retrieved from Texas and Louisiana for months after the accident, was preserved for a unique archive and education program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"I can talk about safety, but once I open those doors and folks enter into the room, it becomes a different conversation," said Michael Ciannilli, who oversees NASA's Columbia Research and Preservation Office. "When you come face to face with Columbia in the room, it becomes real. It becomes extremely real."

Ten years ago, Columbia was on its 28th mission, a rare research initiative in the midst of International Space Station construction flights.

The crew included the first astronaut from Israel, Ilan Ramon, and six Americans - commander Richard Husband, pilot William McCool, flight engineer Kalpana Chawla, payload commander Michael Anderson and flight surgeons David Brown and Laurel Clark.

After 16 days in space, the shuttle was gliding back to Florida for landing when it broke apart due to wing damage that had unknowingly occurred during launch.

Accident investigators determined that a chunk of insulating foam from the shuttle's fuel tank had fallen off 81 seconds after liftoff and hit a carbon composite wing panel that turned out to be unexpectedly fragile. The breach proved fatal.

NASA had no idea falling foam debris, a common occurrence during shuttle launches, could do so much damage.

"One of the most important things that came from Columbia is to really learn to listen to your hardware. It's talking to you," Ciannilli said.

Pieces of Columbia's heat shield, including wing panels and protective thermal tiles, are among the most requested items for study from the archive.

Upon request, NASA lends specific components to researchers and educational institutes for analysis. In addition to NASA field centers and aerospace companies, program participants include Caterpillar, the Colorado School of Mines and Ohio State University.

By understanding the dynamics of flight and how specific parts of Columbia were impacted, the hope is engineers will be able to design safer ships in the future.

The collection includes more than 84,000 individual pieces, most of which are cataloged and boxed. A handful of materials and structures - a tire, a wing panel, pieces of tile - are on display in the front part of a 7,000-square-foot room inside the Vehicle Assembly Building where the archive is housed.

"Sometimes I walk into the room, especially if I'm alone, and it comes back, some of the emotions, some of the feeling, some of the memories," Ciannilli said. "I lived the recovery operation in Texas, so you have these moments where you flash back."

"Some days are a little bit more introspective and difficult, but I really counter that with the fact that I've seen so much good come out of it. Every single tour engages in a conversation about safety," he said.

The Vehicle Assembly Building was once used to piece together space shuttles for flight, but it, like most of the Kennedy Space Center, is in the midst of a transition following the end of the shuttle program in 2011.

Only Columbia remains at the space center. Sisterships Discovery and Endeavour were relocated to museums, and Atlantis was transferred to Kennedy Space Center's privately operated visitors complex.

"We teach the story, show the effects of the accident and show the fixes that we put into place," Ciannilli said. "Columbia's mission was a mission of education and research. We try to continue that in their name."

Columbia still vivid for Texans who saw, heard debris hit

Mike Tolson - Houston Chronicle

The first day of February 2003 broke cool and clear over most of Texas - a perfect Saturday morning without a cloud in sight or a breeze to speak of - so there was scant reason to look up … until there was.

The sun had barely topped the treeline when people in the Piney Woods heard what some later described as a sonic boom. It was 8 a.m. Those who instinctively gazed into the morning sky noticed a sudden strangeness. Some saw a streaking flash of light, others a vapor trail or odd wisp of a cloud. Something was going on, albeit more than 39 miles above them.

And a few minutes later not above them, but in front, in back, and frighteningly close. In this small East Texas town, in nearby Nacogdoches, and across the 60 miles of countryside in between, there came bangs and crashes and thuds and a variety of fierce noises that bespoke something awful.

Phil Brown, a retired mechanic, still remembers the whistling sounds of objects approaching land at high speed, some preceded by mini-booms that echoed around his home at Toledo Bend Reservoir, which was still shrouded in early morning mist.

"I thought we were being bombed," Brown said. "It was foggy over the lake that day. So I couldn't see but only hear things dropping. They sounded hot because they kind of sizzled when they hit the water."

There are things you remember and things you cannot forget. The early morning of Feb. 1, 2003, is among the latter for most Americans of a certain age, and certainly for those around here, whose land and property were pelted by thousands of pieces of debris after the high-altitude disintegration of space shuttle Columbia during re-entry. For an unlucky few, those pieces included remains of the seven astronauts on board. But for all, the memories persist, the passage of 10 years and the end of the shuttle program mattering little.

The community's effort to pick up as many of Columbia's pieces as could be found, and treat those pieces with respect and dignity, brought people together and gave them a connection to NASA that none could have imagined. Before that morning, the space program belonged mostly to others - to Houston, home to the astronauts and Mission Control. To Florida, whose Space Coast boasted Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral's launch pads.

"This has touched every life and heart here," said Marsha Cooper, a U.S. Forest Service fire prevention officer who helped with the search. "It's something we'll carry with us always."

Lift from Scripture

The spacecraft, doomed by damage to an exposed portside wing panel that was normally heat-resistant, actually began to lose pieces west of California during its meteoric descent. Debris reports came in from places as disparate as Canada and the Bahamas, but most of what remained landed in Texas, and the bulk of that along a four-mile-wide corridor angling through the heart of East Texas.

This area quickly became a "ground zero," of sorts, where not only the remains of all the astronauts were found but also the 800-pound nose cone and the orbiter's version of a flight data recorder. A special rapport developed between the community and the astronauts' families, a connection that seemed almost beyond coincidence.

Cooper recalled telling the wife of shuttle commander Rick Husband how a pastor had recited a special Bible verse at every site where astronaut remains were recovered in Sabine County. That verse, Joshua 1:5-9, reads in part: "Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go."

Cooper said Husband's wife looked stunned upon hearing this. This was the exact verse that her husband had recited from memory when all the astronaut families held hands during their last supper together before being quarantined before their mission. That verse is now etched into a black rock outside the Patricia Huffman Smith NASA Museum, Remembering Columbia, that opened on the anniversary of the crash two years ago in Hemphill.

The Columbia accident galvanized people throughout several counties near the Louisiana border. Volunteers guided by local law enforcement as well as federal and state officials spent two weeks walking the woods, meadows and sloughs in the vicinity of Nacogdoches, San Augustine, Hemphill and other towns and hamlets along the Columbia flight path, looking for anything that might have been a piece of the space shuttle.

Following a presidential disaster declaration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped in and set up four large, temporary camps housing thousands of paid workers. Finding Columbia's remains turned out to be the most expensive and elaborate such effort in history.

The debris field, loosely defined, covered almost 2,000 square miles. Helicopters and airplanes were employed, some of them outfitted with infrared scanning devices, and even satellite imaging was utilized.

Nearly 84,000 pieces

By the time the search ended at the end of April, almost 84,000 pieces had been found, the majority not much bigger than the hands that pulled them from the sandy soil. Almost half of the items recovered were so twisted, burned or small that they could not be identified as anything other than shuttle debris. In all, about 38 percent of the orbiter was recovered by the massive hunt.

Those parts that could be identified were placed on the floor of a hangar at Kennedy Space Center atop a shuttle-shaped grid. The team in charge of the reconstruction helped scientists conclude that a compromised wing panel was the culprit in the shuttle's demise, in large measure because recovery teams found 876 pieces associated with the left wing.

Of course, the wing was known to have been struck by a piece of falling insulation during liftoff and was the suspected cause from the beginning. Was it really necessary to mount an effort involving 30,000 people and more than 130 agencies at a cost exceeding $300 million?

Yes, without doubt, said Jon Cowart, the chief reconstruction engineer who oversaw day-to-day operations at the KSC hangar.

"From my perspective, it was necessary to go do it," said Cowart, now an engineer with the private company SpaceX. "It is a tragic fact of life you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes. Going through this taught us so much, including a lot about what our limitations were."

Cowart likened his team to a "NASA version of CSI," tasked with examining every piece to see if it bore a clue. The discovery of a plasma-sharpened piece of carbon panel from the left wing offered final confirmation that a hole in the panel had been Columbia's undoing. The team's report, which offered a lengthy explanation of how the small breach led to catastrophic results, capped months of ceaseless work: seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours on many days, with little time for family life or personal matters.

"Because of the way you felt about doing it, it didn't bother you," Cowart said of the workload. "Everyone took it personally."

As did so many people in and around this town of 1,200, whose diligence, in part, helped Cowart's people solve the mystery of Columbia's demise. What touched the East Texans most were not the items that so interested Cowart's engineers but the astronauts' possessions, the little things that reminded them that it was not just a machine that perished, but someone's mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother.

Poignant prayer

Belinda Gay, who operated a support center for searchers in the early days and became one of the museum's committee members, pointed to a display case containing an unopened contact lens package that Commander Husband had taken with him on the mission. The package was a pointed reminder of Husband's perseverance. He had been rejected several times for service because of his eyesight.

In another case is a photocopy of a few tattered pages of a diary written in Hebrew by the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon. Experts took nearly a year to restore the fragile book, to the point where about 80 percent can be read.

While Ramon's wife has kept the contents confidential, she did release a small portion, a prayer that he had planned to recite while in orbit. It, too, was a reminder of sorts: Creation was the true miracle; and God, not man, was the true "king of the universe."

10 years after Columbia disaster, reflections on lessons learned, remaining risks

Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel

Space shuttle landings were supposed to be routine. And until Feb. 1, 2003, they were — at least to most Americans.

Much like the 1986 Challenger disaster, that expectation of normalcy was a big reason why Columbia's disintegration over the southwestern United States so shocked and horrified the nation.

Adding to that agony was the eventual realization that, once again, human failings were a root cause of why seven astronauts were dead. Their names: Commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon of Israel.

Officially, the accident was caused by a briefcase-sized chunk of insulating foam that came away from the shuttle's external fuel tank and punched a hole in the orbiter's left wing 81.9 seconds after launch Jan. 16. NASA engineers had long ignored foam coming off the tank — believing it was essentially harmless — but the damaged wing could not protect the orbiter from the searing heat of re-entry.

In the months that followed, NASA was forced to re-examine nearly every facet of its operation, from launch safety to how employees talked to one another. And a special investigation board appointed to determine the cause of the tragedy came to this stunning conclusion:

"We are convinced that the management practices overseeing the Space Shuttle Program were as much a cause of the accident as the foam that struck the left wing."

Ultimately, shuttles flew again, and — in 22 missions — completed construction of the International Space Station. On July 21, 2011, the final flight of Atlantis ended the program. The three remaining shuttles are now museum pieces.

But 10 years later, those closest to the Columbia tragedy said the same risks remain. Space travel is still dangerous. Policymakers in Washington continue to ask NASA to do too much with too little. And basic human weaknesses such as ego and apathy are ever-present.

Rodney Rocha, NASA engineer

Of all the pain caused by the Columbia disaster, what hurt NASA workers most was the determination by accident investigators that NASA's safety culture was "as much a cause of the accident" as the foam that led to the orbiter's destruction.

Rodney Rocha was an outspoken example of how the agency's "culture" failed. The engineer repeatedly tried to persuade NASA managers to get telescopic pictures of Columbia's wing before re-entry to better understand the damage.

Rocha was ignored by managers, who couldn't believe a piece of insulating material — the consistency of Styrofoam — could crack open the orbiter's wing.

Ten years later, Rocha said he still regrets not "breaking the door down" to force NASA higher-ups to get those pictures and maybe develop a last-ditch rescue plan.

But Rocha, still with NASA, said that since the disaster, the agency listens more to concerns raised by its frontline engineers.

A key example, he said, was the 2009 mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Because the telescope was too far from the space station for the shuttle to use it as safe haven, the only way to rescue the astronauts in case they got in trouble was to send another orbiter.

Rocha said NASA managers initially underestimated the difficulty of transferring astronauts from a stranded orbiter to a rescue orbiter — until he and other engineers stepped forward.

"I think it illustrates the change — and I hate to use the word 'culture' — but a [new] openness to alternate technical views," he said.

The result, he said, was that NASA developed better plans to prepare for a rescue mission, which ultimately wasn't necessary.

Rocha is asked to speak at NASA centers a few times a year to talk about lessons learned from Columbia. His message to managers: Listen up. And to workers: Speak out.

"So you get your hand slapped. You get chastised," he said. "Then say: 'Can I file [my concerns] anyway?' "

Dr. Jonathan Clark, grieving husband

Of all the questions asked in the aftermath of Columbia, Dr. Jonathan Clark — husband of mission specialist Laurel Clark — said it's one from their son, Iain, that keeps ringing in his head.

Just 8 at the time of the accident, Iain wanted to know why his mom didn't bail out of the shuttle as it broke apart.

Though investigators would conclude that crew survival was impossible — given the orbiter's design and its speed at break-up — the question has nagged at Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon and now an associate professor of space medicine at Baylor University.

So in the decade since, he has devoted himself to finding ways to improve the safety of astronauts and adventurers.

"You have got to find ways to turn badness into goodness. You have to," he said. "It's the only way you get through this."

Clark has written papers on crew survivability and most recently served as medical director for the Red Bull Stratos mission, in which parachutist Felix Baumgartner plunged about 127,000 feet and became the first person to break the speed of sound while in free fall.

"What you are seeing is an expansion of the human survival envelope," Clark said.

Though NASA took steps to better protect astronauts after the Challenger accident, a report on Columbia revealed that the crew did not strictly follow procedures for their full-pressure suits — three were not wearing gloves and one was missing a helmet.

Though this didn't affect their survival chances, Clark said this should jolt NASA into finding ways to build better spacesuits that are both functional and give astronauts a chance to live.

Nowadays, Clark said, his son no longer dreams of building a time machine to save his mother. Instead, he wants to go into marine biology.

A few months ago, the two went sky-diving together — a nod of sorts to the risk-taking woman they lost a decade ago.

"He loved it," Clark said. "He did three jumps."

Wayne Hale, NASA manager

As first days on the job go, few could be worse than the one endured by Wayne Hale.

A longtime flight director at Johnson Space Center, Hale began a new job as shuttle launch integration manager at Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 1, 2003.

"All of us expected the Columbia crew to come home safe and sound," said Hale, who went to work early that Saturday morning to watch the landing. "And the failure of the vehicle was beyond belief."

In the aftermath, Hale became a key player in ensuring the disaster never occurred again — becoming manager of the shuttle program in 2005.

One of his more visible efforts was setting up a new meeting room at JSC aimed at facilitating communication between frontline engineers and managers overseeing a shuttle flight — a disconnect that was blamed as one of the root causes of the accident.

In that room, Hale hung several posters that underlined the need for safety.

One of them, dubbed "Remember," was a photo of the shuttle on its launchpad, nearly enveloped by low clouds, and a quote from Walt Williams, an early NASA manager: "You will never remember the many times the launch slipped, but the on-time failures are with you always."

The posters hung until just a few months ago when Hale — now retired and a consultant to several commercial rocket companies — retrieved them after they were taken down.

He wonders what replaced them — and what that says about NASA a decade after Columbia.

"You talk about memory [of the accident] fading, and you have to wonder what are they [NASA leaders] are thinking," Hale said.

According to NASA, pictures of the space station now adorn the walls.

Adm. Hal Gehman, investigator

When NASA flew its last shuttle mission in July 2011, the occasion was marked with reverence and even regret by some. But to retired Navy Adm. Hal Gehman, who led the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the safe landing of Atlantis brought a sigh of relief.

"The more I think about it, the happier I am that we retired the shuttle program," said Gehman. "We would have gotten away with 30 or 40 [more] launches, and then we would have had another accident. The system was too dangerous."

The dangers were detailed in his board's 248-page report: from the lack of an effective escape system to constant pressure to launch despite shrinking NASA resources. Another factor: the mistaken belief the shuttle was "operational" — like an airliner — rather than a test vehicle that required constant vigilance.

Gehman said the board's recommendation that NASA "recertify" the shuttle before flying it beyond 2010 was — in essence — a call to mothball the shuttle as the cost of recertifying a vehicle with 2.5 million parts was prohibitively expensive.

"We knew we were effectively shutting down the program," he said. But "we were never going to get to the next [era] of human spaceflight until we shut it down."

Though NASA's next vehicle configuration, the Space Launch System and Orion capsule, is being designed to include an abort system, Gehman said it's still vulnerable to the same pressures of time and money that doomed Columbia:

"I can tell you that the pressures that caused bad engineering practices in the past … are still there."

Mike Ciannilli, searcher

A few weeks after the Columbia accident, Mike Ciannilli found himself in a barren field in east Texas, looking at a space shuttle tile he didn't understand.

Part of a debris-recovery effort that involved an estimated 25,000 people and spanned more than 2.3 million acres, mostly in Texas and Louisiana, Ciannilli's job included sitting in the back of a helicopter — doors off — scanning for tiny glints of light that could be pieces of the orbiter.

On that day, his team had found an unusual tile. Most shuttle tiles have burn marks on the exterior, the effect of shielding the orbiter from the searing heat of re-entry. This one had burn marks on its interior surface.

"It was kind of confusing," said Ciannilli, then an engineer for United Space Alliance. "When you see a tile with that degradation on the inside, it poses more questions."

His tile, along with 84,000 other pieces of recovered debris, ultimately led investigators to conclude that a hole in Columbia's left wing allowed superheated air to breach its defenses and melt the wing's interior.

Now Ciannilli is with NASA, overseeing Columbia debris preservation.

He said the debris storeroom, located in the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC, has become a shrine where NASA employees go to remember the Columbia crew and remind themselves to never forget its safety lessons.

Even now, a decade later, an occasional piece of debris is found and sent to KSC.

"Our goal," said Ciannilli, now 45, "is to bring every piece of Columbia home."

NASA marks 10th anniversary of Columbia disaster
Agency learned management lessons from investigation of Columbia explosion 10 yrs ago

William Welch - USA Today

Ten years ago Friday, a crowd of several hundred people gathered at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the anticipated landing of space shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven following 16 days in space. The craft and its occupants never arrived.

"All of a sudden we realized things were not as they were supposed to be,'' recalls Wayne Hale, retired shuttle program manager. "We were in a state of shock, quite frankly.''

Family members of the crew of five men and two women were hustled into vans and whisked to private quarters, where they were given the tragic news as scientists, engineers and managers of NASA pored through data chronicling the catastrophic end of Columbia and its mission, code-named STS-107.

NASA is marking the anniversary with low-key ceremonies in Florida and Texas honoring the crew of Columbia as well as those who died in the Jan. 28, 1986, Challenger shuttle explosion and earlier lost astronauts.

?Among those participating are some of the crew family members who were at Kennedy on Feb. 1, 2003. Lost were Commander Rick Husband, co-pilot William McCool, specialists Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, David Brown, and Ilan Ramon, an Israeli fighter pilot.

The shuttle broke apart as it re-entered the atmosphere and streaked across the nation's skies. Parts of the shattered spacecraft rained down across a broad expanse, much of it centered over Hemphill, Texas.

Days later, Milt Heflin, then the chief flight director and now associate director of the Johnson Space Center, walked into a hangar at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Bright xenon lights illuminated the "busted, twisted, scorched hardware.'' It was, he recalls, "a morgue of high-speed technology.''

The disaster was attributed to a a piece of foam that fell from the external rocket tank on launch, opening a hole in a shuttle wing that caused the craft to rip apart on re-entry.

The accident investigation spread blame broadly, citing management and organizational deficiencies. Among them: a culture that didn't like to hear safety concerns from lower-level engineers.

"In the 10 years since the Columbia investigation, the accident report has become a landmark study in organizational causes of accidents,'' Hale says. "That's the enduring legacy. We learned ... cultural and management lessons.''

The shuttle fleet was grounded and although missions resumed in 2005, President George W. Bush decided to wind down the shuttle program. The last shuttle flew in 2011, and the remaining shuttles have become museum pieces.

10 years later, loss of Columbia and crew has changed NASA forever

Todd Halvorson - Florida Today

Ten years ago today, NASA astronaut Jerry Ross was in a convoy at the north end of Kennedy Space Center's shuttle runway, awaiting the scheduled 9:16 a.m. arrival of Columbia and its seven-member crew.

Eileen Collins, set to command the nation's next shuttle mission just a month later, was at home in Houston watching live NASA TV coverage of Columbia's atmospheric re-entry with her son, Luke, age 2 at the time.

Then 16 minutes before touchdown, as Columbia soared over Texas, Mission Control lost telemetry and voice communications with the orbiter. Soon tracking data also disappeared.

"And, of course, we had a strong suspicion as to what that implied," Ross said. "I stepped immediately outside of the vehicle and paused for a moment, and said a silent prayer for the souls of my friends onboard."

Mission Commander Rick Husband, Pilot Willie McCool, and two Mission Specialists — Laurel Clark and Kalpana Chawla — were on Columbia's flight deck. On the middeck: Payload Commander Michael Anderson; Mission Specialist David Brown and Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon.

All died that day, and the U.S. human spaceflight program suddenly faced sweeping change.

"It was a turning point, without a doubt," said Collins, who commanded NASA's first post-Columbia test flight. "Columbia really was a turning point for our strategy in space exploration."

A decade later, NASA is in mid-pivot.

Flash back to Jan. 16, 2003: 81 seconds after liftoff, a 1.67-pound chunk of foam insulation broke free from Columbia's 15-story external tank. A second later, it blasted a six- to 10-inch hole in the leading edge of the ship's left wing.

The damage went undetected during a 16-day space science mission. Hot gases blow-torched through the wing as Columbia sped home. The ship disintegrated.

"They were a great crew. They really were. Very personable, very humble, very polite," said Ross, co-holder with Franklin Chang-Diaz of the world record for most space missions flown — seven.

Space Shuttle Columbia Launched on Tragic Mission 10 Years Ago

Mike Wall - Space.com

NASA's space shuttle Columbia blasted off 10 years ago Jan. 16 on a mission that turned out to be the last for the orbiter and its seven-astronaut crew.

Columbia broke apart upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003. The tragic accident destroyed the shuttle, claimed the lives of all seven astronauts aboard and signalled the beginning of the end for NASA's venerable shuttle program, which retired in July 2011 after 30 years of orbital service.

"If we hadn't had an accident with Columbia, we would probably still be flying the space shuttle," said Wayne Hale, who served as a flight director for 40 shuttle missions at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston before becoming manager of the shuttle program in 2005.

"At the time, we were talking about flying the shuttle past the year 2020," Hale told SPACE.com.

The second shuttle tragedy

Columbia was the first space shuttle to reach orbit, blasting off on the program's maiden mission on April 12, 1981.

The orbiter launched 27 more times over the years. The last one, on Jan. 16, 2003, kicked off Columbia's STS-107 flight, a research mission that carried more than 80 experiments investigating a variety of questions in fields ranging from biology to fluid physics.

Tragically, Columbia and her crew — commander Rick Husband, pilot Willie McCool and mission specialists Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon — never made it home.

An accident investigation board later concluded that a chunk of foam broke off the shuttle's external tank and struck the leading edge of Columbia's wing during launch, punching a hole in the shuttle's heat shield and leaving it vulnerable to the extreme temperatures experienced during re-entry.

The Columbia disaster was the second major tragedy for the shuttle program. The first came on Jan. 28, 1986, when the shuttle Challenger — doomed by the failure of a seal called an O-ring on its right solid rocket booster — disintegrated 73 seconds after blastoff, killing all seven crewmembers aboard.

Hale has described both accidents as preventable, the result of human error and a lack of attention to detail.

"We thought we were better than we were," he said of the Columbia disaster. "We became overconfident. We thought we had a mature vehicle flying in a well-understood environment, and nothing could have been further from the truth than that."

The beginning of the end

The Columbia accident had far-reaching consequences, and not just for the friends and families of the astronauts who were lost that day.

The shuttles were grounded for 2 1/2 years, returning to flight in July 2005 after new heat-shield safety tools and inspection protocols were developed. And the tragedy set in motion the eventual retirement of the shuttle fleet, which was announced in 2004 and became official in 2011.

Today, all of NASA's remaining space shuttles — Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, as well as the prototype Enterprise — are museum exhibits. The space agency is developing a new capsule-based spacecraft called Orion for deep-space exploration, and plans to rely on new private spacecraft to ferry astronauts into low-Earth orbit for trips to and from the International Space Station. Until those new spacecraft become operational, however, NASA is dependent on Russia and its other international partners to launch supplies and crews into space.

"President [George W.] Bush at the time decided that we needed to do other things," Hale said. "It changed the whole complex. Not only did the president decide to retire the shuttle, but other perspectives that say we need to do deep-space exploration, or perhaps start commercial space transportation — all of those things came after Columbia."

For NASA, a Somber Week of Space Disaster Anniversaries

Tariq Malik - Space.com

This week marks a somber time for NASA, with the anniversaries of three U.S. spaceflight disasters recalling the memories of those astronauts who made the ultimate sacrifice in the pursuit of space exploration.

On Friday, NASA will pause to honor the memories of the three astronauts killed in the Apollo 1 fire of 1967, the seven astronauts killed in the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986, and the seven astronauts who died when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003. This year's Day of Remembrance ceremony is especially poignant — it will mark the 10th anniversary of the Columbia disaster that led to the end of the space shuttle program.

"NASA's Day of Remembrance honors members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery," NASA officials wrote in an announcement. "Flags across the agency will be flown at half-staff in their memory."

NASA will hold a televised ceremony on Friday at the Kennedy Space Center's Space Mirror, a memorial to astronauts who died during spaceflight. The service, hosted by the Astronaut Memorial Foundation, will begin at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) and be webcast live via NASA TV. SPACE.com will carry the NASA video stream live.

NASA chief Charles Bolden — a former space shuttle commander — will pay tribute with other NASA officials during an observance at the astronaut memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

NASA's spaceflight tragedies

On Jan. 27, 1967, Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed when a fire broke out in their crew capsule during a ground test a month before their planned launch. It was NASA's first mission-related tragedy and led to a safety investigation into the Apollo spacecraft. Two years later, in July 1969, the agency's Apollo 11 mission landed the first astronauts on the moon.

On Jan. 28, 1986, 19 years and a day after the Apollo 1 fire, NASA's space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff due to an O-ring failure in one of the orbiter's twin solid rocket boosters. The malfunction allowed hot gas to escape the rocket booster, ultimately causing the shuttle's external fuel tank to explode.

Killed in the explosion were astronauts Francis "Dick" Scobee, Ronald McNair, Mike Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Greg Jarvis and Connecticut teacher Christa McAuliffe. McAuliffe was slated to become the first teacher in space during the mission, boosting national attention on the spaceflight. It would take NASA three years to resume flying the shuttle.

Today, the nonprofit StoryCorps released a video to honor the memory of Ronald McNair, the second African-American in space. The video commemorates McNair's childhood in Lake City, S.C., and his path to space.

NASA's final space shuttle disaster occurred 17 years after the Challenger accident, when Columbia broke apart during re-entry, killing its STS-107 astronaut crew. The crew was commanded by veteran astronaut Rick Husband and included pilot Willie McCool, mission specialists Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and David Brown, payload commander Michael Anderson and payload specialist Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut.

Unlike Challenger, which was destroyed during launch, the Columbia shuttle disaster occurred as the orbiter was coming home after a marathon 16-day science mission. Columbia broke apart due to heat shield damage on the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing. The damage, which occurred during Columbia's launch when a piece of fuel tank foam struck the wing, allowed hot atmospheric gases into the wing, leading to the orbiter's destruction.

An image of the STS-107 shuttle Columbia crew in orbit was recovered from wreckage inside an undeveloped film canister. The shirt colors indicate their mission shifts. From left (bottom row): Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; Rick Husband, commander; Laurel Clark, mission specialist; and Ilan Ramon, payload specialist. From left (top row) are David Brown, mission specialist; William McCool, pilot; and Michael Anderson, payload commander. Ramon represents the Israeli Space Agency.

The Columbia disaster led directly to the retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet and its replacement with new capsule-based spacecraft designed for deep-space exploration. The last space shuttle missions flew in 2011, with NASA's remaining orbiters — Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — and the test shuttle Enterprise arriving at their final museum homes in 2012 for public display.

NASA currently relies on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to fly Americans to and from low-Earth orbit, though the agency plans to rely on new private spacecraft to ferry astronauts on trips to and from the International Space Station once they become available in 2015 or so.

Space memorials from coast to coast

Several of NASA's space centers will hold memorials this week to honor the Apollo, Challenger and Columbia astronauts in different ways.

In Houston, Johnson Space Center officials will join the Sabine County Columbia Memorial Committee for three days of events at the Patricia Huffman Smith NASA Museum in Hemphill, Texas. On Wednesday (Jan. 30), NASA's Digital Learning Network at JSC will host two educational events with Hemphill High School students, at 10:45 a.m. CST and 2 p.m. CST.

On Thursday (Jan. 31), astronaut Tim Kopra and JSC director Ellen Ochoa will speak at the Family Life Center of the First Baptist Church in Hemphill at NASA night. Astronaut Bill McArthur will join Kopra and Ochoa on Friday to share remarks at a memorial service at the church at 7:30 a.m. CST, NASA officials said.

In California, NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, just south of San Francisco, will hold a memorial ceremony at its Exploration Center beginning at 10 a.m. PST on Friday.

"The Exploration Center also will unveil an exhibit to pay tribute to NASA astronaut and STS-107 space shuttle Columbia Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla, a friend and colleague to the Ames community during her tenure as an astronaut candidate," Ames officials said in an announcement.

The Ames tribute will include an exhibit of Columbia mission memorabilia that includes some of Chawla's personal belongings, items and awards, which will be on display through March 25, center officials said.

Remembering The Brightest Lessons From NASA's Darkest Days
Three worst tragedies all happened this week-- 46, 27 & 10 years ago

Rebecca Boyle - Popular Science

The days between January 27 and February 1 are the most difficult week of the year for NASA. The annual space program shiva, honoring the three disasters that claimed 17 astronauts' lives, is always fraught with emotion and regret. But it's also a time to think about what those astronauts were doing and why, and that means it's also a time to be proud, and to remember what we have learned since their loss.

Monday was the 27th anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Challenger, which broke apart because of a failed seal on its right solid rocket booster. Sunday was the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, which happened during a launch pad test. And Friday is the 10th anniversary of the loss of space shuttle Columbia, which suffered a fatal injury on the launch pad that doomed its reentry.

Each time, NASA paused its human spaceflight programs to not only mourn, but piece together what happened. Each time, review boards found not only physical problems, but institutional ones, driven by budgets sometimes but also decidedly human problems like ego and apathy. Each time, NASA learned something from its mistakes. Here is what Dr. Jonathan Clark, husband of Columbia mission specialist Laurel Clark, said about that: "You have got to find ways to turn badness into goodness. You have to. It's the only way you get through this." Here are some of NASA's lasting lessons.

Challenger: Put a lid on "go fever"

The goal of the shuttle program was to put people in space on a regular basis, and in the shuttle's early days, NASA was roundly mocked for flight scrubs and other delays. Managers felt pressure to get Challenger off the launch pad even despite frigid temperatures. This was also partly due to timing with subsequent missions, which were to launch important planetary probes.

Despite mythology to the contrary, there was no political pressure from President Reagan or anything like that--but launch pressures were real. So were rampant communication failures, which "permitted internal flight safety problems to bypass key Shuttle managers," in the words of the post-accident Rogers Commission. Among many changes to the program after the disaster, NASA committed to a more realistic, less frequent shuttle launch schedule.

Columbia: Workers should speak up, and managers need to listen

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that NASA failed to learn many of the lessons it should have taken to heart after Challenger. Chief among them was the engrained institutional flaw that prevented mid-level workers from raising safety concerns in a realistic, meaningful way. Columbia suffered irreparable damage to the leading edge of its left wing during launch, when a briefcase-sized chunk of insulating foam broke off the external fuel tank and slammed into its thermal tiles.

In NASA's own design specifications, this type of incident would have to be resolved before launch could go--but it became so common that engineers came to see it as routine. The Orlando Sentinel, which covers the shuttle program like a caring friend, has a lovely 10-year anniversary spread this week for Columbia that explains how NASA knew about the problem. Engineer Rodney Rocha wanted the agency to get better images of the tile damage before re-entry, but he was ignored, in part because managers couldn't believe a small chunk of Styrofoam could doom the shuttle. Now Rocha is asked to speak at NASA centers about lessons learned since Columbia. Speak up, he says.

Apollo 1: Rethink crew safety

Apollo 1 was less than a month from launch on Jan. 27, 1967, when her three crew members climbed in for a launch pad test. The goal was to determine whether the spacecraft would function as planned when it was detached from all its cables and umbilicals. The hatch was sealed and the cabin filled with pressurized pure oxygen. Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee conducted several tests that day, and a voltage spike started a fire five hours after the "plugs-out" tests began.

Many things changed after the three perished. After the fire, NASA redesigned the Apollo capsules to open outward instead of inward; the cabin atmosphere was changed to 60 percent oxygen and 40 percent nitrogen; and several wiring and plumbing systems were reorganized. But more broadly, NASA realized for the first time the dangers of being too "gung-ho," as Gene Kranz put it.

Charlie Bolden, NASA's administrator and a former astronaut, told NBC these lessons and others were crucial for the continued success of the space program. The International Space Station and the coming age of commercial space vehicles would not have been possible without the sacrifices of the fallen astronauts, he told Alan Boyle. You can read the full interview here.

"What their sacrifice brought is what we should really be thinking about: the fact that they dared to challenge and do things differently," Bolden said. "Because of what they did, we're well on the cusp of going deeper into space than we've ever gone before."

How the Columbia Shuttle Disaster Changed Spacecraft Safety Forever

Clara Moskowitz - Space.com

Ten years after the devastating Columbia space shuttle accident that took the lives of seven astronauts, NASA is building a new spacecraft that will take humans farther into space than ever before, and will incorporate the safety lessons learned from the disaster that befell the agency Feb. 1, 2003.

That day, the shuttle Columbia was returning from a 16-day trip to space devoted to science research. But what began as a routine re-entry through Earth's atmosphere ended disastrously as the orbiter disintegrated about 200,000 feet (61 kilometers) over Texas.

Later analysis found that Columbia was doomed during its launch, when a small bit of foam insulation broke off the shuttle's external fuel tank and tore a hole in the orbiter's wing. That hole prevented Columbia from withstanding the scorching heat of re-entry.

Afterward, the independent team that investigated the accident, called the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB), found a number of factors, from the safety culture at NASA to the design of the shuttle, that led to the disaster.

All of the lessons the agency learned were incorporated into every subsequent flight NASA flew, and are now being used to inform the design of its next-generation spaceship, Orion. That vehicle is slated to carry people to asteroids, the moon and Mars sometime in the mid-2020s.

"We're hoping nothing ever goes wrong, but if it does, we've taken every possible step to keep the crew safe and give them every possible fighting chance they can have," said Dustin Gohmert, NASA crew survival engineering team lead, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "It's especially important to us that were here during the Columbia accident, because they were our friends, too."

Race car seats and children's seatbelts

The Columbia investigation exposed a number of flaws in the design of the shuttle's crew cabin, including its seats, seatbelts, spacesuits and life support system. Each of these has been redesigned for Orion.

"The seats were one of the weaker links during the Columbia accident," Gohmert told SPACE.com. "We wanted to make these seats formfitting so they had a true fit to the body's shape."

NASA looked to the formfitting seats used in professional race vcars, which provide even support to every part of the body, offering extreme cushioning and shock absorption during a crash. Orion designers even fine-tuned the vibration frequency of the seats to have different resonances than the internal organs of a human body.

The engineers also redesigned the seatbelts, which were another issue during Columbia's flight. Here, they took inspiration from the belts on children's car seats, which are adjustable to fit a wide range of body sizes.

"We wanted an exact fit for every single person who could fit in the vehicle, from females down to 4'10" and males up to 6'4"," Gohmert said. "It was quite a challenge."

Suiting up

The astronaut spacesuits were also completely redesigned for Orion. The Columbia investigation board found that the crewmembers didn't have time to configure their suits to protect against depressurization, which occurred rapidly. In fact, some of the astronauts were not wearing their safety gloves, and one didn't even have a helmet on, because of how quickly the accident took place.

"In the case of Orion, the suits will instantaneously, and without any action of the crew, inflate and protect from the loss of pressure," Gohmert said.

The capsule life support system was also upgraded to provide a constant flow of oxygen to the crew, even with their helmet visors up and locked, which wasn't possible in the shuttle.

Each of these changes addresses flaws exposed by the Columbia shuttle disaster. Yet Gohmert said none of these upgrades alone would have made a difference during the disaster.

"I caution against saying that any one thing we've corrected would have protected against the outcome," he said. "However, we examined all the lethal events that occurred in Columbia and addressed each of them in the Orion. We're doing a whole lot of things to make it safer, and everything we've learned from the shuttle accidents, from Russian space accidents, automobile accidents — we've taken lessons from all of them and tried to incorporate them into Orion."

Capsule vs. space plane

Perhaps the largest change from shuttle to Orion is the shift from a winged space plane design to the cone-shaped capsule, which sits atop the rocket rather than next to it.

"When we went to the capsule, we went from a side-mounted spacecraft to a forward-mounted one," said Julie Kramer White, Orion chief engineer. "Therefore, it's not exposed to debris environments, which was obviously a huge issue for Columbia."

This configuration also allows the crew compartment of the capsule to be ejected from the top of the rocket stack in the case of an emergency on the launch pad or during liftoff. Such an escape would not have been possible for the crew cabin of the space shuttle.

Of course, the shuttle had capabilities that no capsule has — namely, the ability to haul large, heavy cargos, such as the building blocks of the International Space Station, inside its cargo bay, White pointed out.

Moreover, the culture of safety at NASA has changed for the better since the days of Columbia, Gohmert said.

"The reaction has been very positive around all of NASA in terms of giving us the capacity to make these safety improvements," he said. "Previously, it was difficult to implement some of the safety features as we'd hoped. Now it really is on the forefront of everyone's mind."

NASA, Texas towns mark Columbia disaster

Matt Smith & John Zarrella - CNN

It started as a dot -- a bright, white star that raced across the Southwest.

Over Texas, the dot became a streak that thickened, then spawned smaller streaks -- "little sparkles," Linda Steed recalled.

Then came the sound -- "a big, rolling boom," she said. "The dog started barking like crazy."

A decade ago, 200,000 feet above Steed's driveway in Nacogdoches, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on re-entry. All seven astronauts aboard died.

Friday, NASA marks the anniversary with tributes to the crew of Columbia and 10 other astronauts lost in the space agency's two previous fatal accidents -- the 1986 explosion that destroyed Columbia's sister ship Challenger, and the launch pad fire that killed Apollo 1's three-man crew in 1967. All three anniversaries fall within a week -- the Apollo fire on January 27, Challenger on January 28 and Columbia on February 1.

Controllers lost contact with Columbia at 8:59 a.m. ET, about 15 minutes before it had been expected to land at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Shuttle commander Rick Husband's wife Evelyn, who was waiting for him there, feared the worst.

"I remember looking up at the sky and thinking, 'Is that it? Is that the end of Rick's life?' " she told CNN.

In an instant, she was a single mother with two young children. She was angry, frustrated. But she said NASA is "the best of the best."

"They're human. They're flawed," said Husband-Thompson, who remarried five years ago. "They did the best they possibly could. Nobody maliciously caused this to happen."

Nevertheless, she said, the grief still lingers.

"The Lord definitely healed our hearts tremendously, but it's a lifelong process," she said. "I don't think that pain ever completely goes away."

Commemorations will also be held in some of the towns where the orbiter's wreckage rained down that bright Saturday morning. One of them is Hemphill, Texas, about 170 miles north of Houston, where a roadside monument and a museum commemorate the disaster and the volunteers who combed the surrounding woods for pieces of the spacecraft.

"Some of them, you knew instantly what they were," said Belinda Gay, one of those searchers. "We would find some of the instrument panel that was in the shuttle cockpit. You could still see the numbers and the switches. You knew that if you found a can of caviar with Velcro on the back of it, you know it's not supposed to be in the woods."

The remains of the shuttle's crew were found near Hemphill, along with the nose, part of the landing gear and much of the cabin. In addition, two members of a helicopter crew engaged in the search were killed in a crash the following month.

Gay now leads the Sabine County Columbia Memorial Committee. Unlike Steed, whose space buff sister-in-law called her outside that morning, she was getting ready for a relative's baby shower and didn't see the breakup.

"My house started vibrating, and the pictures on the wall started shaking, and then I heard two sonic booms," she said. "We knew something was up."

Gay's husband was president of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, and she led the group's Ladies' Auxiliary. Hemphill's VFW hall was quickly turned into a dining hall for the search teams, and it will host lunch for the guests at Friday's ceremony.

Overall, NASA recovered about 84,000 pieces of the orbiter, about 40% of the craft, scattered from the Texas panhandle to Fort Polk, Louisiana. Pieces turned up as late as 2011, when the state's brutal drought uncovered an aluminum fuel tank on the bottom of Lake Nacogdoches.

An investigation determined Columbia was doomed almost from the instant its 16-day mission began. A piece of insulating foam from its external fuel tank broke away, striking and cracking a panel on the orbiter's left wing. The damaged panel allowed searing hot gases to seep into the wing on re-entry, causing the craft to lose control and disintegrate.

The three surviving shuttles returned to space starting in 2005. The last mission was in 2011, thirty years after Columbia -- the first of the class -- made its maiden voyage.

NASA and the families of the crew decided to preserve its wreckage, which now sits on the 16th floor of the massive Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. For scientists, it's a "treasure trove" that lets them study the material used in the spacecraft, said Mike Ciannilli, the caretaker of the orbiter's remains.

And for young NASA workers, it's a place to see firsthand why failure can't be an option.

"When you actually walk amongst Columbia and you talk about the accident and you talk about the lessons learned and how you can do the best job you can do to help prevent this from ever happening again, that's very powerful," Ciannilli said.

Texas town has its memories – but no memorial

Scott Powers - Orlando Sentinel

As NASA officials gather to commemorate the Columbia disaster – in front of a memorial to the seven-member crew of the space shuttle at Kennedy Space Center – the residents of Nacogdoches, Texas, will have their own ceremony.

But they still don't have a memorial.

Ten years ago, death and destruction literally rained down on the small towns, forests, lakes, swamps and farms of East Texas after Columbia disintegrated during re-entry on its final mission.

In places like Palestine, Nacogdoches, San Augustine and Hemphill, Texas, the efforts to recover debris – some as big as a landing gear or nose cone, others as small as a bolt or a shard of insulating tile -- became an intimate part of people's lives for months. Miraculously, not a single person was hit by the debris.

On that awful Saturday, residents initiated – and for the next 14 days led – a search and recovery operation that quickly grew to include an estimated 30,000 people, mostly volunteers, and 33 local, state and federal agencies. They responded with what many outsiders described as grace, compassion, creativity and a powerful sense of patriotic duty.

"We were doing something that was bigger than us, greater than us, and it had a lasting impact. It really wasn't a tragedy to our community; it was a tragedy to the nation," said Susan Catherine Kennedy, then the Nacogdoches County judge and emergency management coordinator who in 2010 became a Roman Catholic nun.

"I think we realized right from the beginning that this had become our responsibility, immediately," said the woman now known in the Daughters of Divine Hope as Mother Susan Catherine.

Today, East Texans will gather in Nacogdoches at Stephen F. Austin State University – which provided maps and other assistance to the searchers -- to share remembrances and honor the dead astronauts. And, perhaps, talk about the memorial that isn't there.

Within months of the disaster, residents began efforts to create something to mark where Columbia came to Earth. One plan called for a bas-relief of the Columbia's nose cone and the seven-member crew. They got Congress to give the lead to the National Park Service, which agreed to conduct a "suitability and feasibility" study.

And at that point, as current Nacogdoches Mayor Roger Van Horne puts it, "I think it just got tied up in government."

The feasibility study was due last year. But Parks Service spokesman Mike Litterst said it was bogged down by conflicting "priorities" – and it won't be done before this spring. At that point, it will be up to Congress to decide what to do.

Even after 10 years, memories are still vivid of how the bucolic area of small towns, forests, ranches, tiny roadside diners and Baptist churches – just west of Louisiana -- was filled with military helicopters and truck convoys, tent cities and NASA astronauts, dressed in their distinctive orange or blue jumpsuits, searching for their comrades.

"It was one of the largest -- if not the largest -- coordinated land searches in history," said Steven A. Austin professor Darrel McDonald, who is with the university's mapping institute now called the Columbia Regional Geospatial Service Center.

The effort drew federal smoke jumpers from New Mexico and Florida; police and firefighters from as far away as New York City; dive teams from New Orleans and Houston; analysts from Israel; native American mounted patrols from several states; and even a national club of power-parachute pilots in their flying machines. Armed with highly-detailed maps created by the university's institute, more than 100 teams combed hundreds of square miles, sometimes needing machetes and chain saws to blaze through thick forest.

Within two weeks, they found the remains of Commander Rick Husband, Pilot William McCool, and mission specialists Michael Anderson, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla and Ilan Ramon, and recovered most of the 89,000 pieces of shuttle debris that were eventually found.

There are some modest East Texas memorials.

The Commerce Bank of Texas embedded a six-inch bronze medallion, inscribed with "Columbia February 1 2003" in a downtown Nacogdoches parking lot where a six-foot piece of shuttle wing slammed to the ground.

The Texas-based Masonic Tranquility #2000 lodge – named after the Sea of Tranquility, after moon-walking astronaut and Mason Buzz Aldrin "claimed" it in 1969 -- created and donated four granite markers, ranging in size from 16-by-20 to 24-by-36 inches, that are placed outside Masonic lodges in Nacogdoches, Hemphill, San Augustine and Carthage.

Mother Susan Catherine said she has worried that a community memorial could be seen as capitalizing on the disaster. But she thinks what happened in her town merits remembrance.

"There is a lot to learn about the strength of the human spirit, and what a national tragedy can draw from a local community. Those things need to be captured," she said, "but not capitalized on."

The crew of the space shuttle remains in East Texans' memories

Dave Berry - Tyler Morning Telegraph

When the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated 35 miles overhead that Saturday morning, rattling our house, my wife rushed in to say something had exploded. Eerie howls of a family of coyotes, usually quiet that early, were replaced by barking neighborhood dogs as an unsettling crackling noise faded away. No smoke appeared on the horizon, just a dirty streak across the southern sky.

CNN was reporting NASA had lost contact with the shuttle. In minutes, they announced that Columbia was overdue and "could not possibly be flying." We knew the worst had happened.

Editors don't have the luxury of watching and grieving. Within minutes, a dozen calls were made or fielded. Assignments Editor Danny Mogle was rounding up journalists and heading them to the office. Most were already on the way.

Photographer Herb Nygren Jr. and reporter Jacque Hilburn monitored the scanner. Chief Photographer David Branch turned his car around and headed back to East Texas. Senior Editor Richard Loomis, manning his usual Saturday spot in the newsroom, fielded reports of debris falling in Nacogdoches and dispatched people that way. The Web team posted information online as it came in. Executive Editor Jim Giametta was assured everyone was coming together and working the story. And Advertising Director Art McClelland worked to open up space in the Sunday paper.

By 9:30 a.m., the newsroom was full of people, and others already were headed south. All of us would be there another 14 hours through two press runs.

After an impromptu news meeting, huddled in a circle in the sports department, an initial list of eight assignments was expanded to 13. That would grow. Five reporters and two photographers were dispatched to Nacogdoches, Jacksonville and Rusk. Others manned phones and chased leads in Tyler.

One of many calls that came in was from a Tyler doctor, Dr. Scott Lieberman, who said he had captured the explosion on his camera from his back yard in far south Tyler. Richard urged him to bring his images to us, and he headed downtown.

We huddled over our options to expand an already hefty Sunday paper and decided to add six pages, giving readers as much information as possible in a six-page special news supplement that would be printed early, and using normal deadlines to deliver late-breaking developments on Page One.

Dr. Scott Lieberman arrived with the images in his camera. Almost immediately our chief photographer returned from the photo lab, saying, "You're not going to believe this. This guy's captured the moment of the explosion. ... And his stuff is good." David's excitement spoke even louder than his words.

The doctor, a cardiologist who studied stars when not gazing into chest cavities, remained calm, but grew more excited as he monitored our reactions. I told him he had captured some great, historic photos, then asked him directly, "Are you offering these to us?" Yes, he said, the paper had been good to him, and he wanted us to have them. Then, with a Cheshire cat grin, he said, "Of course, I would love to be on the cover of Time, and I was hoping you could help me with that."

I suggested we call the Associated Press, with its ability to put his photo onto hundreds of front pages ... and maybe even on the cover of Time. Then, after I assured him we wanted his shots, the executive editor took over the negotiations and called AP in Dallas, which sent a photographer racing to Tyler. As the good doctor would say — the rest is history.

By then, it was noon. The BBC in London called to interview me about how our paper was covering the story. They liked it, but I don't recall much of what I said.

When the Lieberman photos hit the wire, the phones started ringing with people wanting to short-circuit the deal he had cut with the wire service. AP member newspapers could use it as part of their agreement, and hundreds did ... all around the world. But I fielded calls from Newsweek, People, Time, photo marketing agencies and a wayward news director from an Oklahoma City TV station. I forwarded them to Jim and Dr. Lieberman during their negotiations, then on to the AP after the deal was struck.

Soon, by 3:30 p.m., our own photos and local stories started pouring in. During our news budget meeting, we determined the play and placement of every story, looked over photo possibilities and talked about headlines. Everyone put their heads down and worked toward that first deadline, and the 8:30 p.m. early run started on time. "Disaster in the Sky: A Nation Mourns" was the headline over a huge photo of debris raining from the sky and photos of the seven astronauts who lost their lives.

We continued editing copy, building and proofing pages until all our deadlines were met, then waited for the pressroom crew to do their work and crank up that big press. It rolled around midnight.

After plotting the next day's staffing and coverage, most of us drifted toward home. Few could sleep, caught up in the story, watching TV news reports until hours later.

Sunday was another long day. Monday and Tuesday were more normal but extremely busy. On Monday, our photographer stumbled across debris in the woods near Hemphill that turned out to be the shuttle's nose cone. Tuesday, he discovered a New York FBI dive team on the shore of an East Texas lake while journalists from around the world took tours of the nose cone debris he had shot the day before.

At the end of that first long day, reporter Jacque Hilburn, who wrote the main front page story, stood in the pressroom, too excited to go home, waiting to snag one of the first good copies. "This is the part I love," she said. And I smiled, knowing what she meant. But I knew the adrenaline would wear off and the story she had chased so avidly all day would soon become all too real and reduce us both to tears. For me, reality hit on the third day.

Some who don't understand journalists might call us callous or uncaring. Actually, we care deeply.

Many tears were shed in and around that newsroom. But when news is breaking, journalists just have to move and keep moving. You might allow yourself a few seconds or minutes of numbed silence while you absorb the enormity of the tragedy. I saw it when Delta Flight 191 crashed at DFW in 1985, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded on takeoff in 1986, when the Branch Davidian compound burned in 1993, and when the Towers fell in 2001. But you put that aside until later; your immediate job is to tell the story.

The story of space shuttle Columbia's fiery plunge into the forests and fields of East Texas is now part of history. What we wrote and photographed in 2003 is part of that larger sad saga. And filling those chapters are personal stories of heroes and heroines, honor and courage, grief and generosity, pathos and perseverance. I will forever be proud of how East Texans, including our news staff, responded.

Coming home that first night, as I followed a lonely rural road to my house in the country, three tiny pieces of white foam brushed past my windshield. I don't know if it was from the shuttle or just flakes from a crushed Dixie cup blown by the wind, but when I pulled into my drive, I stood for a long while looking up at the dark sky. It seemed much emptier than usual.

Part 1
Columbia's Final Flight - 'Just a Research Mission'

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org

Early in the spring of 2001, the mission of STS-107 first sparked my interest, for two reasons. One was the fact that its seven-strong crew was relatively inexperienced—like that of Challenger, none had flown more than once in space—and the other was that it represented the first "stand-alone" scientific research flight performed by the shuttle for several years.

With most of the missions around it devoted to International Space Station construction, Commander Rick Husband's flight seemed oddly out of place. "Why do you want to write about that one?" came the reply from the magazine Spaceflight, when I proposed an article on STS-107. "It's just a research mission?"

Nonetheless, Spaceflight graciously supported my request to interview Husband and the article was published in October 2001. More than a decade later, I am glad that I took such an interest in STS-107, the final flight of Columbia and a mission which suddenly and drastically altered humankind's trajectory in space as few other missions have ever done, for better and for worse.

Rick Husband and I spoke for half an hour on the evening of 3 April 2001, over the telephone from his Houston office. I was in Liverpool, studying for my master's degree at the city's university, a couple of miles from the birthplace of Beatlemania. I could scarcely have imagined that Husband and his crew would be engulfed in the shuttle program's second disaster in less than two years' time, as they hypersonically knifed their way back through the atmosphere after an enormously successful 16-day flight. It is to my lasting regret that I never got the chance to tape record my conversation with Husband—only a page of hand-scribbled notes, later transferred onto a computer, exist as a memory—but I do recall the opening words of our exchange, when I realised I was talking one-to-one with a real, live astronaut. It is funny how certain things stand out about a person, and others do not, for my first impression was the depth of Husband's voice and his humor.When NASA PAO contacted me in March 2001 to agree to the interview and gave me a telephone number to call at a specific time on that day, I thought for an instant that someone was pulling my chain. Surely I wouldn't be connected directly to Husband's office … would I? I would certainly speak to his secretary or a PAO official in the first instance. I would be asked for my list of questions, such that Husband could be prepared in advance. As I dialed the number, I felt a twinge of excitement and nervousness. My hand-written notes and list of questions trembled in my hand.

Someone answered. Deep voice, Texan drawl. "Rick Husband."

Oh, hell, I thought, it's really him. Yet my stupidity still made me unsure.

"Good afternoon. Colonel Husband?"

"This is he."

"Colonel Husband, good afternoon. My name is Ben Evans and I'm … "

"Hi, Ben." As if he'd known me all my life. That set me at ease.

To start the interview, I reiterated thanks to him for a signed photograph that he had sent to me in late 1998, inscribed with the legend "Proverbs 3: 5-6." It seemed a logical place to start the interview and Husband seemed pleased that I had remembered the quote—Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding / In all your ways, submit to Him and He will make your paths straight—as he explained that "God's blessing and provision" had indeed guided his path since childhood, through engineering college, into the Air Force and test pilot school, into the hallowed ranks of NASA's astronaut corps, and into the exalted position of being selected to command the space shuttle. I stressed that he was the first pilot since Sid Gutierrez in April 1994 to lead a crew on only his second mission, but Husband brushed it off. Humbly, he said, it was nothing more than being in the right place at the right time.

There was, of course, much more to it than that. Kent Rominger—who commanded Husband's first mission and served as chief of the astronaut corps at the time of the STS-107 disaster and through the return to flight in mid-2005—later recalled that the selection had more to do with his expertise and skill in the cockpit. In her book High Calling, his widow, Evelyn, wrote of Rominger's recollection that Husband returned from his stint as pilot of STS-96 in June 1999, primed and ready for the commander's seat. "You really only need to know two things," reflected fellow astronaut Jim Halsell. "First, we recruited him into the astronaut office because of his wide-known reputation within the Air Force. Second, Rick was offered his own shuttle command after only one flight as a pilot, instead of the standard two. He was that good." Husband served a spell as chief of safety for the astronaut office, and in December 2000 was named to lead STS-107. Assigned alongside him was pilot Willie McCool, and the pair joined a previously announced quintet as multi-culturally diverse as they were multi-talented: an African-American (Mike Anderson), an Indian-American woman (Kalpana Chawla), two physicians (Dave Brown and Laurel Clark), and Israel's first spacefarer (Ilan Ramon). These five had been assigned in September 2000. They would support dozens of scientific experiments in the new Spacehab Research Double Module, housed in Columbia's payload bay, and a battery of instrumentation on the Freestar pallet.

Launch was originally scheduled for August 2001, but was extensively postponed as NASA's oldest orbiter did not return to the Kennedy Space Center, after a $164 million program of modifications and upgrades, until early March of that year. According to Shuttle Program Manager Ron Dittemore, she was "a leaner, meaner machine," with more than 1,100 pounds of weight removed and wiring added to support an ISS-specification airlock and external docking adapter. Columbia had also been equipped to support the new Multifunction Electronic Display Subsystem (MEDS) "glass cockpit" to replace her outdated flight deck instrument suite. Despite these improvements, she remained too heavy to haul large ISS components in orbit and was committed at first to just two missions: STS-107 and the STS-109 Hubble Space Telescope servicing flight. The priority of the latter meant that it leapfrogged STS-107 and flew successfully in March 2002. Rick Husband's mission was tentatively rescheduled for July, some four months later.

Then, in mid-June, with barely five weeks to go, and with Columbia ready to roll over to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for stacking onto her External Tank and twin Solid Rocket Boosters, a potentially show-stopping problem reared its head. Several cracks—each measuring around 0.09 inches in diameter—had turned up in metal liners, deep within the main engine plumbing of her sister ships, Discovery and Atlantis. Although the cracks did not hold pressure, and thus were not indicative of propellant leaks, it was feared that debris shed from them might work its way into an engine and possibly trigger an explosion. Repair work demanded the removal of Columbia's three engines and suspended preparations for STS-107 once again. Rick Husband took it in his stride. "We've had a fair number of slips through the course of our training," he told an interviewer in late June, "but we've made good use of those. This will be no different."

With emphasis placed upon the continued construction of the ISS, two other assembly missions—STS-112 and STS-113—flew ahead of Columbia, but by Christmas the STS-107 stack was "hard-down" on Pad 39A, tracking a 16 January 2003 launch. The liner cracks had been repaired, but another crack was found in a 2-inch metal bearing in one of Discovery's propellant line tie rod assemblies; this prompted another assessment and Columbia was cleared to fly. Like all of the post-9/11 shuttle missions, preparations were undertaken with intense security, with F-15 fighters and Army attack helicopters patrolling the KSC skies. The presence of Israeli Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon on the crew had served to ramp up this security level, with a tottering Middle East peace process and generally unstable political situation giving widespread concern. According to David Saleeba, a former Secret Service operative then working at the Cape as NASA's head of security, the space agency routinely monitored intelligence reports from the Department of Homeland Security, all of the armed forces, the FBI, Customs, and the FAA. Beach-front hotels occupied by high-ranking Israeli officials were subjected to random car stops and searches by armed officers and bomb-sniffing dogs. The astronauts' families all had police escorts. The departure times of the crew from Houston and their arrival in Florida were not publicly announced until the last minute, and the precise liftoff time was not revealed until shortly before launch.

"I really don't enjoy launches," said Mike Anderson in a NASA interview. "Entries are a little bit better. It's a little quieter … not quite as violent. You can enjoy it a little bit. For me, on this flight's entry, I'm just going to sit down in my seat and hopefully reflect on the 16 days on-orbit that we've had, anxious to get back to Earth and give the scientists all their research results. I'll be happy to have the flight behind us."

The awesome challenge of bringing the crew together was Husband's responsibility. One of his methods was to take them on a team-building excursion, sponsored by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), in August 2001. The seven of them backpacked into the mountains of Wyoming with a pair of NOLS instructors and spent nine nights and ten days with 60-pound packs in some of the toughest terrain in the United States. "We got to see some incredible scenery," recalled Husband. "We got to learn a lot about how each of us deal with the kind of situations that they put us into. It's also a challenge learning how to keep track of all your equipment, personally, then learning to work together … so that when you come back you know each other's strengths and weaknesses and so you can maximise that during the rest of your training flow." The trek took them through dense areas of the Shoshone and Bridger-Teton National Forests—which featured treeless peaks in the 12,000-foot range—and high mountain lakes. Their guides, John Kanengieter and Andy Cline, led the expedition for the first few days, then the seven astronauts took turns to elect a new leader each day and evaluated each other's performance at nightfall. Despite the serious nature of the expedition, they treated it with aplomb and humor, even telephoning Houston from the 12,990-foot Wind River Peak to inform fellow astronauts that they had landed.

Yet the fact remained that this would be the least-experienced shuttle crew—in terms of space experience, that is—for several years. This made them the butt of several good-natured jokes, several of which they invented themselves. In April 2002, Jerry Ross had flown a record-breaking seventh mission, whereas the experienced members of STS-107 (Husband, Anderson, and Chawla) had barely three missions between them. "Before Jerry Ross flew his seventh mission," said Husband, "he had six flights to his credit. Our crew had only half that amount of flight experience … but after our flight we'll have caught up with him and then some!" Added Willie McCool, "He's got us beat by a factor of two, but when we come back we'll have ten flights among all of us and we'll jump ahead of Jerry."

For Ilan Ramon, it was peculiar to be the first Israeli in space. His mother was a Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz and his father had fought for the independence of Israel. During training, Ramon spoke to many other Holocaust survivors, and when he explained the nature of his mission they could only look at him with astonishment. To them, it was like a dream that they could have never dreamed was possible. The seed of the idea came in December 1995, when U.S. President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres agreed "to proceed with space-based experiments in sustainable water use and environmental protection." As part of the deal, an Israeli astronaut would operate a multi-spectral camera to investigate the migration of airborne dust from the Sahara Desert and its impact upon global climatic change.

Ramon and the man who would later serve as his backup, Yitzhak May, were selected in April 1997 and began their official training the following year. The Mediterranean Israel Dust Experiment (MEIDEX) was a radiometric camera and wide-field-of-view video camera, mounted on a pallet at the rear of Columbia's payload bay and capable of operating across six spectral bands, from ultraviolet to infrared. Ramon also packed a pencil drawing, entitled "Moonscape," by Petr Ginz, a 14-year-old Czeckoslovakian Jew who died at Auschwitz in 1944. Ramon hoped that carrying it into space would symbolize "the winning spirit of this boy." Although he was a "secular" Jew, Ramon planned to take kosher food into orbit and hoped to observe the three Sabbaths that STS-107 would spend in space. As circumstances transpired, he would be so busy that he could only partly celebrate a single Sabbath.

Partly, that is, because that Sabbath was the final day of the mission, Saturday, 1 February 2003; a day which began with a bright and chirpy Ramon and his crewmates packing away their equipment for re-entry … and a day whose sun went down on one of the darkest days in U.S. and Israeli history.

Part 2
Working as a Team

"We've had a Go for Auto Sequence Start. Columbia's on-board computers have primary control of all the vehicle's critical functions … "

More than two decades since her first flight, Columbia, the oldest orbiter in NASA's fleet of space shuttles, was ready for her 28th voyage on the morning of 16 January 2003. She would be carrying a crew of seven—Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Mike Anderson, Dave Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Israeli payload specialist Ilan Ramon—into orbit for 16 days to perform dozens of scientific experiments in the Spacehab Research Double Module and aboard the Freestar pallet. The mission had been delayed for more than a year, due to difficulties endured during a lengthy process to upgrade Columbia, then cracked metal liners across the fleet in the summer of 2002. Now, at long last, STS-107 sat motionless on Pad 39A, attached to her bulbous External Tank and twin Solid Rocket Boosters, primed and ready to go. The astronauts had closed and locked their visors. A little more than two minutes ago, Willie McCool had reached over from the pilot's seat and activated Columbia's Auxiliary Power Units. Their ship now had hydraulic muscle.

"T-20 seconds and counting … "

Sitting in the commander's seat was Rick Douglas Husband, an Air Force colonel and veteran of one previous shuttle mission. Born in Amarillo, Texas, on 12 July 1957, he graduated from high school in his hometown, earned his private pilot's license, and entered Texas Tech University to study mechanical engineering. Since earliest childhood, Husband had been fascinated with the idea of someday becoming an astronaut, and his widow, Evelyn, in her book, High Calling, noted that he explained this to her at one of their first dates. Upon receipt of his degree in 1980, he entered the Air Force and underwent flight training at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Husband subsequently flew F-4 fighters and by the end of 1985 was serving as an instructor pilot and academic instructor at George Air Force Base in California. Two years later, his astronaut dream took another step forward when he was selected for the famed Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and upon graduation he flew the F-4 and all five versions of the F-15, working specifically on the latter's Pratt & Whitney F100-P2-229 increased performance engine. A master's degree followed and in mid-1992 Husband arrived at the Aircraft and Armament Evaluation Establishment at Boscombe Down, England, as an exchange pilot with the Royal Air Force, test flying several aircraft and serving as project pilot of the Tornado GR1 and GR4. Selected by NASA as an astronaut candidate in December 1994, he first flew as pilot on STS-96—the first International Space Station docking mission—in mid-1999.

" … 15 seconds … "

Seated to Husband's right side on Columbia's flight deck was Navy commander William Cameron McCool, the pilot of STS-107. He came from San Diego, Calif., where he was born on 23 September 1961, the son of a Marine and naval aviator father. With such a background, it was always obvious that McCool would follow a naval career. After completing high school in Lubbock, Texas, he entered the Naval Academy and earned his degree in applied science in 1983, followed by a master's credential in computer science from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1985. After initial flight training, McCool was assigned to Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron 129 at Whidbey Island, Wash., for the EA-6B Prowler. "The military and NASA are a lot alike when you talk about working together as a team," he said in a pre-flight interview. "We advocated crew co-ordination and working together as a crew. NASA does the same exact thing." During this period, he completed two overseas deployments aboard the USS Coral Sea to the Mediterranean region and was designated a wing-qualified landing signal officer. Selection for Naval Test Pilot School in Patuxent River, Md., followed shortly thereafter, and McCool's subsequent duties included working on airframe fatigue life studies, numerous avionic upgrades, and, of course, flight testing of the Prowler. He was an administrative officer aboard the USS Enterprise when he was selected by NASA in April 1996.

" … eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven … "

At ten seconds, a flurry of sparks swirled beneath the dark bells of Columbia's three engines, as hydrogen burn igniters fired to dissipate lingering quantities of the unburnt gas, ahead of Main Engine Start. The astronauts braced themselves for the immense push of engine ignition. Seated behind and between Rick Husband and Willie McCool was Kalpana Chawla, the flight engineer, who was making her second shuttle mission. Chawla had been the first Indian-American woman to be chosen for astronaut training in December 1994. She came from Karnal, in the state of Haryana, on 1 July 1961, and completed high school and received an aeronautical engineering degree from the Punjab Engineering College, before moving to the United States. Chawla earned her master's degree from the University of Texas in 1984 and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 1988. Her NASA career began after receipt of her doctorate, and she spent several years working at the Ames Research Center on powered-lift computational fluid dynamics, simulating complex airflow around aircraft such as the Harrier. In 1993, she joined Overset Methods, Inc., working on a research team to implement techniques for aerodynamic optimization. In December of the following year, she was selected as an astronaut candidate. Her first flight was aboard STS-87 in late 1997. "Aircraft design," she said in one of her last interviews, "was really the thing I wanted to pursue. If people asked me what I wanted to do [in college], I would say 'I want to be a flight engineer.'" On STS-107, she would be just that, for the position of flight engineer on the Shuttle—working with Husband and McCool to continuously monitor hundreds of displays and instruments during the most dynamic phases of flight—was one of the most demanding roles of the whole crew.

" … We have a Go for Main Engine Start … "

All at once, the four astronauts on the flight deck and their three comrades on the darkened middeck felt a huge rush and a gigantic outpouring of sheer power as turbopumps awoke, liquid oxygen and hydrogen flooded into the combustion chambers of Columbia's main engines, and they roared to life for what would be the final time. Such was their power that they actually shifted the orbiter slightly "upwards" on the External Tank struts, in a phenomenon known as "the twang," before settling ahead of the ignition of the twin Solid Rocket Boosters at T-zero. Seated shoulder-to-shoulder with Kalpana Chawla, and directly behind Willie McCool, the muscles of rookie astronaut David McDowell Brown tensed. The Navy captain and flight surgeon was making his first mission. Born in Arlington, Va., on 16 April 1956, Brown attended high school in his hometown and gained a degree in biology from the College of William and Mary and a medical doctorate from Eastern Virginia Medical School, then joined the Navy. He trained as a flight surgeon and in 1984 became the Director of Medical Services at the Navy Branch Hospital in Adak, Alaska. He subsequently deployed to the western Pacific aboard the USS Carl Vinson and in 1988 became the only flight surgeon for ten years to be selected for pilot training. "I pursued things that I was interested in," he said in one of his final interviews. "I don't think I was afraid of working hard and went down a path that I thought would be really challenging, and lo and behold, this is where it ended up!" Designated a Naval Aviator two years later (and ranking No. 1 in his class), Brown flew the A-6E aircraft, served as a Strike Leader Attack Training Syllabus Instructor and Contingency Cell Planning Officer, and qualified in the F-18. By 1995, the year before his selection by NASA, he was serving as flight surgeon at the Naval Test Pilot School in "Pax River," Md.

" … three, two, one … "

By now, the three blazing engines were at near-full power; their translucent orange plumes replaced by a trio of dancing Mach diamonds. If the four astronauts on Columbia's flight deck, with its six wrap-around front windows and two overhead windows, had a sense of seeing the enormity of the controlled explosion that was going on around them, their three crewmates on the middeck had no such luxury. They could rely only upon the feelings in their bodies and the sounds. Of those three, only payload commander Michael Phillip Anderson—Air Force lieutenant-colonel and physicist—had flown into space before. He was born on Christmas Day in 1959 in Plattsburgh, N.Y., the son of an Air Force pilot—"an Air Force brat," he once said—and grew up on Air Force bases around the United States. Anderson earned his degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Washington and a master's in physics from Creighton University. Betwixt his two degrees, he entered the Air Force and after training served as Chief of Communications Maintenance for the 2015 Communications Squadron and later Director of Information System Maintenance for the 1920 Information System Group. Flight training followed in 1986 and Anderson piloted the EC-135 for the Strategic Air Command. His later career carried him through roles as diverse as aircraft commander, instructor pilot, and tactics officer, before selection into NASA's astronaut corps in December 1994. Anderson made his first shuttle flight on STS-89 in January 1998.

" … We have booster ignition … "

At some stage in the milliseconds after 10:39 am EST on 16 January 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia's twin Solid Rocket Boosters—like a pair of colossal Roman candles, stacked on either side of the bulbous External Tank—spewed columns of golden flame and STS-107 took flight. For the last time, Columbia spread her wings under her own power. Hold-down bolts were explosively sheared and the behemoth began its climb for the heavens. Seated on the middeck, Ilan Ramon must have reflected in those adrenaline-charged seconds upon the importance of this mission for himself and for Israel. Born in Tel Aviv on 20 June 1954, Ramon entered the Israel Air Force Flight School and trained on the A-4, Mirage III-C, and F-16 aircraft. In 1981, he served as Deputy Squadron Commander B of the Israeli Air Force's F-16 Squadron. Ramon earned a degree in electronics and computer engineering from Tel Aviv University in 1987 and rose in his military career to become a Squadron Commander and Head of the Aircraft Branch in the Operations Requirement Department and, later, Head of the Department of Operational Requirement for Weapon Development and Acquisition. These posts ended in 1998, when Ramon began dedicated space shuttle training. "When I was selected," he told a NASA interviewer, "I really jumped, almost to space. I was very excited." As recounted in yesterday's history article, Ramon's mission marked a watershed moment for a nation and religion which had emerged from the trauma of Second World War persecution and, whether for good or ill, had asserted itself in the Middle East.

" … and Liftoff of Space Shuttle Columbia with a multitude and national and international space research experiments … "

Next to Ramon was a second Navy flight surgeon, Captain Laurel Blair Salton Clark, also making her first space mission. Clark came from Ames, Iowa, where she was born on 10 March 1961, and studied zoology as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then entered medical school and earned her doctorate in 1987. During this period, she undertook active-duty training with the Diving Medicine Department at the Naval Experimental Diving Unit and commenced Navy undersea medical officer training in 1989. Clark's naval career included numerous medical evacuations from U.S. submarines, and she became a qualified flight surgeon, deploying overseas to the western Pacific. She was serving as a flight surgeon for the Naval Flight Officer advanced training squadron in Pensacola, Fla., when she was selected by NASA in April 1996. "I never really thought about being an astronaut or working in space myself," she said before launch. "I was very interested in environment and ecosystems and animals." That changed over time with her developing naval and medical expertise. "It was really just sort of a natural progression when I learned about NASA," Clark added, "and what astronauts do and the type of things that they are expected to do, that I thought about the things I had done so far and became more interested in that as a career."

Columbia rose from Earth to the cheers and Hebrew prayers of an assembled multitude. The picture-perfect launch would make headlines in Tel Aviv, providing a brief distraction from the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. Even Tiewfiek Khateeb, an Arab-Israeli member of parliament, described it as "a happy occasion," but refused to be drawn on whether the goodwill might be extended into politics. Said Daniel Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to the United States: "Only two generations after the Jewish people were at their lowest ebb, on the very demise … here we are soaring up and making great achievements."

As STS-107 cleared the Pad 39A launch tower and climbed into a beautifully clear Florida sky, Columbia kicked off an ambitious series of six shuttle missions planned for 2003 … and the only flight not destined for the International Space Station. In fact, not since 1998 had a long-duration shuttle mission been devoted exclusively to multidisciplinary experiments, and this caused concern to both the scientific community and Congress, who were keenly aware that the United States might lose its "lead" in the microgravity research arena. At a March 2000 hearing, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher had declared that "We can't expect the scientific community to remain engaged if researchers do not see hope that there will be research flight opportunities on a regular basis." Moreover, performing experiments for a couple of weeks offered a highly valuable testbed before committing them in the longer term to the ISS. At length, Spacehab, Inc., which had been building pressurised science modules since the 1980s, offered its new Research Double Module to support 80 investigations. To Mike Anderson, responsible for overseeing the integration of payload requirements into an effective timeline that he and his crew could follow, it was clear from the enormous breadth and depth of STS-107's experiments that this mission was one that the scientists had waited a long time to see happen. The workload would be great, but the payoffs were expected to be equally so.

As Columbia vanished from view in the sky, heading for orbit, no one could possibly have foreseen the calamity that would ungulf her, two weeks hence. No one could have guessed that she would never be seen up close by human eyes again. No one could have guessed that the STS-107 crew would never hold their loved ones again. And no one could have imagined that Columbia would accomplish 99.9 percent of her mission and fight like a trooper to save her human occupants and bring them safely home. A tough 16 days lay ahead … and beyond that lay an even tougher two and a half years.

Part 3
'One of the Smoothest'

When Columbia's payload bay doors opened at around midday EST on 16 January 2003, they exposed a cargo unlike anything which had flown into space for almost five years. Most shuttle missions in the interim had been exclusively dedicated to the construction of the International Space Station and only four—a radar-mapping flight, two Hubble Space Telescope servicing calls, and the deployment of the Chandra X-ray Observatory—had been dedicated to non-ISS tasks. This caused concern to both the scientific community and Congress, who feared that such paucity of "science" missions threatened to harm the United States' lead in the microgravity arena. "We can't expect the scientific community to remain engaged," Congressman Dana Rohrabacher told a March 2000 hearing, "if researchers do not see hope that there will be research flight opportunities on a regular basis." Columbia's mission, STS-107, was set to address that issue.

There were other benefits of carrying experiments on a two-week shuttle flight, before committing them to long-term ISS missions. John Charles, NASA's mission scientist for biological and physical research at the time, had long referred to STS-107 as doing "simulated space station science … although the science itself stands on its own right." Moreover, many of the life and physical science experiments to be performed by Columbia's crew—Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Dave Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Mike Anderson, Laurel Clark, and Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon—carried an overwhelming emphasis on improving astronaut health and safety in readiness for extended ISS missions.

Congressman Dave Weldon, a Republican from the shuttle's home state of Florida and a colleague of Rohrabacher, agreed that research missions like STS-107 were critical for demonstrating experiments before committing them to the space station. Unfortunately, for a time, this backing was crippled by a mission known as "Triana," which, bizarrely, had been conceived in a dream by then-Vice President Al Gore. Named after the lookout on Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the New World, Triana was billed as a 21st-century Earth-watching lookout with questionable scientific value. Gore's challenge to NASA was to build a relatively inexpensive—between $25-50 million—satellite to broadcast real-time images of the Home Planet, 24 hours per day, over the internet. It received generally negative reviews from NASA's Inspector General and an angry Congressional panel slammed its scientific worth. At an early stage in its development, Triana was manifested onto STS-107, but it soon became clear that it could not be completed in time, and by the summer of 2001 it was pulled from the mission. In its place was a bridge-like facility at the rear end of the payload bay, known as the Fast Reaction Experiments Enabling Science, Technology, Applications, and Research (FREESTAR), which would house six high-priority instruments, including an Israeli dust-monitoring camera.

As for the experiments which demanded a pressurized environment, there was a problem. The two European-built Spacelab modules had been retired following the Neurolab mission in early 1998. In their place, NASA paid $47 million to Spacehab, Inc., a provider of commercial augmentation modules to expand the Shuttle's pressurized envelope. In its original incarnation, first flown in June 1993, Spacehab increased the working volume of the reusable orbiter by almost a thousand cubic feet, but with STS-107 a new "Research Double Module" would take the stage for the first time. Although a Logistics Double Module had already flown on several earlier missions, the RDM included additional environmental controls for humidity removal, electrical power, and experiment data-handling … and provided in excess of 2,100 cubic feet to support over 8,500 pounds of payloads. On STS-107, Spacehab, Inc., marketed 18 percent of the module's capacity, netting $22 million in revenue, whilst the rest was reserved for NASA experiments.

Those experiments were roughly divided into life and physical sciences. The former included studies of pulmonary and cardiovascular changes during rest and exercise and investigated bone cell activity. Before launch, Dave Brown—a physician and former Navy flight surgeon—hoped that the Canadian-provided bone cell experiments could yield insights into future treatments for osteoporosis, since the loss of calcium from astronauts' bones in space flight offered "a very accelerated model" of what happens to people on Earth over many years. During STS-107, the science crew members gulped down pills and injected fluids, laden with "tracer" chemicals, to indicate the rate at which calcium was being lost from their bones. Elsewhere, Michael Delp of Texas A&M University provided an experiment to investigate the effect of microgravity on blood vessels, which featured a contingent of rats being flown to assess how their hind limbs grew thinner and weaker in space. Rats' bones react much more rapidly than human ones, and previous missions had shown that 16 days in orbit was roughly comparable to several months in orbit for humans. It was hoped that the blood vessels in the rats' hind limb skeletal muscles would be examined after Columbia's landing to track structural and genetic changes. Still other experiments included studies of the astronauts' sleep patterns, with watch-like "actigraphs" monitoring disturbances in their sleep-wake cycles as they passed through 16 "sunrises" and "sunsets" in each 24-hour period.

As well as combining several scientific disciplines, STS-107 combined several nations, with the European, Canadian, German, and Japanese space agencies sponsoring a variety of payloads. Students from Australia, China, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, and the United States observed the impact of microgravity exposure on fish, spiders, ants, silkworms, bees, and inorganic crystals. To Rick Husband, who oversaw the whole mission, it was "a humbling experience" to carry such immense responsibility for so many experiments. As the payload commander, Mike Anderson held in his hands the task of deciding who to train for which experiments and how to finely choreograph the research work in orbit.

None of these experiments could have been accomplished without a superbly organized payload crew … and this necessitated a dual-shift system, operating around the clock, 24 hours per day. The "Red Team" consisted of Husband, Clark, Ramon, and Chawla, while the "Blue Team" comprised McCool, Anderson, and Brown. Their division of labor was far more intricate than a simple divvying-up of tasks. "The issue is that, on our orbiter, there are lots of attitude requirements," Kalpana Chawla remarked in one of her last interviews. "The orbiter should be in a certain attitude to do the ozone measurements; in a different attitude to do the dust measurements; in a 'free-drift' attitude … to do some of our very microgravity-sensitive experiments." One series of experiments, featuring the Combustion Module, demanded a particularly quiescent environment, with virtually no thrusters disturbances, and this demanded almost a full dedicated day. "It really helps to use the crew more efficiently," continued Chawla, "by doing that."

That efficiency began within minutes of achieving orbit, when Dave Brown bailed out of his seat on the flight deck and moved crisply into position to photograph the just-jettisoned External Tank. With Mike Anderson acting as what Rick Husband called "the post-insertion guru," supervising the activation of STS-107's many payloads, astronauts Ilan Ramon and Laurel Clark busied themselves with setting up the Spacehab Research Double Module for an intensive 16 days of research. Elsewhere, Brown and Willie McCool started up the FREESTAR pallet and the laptops to support the Shuttle Ozone Limb Sounding Experiment. The latter utilized a visible and ultraviolet spectrograph to measure the distribution of ozone in the atmosphere using limb-viewing geometry. It was calibrated as Columbia flew above Hawaii, coinciding with a ground-based balloon launch. Other experiments included Israel's high-profile dust study, which brought joy on 19 January when it detected an "elf"—a type of electrical phenomena which materialize above thunderstorms in time spans of a tenth of a millisecond—in one of its earliest data-takes. Overall, FREESTAR performed admirably and Mission Manager Tom Dixon described STS-107 as "one of the smoothest missions I've ever had a payload on … and the closest we've ever stuck to the pre-mission timeline."

Only the most minor of glitches troubled Columbia herself. One of two dehumidifiers to collect and distribute water inside the Spacehab module produced an electrical "spike"; an identical system had earlier sprung a leak and had been shut down. Following the reconfiguration of a valve to allow cool air from the orbiter's cabin to flow into the Spacehab, the temperature stabilized and was brought down to comfortable levels of around 22 degrees Celsius. In fact, the warm temperature inside the module had brought envious comments from staff at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: for overnight forecasts in Maryland predicted lows of just 8 degrees Celsius and a wind chill of -5 degrees Celsius, and even Cape Canaveral had endured snow flurries on 17 January. In spite of the temperature, the work inside Spacehab continued at a rapid clip. Europe's Advanced Respiratory Monitoring System required extensive breathing exercises to measure cardiac output, with the first data taken a few hours into the 16-day mission. All four members of the science crew—Anderson, Clark, Brown, and Ramon—participated in the experiment, gathering data both at rest and whilst undertaking moderate and medium-high exercise on a stationary bicycle ergometer. Ten days into the mission, on 26 January, the investigators were lauding a 100-percent success rate for the device, but noted that the most critical data would be acquired in the hours after touchdown on 1 February.

Elsewhere, cell cultures were being grown to understand genetic characteristics and a German study observed the development of gravity-sensing organs in fish. Students from around the world explored the effects of the strange environment of space on a variety of insects. Proteins were crystallized, mammal cells were cultivated, and the effect of cosmic radiation upon biological processes was examined. One experiment, "Astroculture," actually nurtured a rose and an African rice flower, being flown as part of a commercial attempt to produce new, space-grown fragrances.

Kalpana Chawla took charge of several combustion science experiments, including SOFBALL, which explored the behavior of flame balls in microgravity, and the Laminar Soot Processes, which analyzed the formation of soot. The SOFBALL work yielded new records for the weakest flame ever burned on Earth or in orbit, the least amount of fuel mixed with air, and—at more than 81 minutes—the longest-lived flame ever burned in space. (The latter flame ball, nicknamed "Kelly," came close to completing an entire orbit of Earth.) Fifteen different fuel mixtures produced 39 tests and triggered no fewer than 55 flame balls for a grand total of 6.5 hours. With expectations for a fully-fledged combustion facility aboard the International Space Station, this work was expected to ultimately lead to cleaner and more efficient car engines and better fire safety equipment. The Mechanics of Granular Materials sought to test "sand columns" in microgravity to enable better models for soil movement under stress, with possible applications in strengthening the building foundations, managing undeveloped land, and handling powdered and granular industrial materials.

For the "rookie" members of the STS-107 crew, their first experience of weightlessness was a magical time. Laurel Clark remembered the noises. Since everything was in a perpetual state of free-fall, she found it beautiful that belts and D-rings tinkled against each other, producing a gentle background "music." Willie McCool spent much of his time on Columbia's flight deck and reflected upon the glorious splendor of sunrises and sunsets. Panoramic views of Australia and the grandeur of the Himalayas took his breath away. Former circus gymnast Dave Brown spent his free time doing weightless backflips in the Spacehab. And Ilan Ramon could do little but marvel upon the fragility of the Home Planet's gaseous veil, "so thin and fragile," which both gave life and saved it.

A week and a half after launch, on 27 January, the crew had the chance to speak to the three-man Expedition Six team aboard the International Space Station, codenamed "Alpha." Commander Ken Bowersox and Flight Engineers Nikolai Budarin and Don Pettit had been in orbit for two months, and their communications session with Columbia occurred as the station passed over eastern Ukraine and as the Shuttle was over northern Brazil.

"Hey, Alpha, this is Columbia," called Rick Husband. "How you doing over there?"

"We're doing great. We're so glad to see you guys made it into orbit," replied Bowersox.

"We're glad to be here, too," said Husband. "We're really excited to be able to talk to you guys, one space lab to another big old space lab on that beautiful station of yours."

The conversation lasted just a handful of minutes, before the two crews bade each other farewell and drifted out of radio range. Next day, the 28th, they both joined with people on Earth in reflecting upon the loss of the Challenger Seven in 1986. As Rick Husband spoke of his profound sadness at the loss of those seven brave lives, he could hardly have imagined that his own crew would follow them in barely four days' time.

Video footage, acquired during Columbia's ascent, had already shown a briefcase-sized chunk of insulating foam fall from the External Tank about 81 seconds after launch and hit the left wing. Debris of this kind had been falling from every tank since the dawn of the shuttle era and few NASA managers were unduly concerned. Nonetheless, the media latched on to the foam strike, to such an extent that an email was sent to Husband a week after launch to advise him of the incident, lest he be caught off-guard by a journalist's question. The email assured Husband that painstaking analysis on the ground had cleared Columbia as safe to fly. Any damage was superficial, said Flight Director Steve Stich, and there was "absolutely no concern for entry."

Today, a decade later, those haunting words send a chill down every spine.

On 30 January, as Anderson, Brown, Clark, and Ramon wrapped up the final few Spacehab experiments, a quick check of the troublesome dehumidifier was made and no moisture was found. Next day, the FREESTAR payload was deactivated, as was Spacehab itself, and Husband, McCool, and Chawla set to work on the standard test of Columbia's thrusters, hydraulics, and other systems, ahead of re-entry and landing. Speaking to journalists that day, Entry Flight Director LeRoy Cain remarked that weather conditions at the Kennedy Space Center on 1 February were predicted to be excellent and that the re-entry "will be a very good visual sighting for folks, particularly on the West Coast, as well as in mid-Arizona, New Mexico area." He added that "it should be a pretty spectacular event for folks that have never seen a shuttle sighting, particularly at night."

It was going to be "spectacular," though not as Cain intended.

For the STS-107 crew, their impending return to Earth closed a chapter on a job well done. "Science-wise, this flight's been absolutely fantastic," said Mike Anderson on the 31st. "I think a lot of our experiments have exceeded our expectations by 100 percent. We've seen things we never expected to see."

Early on 1 February, the astronauts donned their pumpkin-orange pressure suits and took their seats for the hour-long hypersonic glide back to Earth. At 8:15 am EST, as Columbia hurtled over the Indian Ocean at five miles per second, Capcom Charlie Hobaugh gave Rick Husband a "Go" to execute the irreversible de-orbit burn, committing the ship to a landing in Florida at 9:16 am. For the first 30 minutes, the orbiter fell like a metaphorical stone, through darkness, toward its date with the Shuttle Landing Facility on the opposite side of the planet. The second 30 minutes were expected to be far more interesting, as compression of the steadily thickening air at hypersonic velocities produced a brilliant light show outside the windows.

"That might be some plasma now," Willie McCool noted at one stage. The pitch blackness of space had been replaced by a steadily brightening pinkish glow, a little like salmon in color.

"Think so? Already?" queried Laurel Clark, seated behind him on the flight deck. She aimed a handheld video camera through the window above her head to capture the flashes.

"That's some plasma," confirmed Husband.

"Copy, and there's some good stuff outside," continued Clark. "I'm filming overhead right now."

"It's kinda dull," said McCool.

"Oh, it'll be obvious when the time comes," replied Husband.

A few minutes later, as the glow brightened further, McCool was able to tell Dave Brown, Mike Anderson, and Ilan Ramon on the middeck that he could now see orange and yellow waves washing across Columbia's nose. In the chatter that followed, Husband referred to it as "a blast furnace." The time was now 8:44 am EST and the Shuttle had reached an altitude of around 75 miles as it hurtled across the eastern Pacific, just nine minutes from the California coastline. Flying with her nose angled "upwards" to subject her reinforced carbon-carbon nosecap and the leading edges of her wings to the most extreme re-entry temperatures of close to 3,000 degrees Celsius, Columbia was still dropping at more than 24 times the speed of sound. Aerodynamic pressures upon her airframe doubled, tripled, quadrupled. For the STS-107 crew, as they calmly donned their gloves and pressurized their suits and conducted communications checks, it was a chance to ride out the greatest light show on—or off—the Earth.

At 8:50 am, with the computers still flying the vehicle, Columbia's right-hand Reaction Control System (RCS) jets automatically fired to adjust the position of her nose. Three minutes later, precisely on time, she crossed the California coastline and ground-based observers were able to see her streaking, like a meteor, across the darkened sky. It was at this point that freelance photographer Gene Blevins and his colleague Bill Hartenstein saw what they later described as "a big red flare" coming off the Shuttle and disappearing beneath it. To them, the first uneasy sense that something acutely wrong had taken hold.

Hundreds of miles away, in Florida, NASA and Israeli dignitaries and the astronauts' families had gathered at the Shuttle Landing Facility to await Columbia's arrival. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe was there, as was his new Associate Administrator for Space Flight, former astronaut Bill Readdy. The landing of STS-107 would kick off an ambitious series of missions in 2003; missions which would see the construction of the International Space Station pushed several steps closer to completion. Almost its entire electricity-generating solar array network and trusses were expected to be in place by the end of the year and Columbia herself was scheduled to fly one of those missions, STS-118, in mid-November. She was also pencilled-in to fly a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2004 or 2005.

All of those plans changed a few minutes before 9:00 am EST on 1 February 2003, when Columbia's otherwise normal re-entry profile began to go hideously wrong.

Part 4
'Lock the Doors'

In the second half of January 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia flew her 28th and final mission into orbit. For 16 days, her seven-strong crew supported more than 80 scientific experiments in the Spacehab Research Double Module and aboard a pallet at the rear of the payload bay. By now, the shuttle was perceived to be a dangerous, though well-understood, vehicle; this was the 87th post-Challenger flight and the four-strong fleet of orbiters had a history of robustness, having endured pad aborts, engine problems during ascent, and severe thermal-protection system damage during re-entry. When a briefcase-sized chunk of insulating foam was spotted on launch video falling from the External Tank at T+82 seconds and hitting Columbia's left wing—at precisely the spot where Reinforced Carbon Carbon (RCC) panels would later shield the ship against the most extreme re-entry temperatures—concern was elevated for a time, but ultimately dismissed.

It was a dismissal that would haunt NASA for years after the event … a dismissal as ill-judged and as ill-conceived as declaring the Titanic to be unsinkable.

The video footage from STS-107's launch offered little indication of what, if any, damage the foam strike had caused, save for a huge shower of particles. It was unclear if these particles originated from the impact of the foam itself or from shattered pieces of the RCC panels. If it was the latter, this did not bode well for Columbia's re-entry, for the panels helped to guard the vehicle against the brunt of 3,000-degree-Celsius extremes during the hypersonic return to Earth. Senior managers doubted that a foam strike—an event which had occurred on earlier missions—could possibly be a "safety of flight" issue.

This did not, however, prevent an analysis of a possible scenario in which the RCC had been breached. On 31 January, the day before Columbia was due to land, engineer Kevin McCluney offered a hypothetical description to his colleagues at the Johnson Space Center's flight control team of the kind of data "signature" they could expect to receive in the event that the worst should happen. Let's suppose, said McCluney, that a large hole had been punched through one of the shuttle's RCC panels, enabling super-heated plasma to enter the airframe. "Let's surmise," he told them, "what sort of signature we'd see if a limited stream of plasma did get into the wheel well [of Columbia's main landing gear], roughly from entry interface until about 200,000 feet; in other words, a 10–15-minute window." Little could McCluney possibly have guessed that his "signature" would almost exactly mirror the dreadful events which befell Columbia on the morning of Saturday, 1 February 2003.

"First would be a temperature rise for the tires, brakes, strut actuator, and the uplock actuator return … "

At 8:52:17 a.m. EST, nine minutes after entry interface—the point at which the shuttle began to encounter the tenuous upper traces of the "sensible" atmosphere—Entry Flight Director LeRoy Cain and his team saw the first unusual data on their monitors. Cain had begun his shift on console earlier that morning, with an up-tempo "Let's go get 'em, guys," before giving STS-107 Commander Rick Husband the go-ahead to perform the irreversible de-orbit burn to drop Columbia out of orbit and onto an hour-long path to land at the Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility at 9:16 a.m. EST. Much of the entry profile was controlled by the shuttle's General Purpose Computers (GPCs), as was normal protocol, but with 23 minutes remaining before touchdown, Maintenance, Mechanical, Arm, and Crew Systems (MMACS) Officer Jeff Kling saw something peculiar in his data.

It was what flight controllers termed an "off-nominal event."

As later described by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood in their chilling account of the mission, Comm Check, Kling noticed that two downward-pointing arrows appeared next to readings from a pair of sensors deep within Columbia's left wing. They were designed to measure hydraulic fluid temperatures in lines leading to the elevons. A few seconds later, two more sensors also failed. The attention of Kling and his team was instantly captured; it looked for all the world that the wiring to all four sensors had been cut. They tried to fathom a common "thread" to explain the fault, but none was forthcoming.

Kling spoke directly to Cain. "FYI, I've just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle," he began, cautiously. "Hydraulic return temperatures. Two of them on System One and one in each of Systems Two and Three."

"Four hyd return temps?" queried Cain.

"To the left outboard and left inboard elevon." Cain's thoughts mirrored those of Kling: was there a common root cause for all four sensors to have failed in such close physical and temporal proximity to one another? When Kling asserted that there was "no commonality" between the failures, Cain was perplexed … but instantly thought back to the foam strike. In subsequent interviews, he would admit that his immediate fear was that hot gas had worked its way through a breach in Columbia's left wing and was somehow affecting the interior systems. However, Guidance, Navigation, and Control Officer Mike Sarafin assured him that overall vehicle performance as it crossed the California-Nevada state line at 22.5 times the speed of sound remained nominal. Was Kling happy with all other hydraulic systems? Kling replied that, yes, everything else was functioning normally.

"Tire pressures would rise, given enough time, and assuming the tires don't get holed," continued Kevin McCluney's chilling prediction of what might happen. "The data would start dropping out as the electrical wiring is severed … "

Suddenly, at 8:58 a.m. EST, Rick Husband made his first radio communication since entry interface a quarter of an hour earlier. He started to call Houston, but his words were abruptly cut off. A few seconds later came a loss of temperature and pressure data from both the inboard and outboard tires of Columbia's landing gear in the left well. If the tires were holed or losing pressure, it was very bad news, for STS-107 was a "heavyweight" mission with the fully-loaded Spacehab module and experiment pallet. A "wheels-up" belly landing was not expected to be survivable. The astronauts would need to perform a never-before-tried bailout, utilizing an escape pole system implemented after Challenger, but this could not be attempted until Columbia was at much lower altitude and at much lower airspeed.

"Data loss would include that for tire pressures and temperatures, brake pressures, and temperatures," concluded McCluney.

After hearing Jeff Kling's report, astronaut Charlie Hobaugh—the lead Capcom on duty that morning and the man responsible for talking directly to the STS-107 crew—called Husband to inform him of the anomalous tire pressure messages. Hobaugh also asked Husband to repeat his last comment. There was no reply from the rapidly-descending Columbia. By now, LeRoy Cain was pressing Kling for answers on whether the messages were due to faulty instrumentation, but was advised that all associated sensors were reading "off-scale-low"—they had simply stopped working.

Seconds later, at 8:59:32 a.m., Rick Husband tried again to contact Mission Control. These were to be the last words ever received from Space Shuttle Columbia.

"Roger," he said, presumably acknowledging Hobaugh's earlier pressure call, "uh, buh … " At that point, abruptly, his words were cut off in mid-sentence, together with the flow of data from the orbiter. Communications were never restored. Thirty-two seconds after Husband's partial transmission, a ground-based observer with a camcorder shot video footage of multiple debris contrails streaking like tears across the Texas sky …

With the telemetry thus broken, the atmosphere in Mission Control was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Kling told Cain that there was no common thread between the tire pressure messages and the earlier hydraulic sensor failures; moreover, other instrumentation for monitoring the positions of the orbiter's nose and main landing gear had also been lost. As the seconds of radio silence stretched longer, Cain asked Instrumentation and Communications Officer Laura Hoppe how long she expected the intermittent "comm" to last. She admitted that she expected some ratty comm, but was surprised and puzzled by how protracted and "solid" it was.

"Columbia, Houston, comm check," radioed Charlie Hobaugh at 9:03 a.m. His words were greeted only by static and by the echo of his own voice in the deathly-silent Mission Control. A minute later, he repeated the call. Again, there was no reply.

Half a continent away, at the Kennedy Space Center, astronauts Jerry Ross and Bob Cabana were chatting outside the convoy commander's van at the Shuttle Landing Facility, when they heard that communications with Columbia had been lost. At first, they were unconcerned—that is, until they were informed that powerful long-range radars at the Cape, which were supposed to lock onto the incoming orbiter at 9:04 a.m. and track its final approach, saw nothing coming over the horizon. In LeRoy Cain's words, that offered the final punch-in-the-stomach confirmation that all hope was lost. Columbia was lost. "That was the absolute black-and-white end," he said later. "If the radar is looking and there's nothing coming over the horizon, the vehicle is not there."

Unlike an aircraft, which can adjust its flight profile to make secondary approaches, the shuttle had only one shot to make a pinpoint landing. Its trajectory through the atmosphere could be timed to the second and touchdown was expected at 9:16 a.m. Weather data also made it possible to predict how far down the runway—about 1,500 feet—the shuttle would land. At the Cape, the assembled crowds saw the countdown clock tick to zero … and then begin ticking upwards again as 9:16 came and went, with no sign of Columbia. No trademark sonic booms had been heard. No sign of the tiny black-and-white dot of the orbiter had been seen. Astronaut Steve Lindsey—later to become chief of the astronaut office—was one of the escorts for the STS-107 families and his blood ran cold. Something was terribly wrong.

Standing next to NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe was former astronaut Bill Readdy, now serving as the space agency's Associate Administrator for Space Flight. O'Keefe would describe the former fighter pilot and veteran shuttle commander as ashen-faced and visibly trembling. Jerry Ross was a few months into his new job as head of the Cape's Vehicle Integration Test Team and his first act was to say a brief prayer.

In Texas, police were being inundated with 911 calls, reporting strange lights in the sky, loud explosions, and instances of falling debris. CNN quickly picked up on the stories and began reporting them. In Mission Control, however, televisions were not tuned to outside broadcasts. It was an off-duty NASA engineer, Ed Garske, who watched the shuttle pass overhead from the roadside, south of Houston, and called colleague Don McCormack in Mission Control with the news.

"Don, Don, I saw it," Garske cried, paraphrased by Cabbage and Harwood in Comm Check. "It broke up!"

"Slow down," McCormack replied. "What are you telling me?"

"I saw the orbiter. It broke up!"

Sitting behind LeRoy Cain at the same time, veteran flight director Phil Engelauf received a call from off-duty flight director Bryan Austin, who provided his own first-hand testimony of Columbia's death throes. By this time, although no one in Mission Control had physically seen the evidence of the destruction, they had resigned themselves to it. At 9:05 a.m., Cain had asked Flight Dynamics Officer Richard Jones when he could expect tracking data from the long-range radars in Florida. One minute ago, came the reply.

Now, as Engelauf relayed Austin's emotional report to Cain, the flight director slowly shook his head, composed himself, and turned to the silent control room to declare an emergency. At 9:12 a.m., he instructed Ground Control Officer Bill Foster to "lock the doors"—a de facto admission that all hope was gone—and ordered flight controllers not to leave the building, but to begin preserving their data and writing up their logbook notes for use in the subsequent investigation. After checking with Jones that no further tracking had been acquired, Cain referred his team to their contingency plans … the plans that they and the STS-107 crew had worked in training, but which they hoped fervently would never be needed.

"OK," Cain began, "all flight controllers on the Flight loop, we need to kick off the FCOH [Flight Control Operations Handbook] contingency plan procedure, FCOH checklist, page 2.8-5." He then proceeded to talk them through the required actions: preserving logbook entries and display printouts, communicating only on the Flight loop, and restricting outside telephone calls and transmissions. "No phone calls, no data, in or out," he told them.

Nine hundred miles to the east, in Florida, the STS-107 families were shepherded from the landing site to the crew quarters by 9:30 a.m. It was left to Bob Cabana to break the terrible news—one of his worst jobs in his astronaut career. Mission Control, he explained, had not picked up any radio beacon signals which would have been activated if the crew had managed to bail out of Columbia. Regardless, the orbiter was at an altitude of around 40 miles and travelling at nearly 15,000 mph when it disintegrated. That alone offered not even the faintest hope of being survivable.

Later that morning, near Hemphill, Texas, Roger Coday found some human remains.

He said a brief prayer and built a tiny wooden cross by the roadside.

'Rick was worth it':
Amarillo astronaut's family reclaims private life in wake of public tragedy

Karen Smith Welch - Amarillo Globe-News

Evelyn Husband-Thompson had to steel herself to do the interviews she would inevitably be asked to do in the days approaching the 10th anniversary of the space shuttle Columbia tragedy.

Ten years ago today, Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry over Texas, killing 45-year-old Amarillo astronaut Rick Husband, the mission commander, and his six-member crew.

The disaster occurred 16 minutes from a scheduled landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where Husband-Thompson and her children – Laura, 12, and Matthew, 7 – and other crew families waited to greet their astronaut heroes. Since then, the commander's widow has spoken at memorials on behalf of the crew families, written a book and made presentations to talk about the Christian faith Rick Husband had — the faith in which she remains steadfast. She will again perform that role, speaking today during a ceremony at the Space Mirror memorial at Florida's Kennedy Space Center

But living through a very public tragedy hasn't come easy.

"We work really hard to live in the present and look forward to the future," she said Monday. "And I have to find that place in my gut to be able to talk about it without the devastation. ... But Rick was worth it. It's a testimony, I guess, of how much he meant to me, how much the crew meant to us."

Husband-Thompson, who remarried in 2008, selected Monday for a gamut of telephone interviews because the date, Jan. 28, represented a pair of bookends in her life with Rick.

It was the date in 1977 when the two Texas Tech University grads had their first date in Lubbock.

"That night, he even shared with me his interest in being an astronaut," she said.

And it was the date, 10 years ago, when she, daughter Laura and son Matthew last spoke to Husband, aboard Columbia, via a video link beamed to NASA's Johnson Space Center. The screen froze, during the conversation, but audio continued.

"So we all just said over and over to each other, 'I love you. I love you,'" Husband-Thompson said. "So those words were about the last words we ever said to each other. And if I had it to do over again, there's nothing better."

What follows are excerpts from the AGN Media interview with Husband-Thompson.

Q: How is the 10th anniversary different?

A: Well, obviously, it's put some distance between the event and now. And so that's been merciful. ... But it's very simple to be pulled right back to those moments when everything happened. ... But it's OK. The Lord has certainly healed our broken hearts and bound up our wounds like He promises to. He has definitely gotten us all to a better place.

Q: What do you remember most about the kind of day it was and waiting at Cape Canaveral for Columbia to land?

A: It was just such a shocking turn from waiting up with such expectancy that morning. Laura and Matthew finished watching the last devotional (video)tape that Rick made for them and just being so excited for him to come home, so excited to see him, so proud of him.

He worked so hard and had just been so meticulous to make sure everything went well. He just wanted every crew member to have the best experience they possibly could and he wanted them to work at the very top of their game. ...

I remember looking up at the sky. It's like a freeze frame in my brain of looking up at the clouds, it was just a thin layer of clouds and thinking, "Is that it? Is that it? Seriously? Is that it? That's it. And (I remember) wanting explanations, but already in my heart knowing that it was bad, it was very bad. (I remember) welcoming, of course, any thought that there was a ray of hope, but deep down I knew that there wasn't. I even knew it standing out there. Because I knew that they weren't late. And I knew something was wrong. Very wrong.

And going home and looking at everything as we're driving home. ... All the cars pulling over and people getting out of their cars and taking their hats off and putting them over their hearts. It was a motorcade and they knew who we were.

And they took us home and our front yard super decorated all the banners and flags and everything to welcome Rick home ... And the front yard, the front porch especially, is just covered in flowers and notes already.

I just remember coming in the front door and just standing there. And that's when it hit us like a ton of bricks.

It felt impossible to make it to the next moment. But we did. And we made it to the one after that. I look back on that now and I think how in the world did we even survive that? And it really boils down to God's faithfulness. I had the arms of God wrapped around me and my family.

Q: How are Laura and Matthew doing? I can't believe how much Matthew looks like Rick.

A: Oh, I know. And he has little expressions and even like his posture and things that he does look exactly like his dad. So sometimes it's almost unnerving, because it catches me off-guard and he's not aware that he's doing it. I mean, he was 7 years old when Rick died. ...

Laura has graduated from Trinity University. Her degree is in religion and a minor in Spanish. She went to Israel for a month with Chosen People Ministries and served in Israel. She's in grad school now; she's in a seminary program, and she'll finish that in April.

Matthew's in high school. He's doing really well.He's making good grades. He is in a really good place right now and I'm just extremely grateful for that.

We've walked through a lot of stuff trying to sort through the grief process of losing Rick, and it's been a difficult, difficult road. So when I say God is faithful, it's not just an idealistic comment. (laughter) It's a very meat and potatoes comment. Because I have prayed fervently for both of my children. And the grief process is hard and it's long. It's not something you get over in a year or two or five. (laughter)

Q: What are your thoughts on manned space flight?

A: I think it's great. I don't want to see it come to an end. Surprisingly, I was a little bit sad to see the shuttle program come to an end. We were at the last launch in Florida. And it was the end of an era. ... I feel that Rick and all of the astronaut corps and all of NASA have poured years and years of work into improving manned flight. And I do not want to see that come to an end. We are born explorers at heart. We can lay that aside, but other countries will pick up where we left off, and I'd just really hate to see that happen. I think we should continue to be strong as a nation and as a space program.

Q: Are you still close with the families of the Columbia crew?

A: Everybody's kind of moved on. Which is a natural process, I think, and a healthy one. Probably my closest friend is still Sandy Anderson (widow of Columbia astronaut Michael Anderson). ... We're the only two that have stayed in Houston. So we're still close. I talk to the other crew families occasionally. When Laura was in Israel last summer, she stayed with the Ramons for a few days. ... Everybody's trying to find their way and live their lives as best they can. So these memorials kind of bring us all back to each other, but I think all of us have tried to move on.

Q: Do you look at the stars?

A: (Laughter) Yeah, I do look at the stars. I see everything in the heavens in decency and order. I see God's design, and there's just such an eternity feel when you look at the heavens. There's a verse in the Bible in Colossians that I love that says set your mind on things above and not on things of this earth. And when you gaze up at the stars, you see God's providential hand. He is in control. But we have to trust him. We have to trust him.

Q: Does it feel like you have reached a milestone?

A: Oh, definitely. I'm grateful for every day that the pain isn't as much. But I have to tell you it definitely bubbles to the surface this time of year. But I've learned to not be afraid of the grief. I think in the past, all of us really stuffed down the pain when it just was too much. And I think all of us have learned a better way to manage it where we face it and pray through it and know that it's tough and appreciate the prayers and face it.Then there's a lot of healing that I think takes place.

There's a lot of healing — the first time I went back to Florida, after Rick died was in November of that same year of 2003, when they dedicated the addition on the Space Mirror of the crew, they have all their names up there. It was horrible. That was so hard. Each time since that I've gone back to Florida, and I've been back many times, it's been less and less painful. It will never not be painful, but I think, it's reassuring to see that you can go back to those places and reflect and remember God's faithfulness and how he has walked us through. And that's been encouraging to do. And it's very encouraging to do it together as a family. So I'm glad we're all going to be together (on the anniversary of the tragedy). I'm very grateful.

Q: Talk a little about the memorials.

A: When you ask me what memorials mean — a lot. There's video in (a PBS documentary about Columbia astronaut Ilan Ramon she recently watched.) that I had not seen of Rick. So to see him walking around talking and laughing and connecting with him for a moment through that documentary, remembering, is so bittersweet. But there is very much: Bitter of course is the loss. But the sweet is getting to see just a few moments of seeing him interact and remembering his casual laugh and smile and all the personal things about him that I just love so much. And the way he interacted with the crew and the kindness and the gentleness in his eyes and things you don't think about on a daily basis, I think they would be too painful.

Of course (the documentary) showing the accident across the sky and burned ground in East Texas and a helmet laying on the ground and all of that was just incredibly difficult.I cried the hardest of the whole video in the strangest place though. I cried when they showed the launch. Because I knew.

I'm watching that, I'm thinking, That's the point that Rick left the earth.

Q: What part will you play in today's memorial at the Space Mirror?

A: "I don't know how much we can all say in speeches that's going to change or help. And I'm giving the keynote speech next weekend at Kennedy on Friday and I just want to focus briefly on each crew member and say what I remember about them and just touch briefly on what these 10 years have been. The theme is out of Isaiah, the lord has turned things to beauty from ashes. And that's what he's done. He's brought friendships and all types of things have evolved out of this that again show the human spirit, and created totally by God. How it has turned things into positive. Memorials and scholarships and educational opportunities and airports. (laughter) All kinds of things.

Q: Would Rick be embarrassed by all the tributes?

A: Oh yeah. Rick told me, literally, that his goal in life was to never have a school named after him. And the reason he said that is he didn't want to die doing what he loved. That was just an honest comment. His goal was to successfully live through all of it and retire and live to be a ripe old age. But that was not what was to be.

I haven't looked at any of the memorials as a negative. I think it's very honoring. Always an opportunity to re-establish what Rick's faith was, too.

Q: Talk a little bit about how faith guided what Rick did and how he put danger in perspective.

A: That kind of comes with the territory of being a test pilot. So when he pursued that, when he became a fighter pilot and subsequently a test pilot and then becoming an astronaut: Yeah, there's always a risk, but it's a calculated risk.So I know full well that although there was always a risk involved, that he felt that the odds were very much in his favor that it would be a successful mission and that he would be able to accomplish what he wanted to do. All of us function in calculated risk every day, the moment we step out of bed. We take a calculated risk when we sit down in a chair, when we get in a car, when we get on a plane. We know that we do not live in a world that is perfectly safe. ... But the advantage and the purpose outweigh the risk, and therefore we move forward. So that's what he did.

Q: When was your faith tested the most?

A: That's a great question. I would say that something happened on Feb. 1 I really can't fully explain. But I was able to almost put a childlike trust in God that day. I was absolutely devastated. And I had no idea how it was going to turn out. But I just knew that God was going to take care of us. And I had no particular reason other than just believing His word. But I had no idea how. ...

I think the biggest test — and it wasn't a test of faith, it was more a challenge to not become bitter — was in the following August when the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report came out. That was very difficult because it very specifically outlined where mistakes were made and why this happened. And individuals that made decisions that maybe could not have prevented what ultimately happened, but certainly they made decisions not to investigate or try to figure out what needed to happen because of the foam strike. (A piece of foam dislodged and struck the shuttle during liftoff.)

So it was very specific. And I had to go through a process of processing anger and bitterness for a few days. It was tough. But I did come to the conclusion: "No one maliciously did this." It was human error and the limit that we have as humans — even if we're really smart — is, we cannot be omniscient. And so there was no way for them to know the full impact of it or they would have done something. No one maliciously did that.

I also figured out that that road of anger and bitterness was going to lead to nothing more than a huge decrease in quality of life for me and for Laura and Matthew. That it would serve no purpose. Because at the end of the day, the crew would still be lost and we would be where we were. I had to pray through it."

Astronaut's father recalls Space Shuttle Columbia disaster

Adam Young - Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

From the teachers who protected children in the halls of Sandy Hook Elementary last month to the astronauts who perished in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster nearly 10 years ago, Barry McCool said he knew they had one defining character in common.

"We're talking about heroes here," McCool said. "We have a lot of heroes today. I happen to be lucky enough I have one I can call my son."

McCool, father of astronaut William C. "Willie" McCool who died aboard the Columbia on Feb. 1, 2003, told stories of the heroism and character his son and fellow crew members, including mission commander Rick Husband of Amarillo, showed in their lives.

The presentation Jan. 22 at Hillcrest Country Club marked the upcoming 10th anniversary of the Columbia disaster. The shuttle disintegrated over Texas and Louisiana, killing all on board, including Husband, Willie McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Ilan Ramon, Michael Anderson and David Brown.

Barry McCool beamed as he told a Lubbock audience about his son's accomplishments.

Willie McCool was a 1979 Coronado High School graduate who held records in track. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy, his father said.

Barry McCool recalled getting to know his son's fellow crew members, but especially remembered a brief but revealing phone conversation with Husband.

The cellphone call came not long before the Columbia flight, Barry McCool said.

"He says: 'The reason I'm calling is I want to thank you for your son: Willie is the glue that has kept the crew together through all the ups and downs we have had,'" the father said, noting the crew's two previous missions were canceled over two years.

The call from Husband spoke volumes about Husband's character, Barry McCool said.

"That's the kind of individual Rick Husband was," he said. "That's what the six other crew members were like. Overachievers. Highly motivated individuals."

The Texas Aviation Heritage Foundation at Lubbock hosted Tuesday's event, which served as a preview for the foundation's upcoming tribute to Husband and Willie McCool, a special exhibit set to open Feb. 1 in Lubbock's Silent Wings Museum.

The Columbia Disaster exhibit will run through March 17 at the museum, 6202 N. Interstate 27.

Columbia pilot's parents recall crash 10 years ago

Associated Press

One morning nearly 10 years ago, Barry McCool watched his son's space shuttle fly more than 40 miles above his Las Vegas home.

He went back inside to watch a live computer feed from Houston, home of NASA's Mission Control. It wouldn't be long until Columbia landed in Florida. But it never did.

The shuttle piloted by his son William McCool disintegrated high over Texas during its descent back to Earth. All seven crew members died on Feb. 1, 2003.

Even before the tragedy was announced, Barry McCool knew something was wrong when he heard Houston officials say they had lost infrared radar contact with the shuttle and its crew, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported (http://bit.ly/Wqawzo). He got a sickening feeling in his stomach when he saw the flight director's expression, he said.

"Willie's gone," McCool told his wife, Audrey.

She didn't believe it.

"Are you sure?" she asked him.

McCool said he knew he had to get to Houston. His son had designated him as one of his casualty assistant officers _ someone who would take care of paperwork and distribute personal effects if the astronaut died.

At the airport, Barry McCool went to the front of the line at the Southwest Airlines counter and told a woman, "I'm (retired Marines) Lt. Cmdr. McCool. My son is Willie McCool and he was just killed on the shuttle. I need to get to Houston."

Two airlines' computers were down. But finally an employee set up his trip, and a golf cart rushed him to the gate, where five Southwest employees hugged him and told him they were holding a seat.

McCool recalled the kindness of strangers as the devastating loss started to sink in. Flight attendants kept asking if he was OK. The co-pilot and later the pilot came back to visit and shared condolences, McCool said.

Then passengers handed him kind notes on napkins during the plane's layover in Lubbock, where Willie McCool spent his last two years of high school after his parents moved there in 1977 after being stationed in Guam. The flight continued to Houston, where the rental car employee saw his name on his driver's license, started crying and apologized for having to charge him for the car, McCool said.

Just 16 days earlier, Barry McCool and his wife were in Florida to watch Columbia's launch.

"That's my little boy sitting on top of 2 million tons of TNT," he thought just seconds after ignition.

McCool was proud of his son, crying _ but just he wanted to get through the 86th second. The shuttle Challenger exploded 86 seconds into its tragic 1986 flight, killing all seven astronauts.

Columbia's liftoff seemed fine as the shuttle soared into space. But astronauts and their families didn't know that a chunk of foam tore a hole in Columbia's left wing 82 seconds after liftoff, and the gap later let in the searing gases of re-entry and caused the shuttle to break apart.

The Columbia mission was the first spaceflight for William C. "Willie" McCool, 41, a Navy commander. After graduating second in his 1983 class at the Naval Academy, he went on to test pilot school and became an astronaut in 1996. McCool, an experienced Navy pilot with more than 2,800 hours in flight, was married with three sons.

Part 1
10 years ago: America lost seven heroes; McCool's lost oldest son
Remembering Lubbock's Willie McCool and the shuttle Columbia crew

Terry Greenberg - Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

Barry McCool watched his son's spacecraft fly past more than 40 miles above his Las Vegas home.

It was early morning, Feb. 1, 2003.

He went back in the house. His television carried the news. On his computer, he watched a live feed from NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston.

It wouldn't be long until Space Shuttle Columbia — piloted by his son, Willie McCool — landed in Florida.

It never did.

The launch

Sixteen days earlier, Barry and wife Audrey were in Florida to watch Columbia's launch.

Seconds after ignition, Barry felt the engines rumble through his chest.

"That's my little boy sitting on top of two million tons of TNT," he thought.

Barry was proud, crying.

And he wanted to get through the 86th second.

The shuttle Challenger exploded 86 seconds into its tragic 1986 flight.

He knew the success rate on launches had been good.

He also knew there are no guarantees ... in space or the dicey job Barry did flying S-3 Vikings on and off aircraft carriers.

You're prepared ...

But if it's your time to go ...

Columbia passed the 86th second and was going strong into space.

What Barry, Audrey and their family members didn't know was 82 seconds into Columbia's flight a piece of foam broke off the spacecraft's external tank.

More than two weeks later, it proved fatal.

'Willie's gone'

Something was wrong after Barry had gone back into his Las Vegas home when he heard Houston saying they'd lost infrared radar contact with the shuttle and its crew of seven astronauts.

He got a sickening feeling in his stomach when he saw the flight director's expression.

Barry saw it in the man's eyes. Saw his head was down.

He looked at Audrey and said, "Willie's gone."

She didn't believe it.

"Are you sure?" she asked him.

Barry hugged Audrey and told her he had to get to Houston.

Willie had designated Barry as one of his casualty assistant officers — someone who would take care of paperwork and distribution of personal effects if he died.

It was a role Barry had filled for others during his career in the Marines.

Duty called.

He had to get to Houston to carry out Willie's wishes.

Audrey could see Barry was getting more hyper as he thought of what he needed to do to get to Houston.

She didn't want him driving to McCarran International Airport and got a friend to come and take him.

Audrey took a call from her daughter, Kirstie, who was at Cape Canaveral, waiting for her brother to land.

NASA had taken the families away on a bus, but didn't tell them what happened — adding to the angst.

Audrey told Kirstie. She relayed the news to family members of other astronauts — including Commander Rick Husband's brother and mother.

Barry headed to the airport and Audrey stayed home — handling logistics. She got a car and hotel for Barry in Houston. She talked more to Kirstie and others.

Journey to Houston

Barry went past a line of waiting people, walked up to the Southwest Airlines counter and told a woman, "I'm Lieutenant Commander McCool. My son is Willie McCool and he was just killed on the shuttle. I need to get to Houston."

Their computers were down.

She ran to United Airlines to see if they could help.

While he waited, he had time to think.

It hit him again ... Willie was dead.

He turned to see 250 people looking at him with daggers ... wondering why he just walked up to the counter and why the staff was helping him.

He started to tear up.

The woman came back and said United's computers were also down.

Finally, another woman's computer was working.

They set up his trip. Las Vegas to Lubbock to Austin to Houston.

A golf cart rushed him to the gate, where five different Southwest employees hugged him and told him they were holding a seat.

The flight crew greeted him and put him in the emergency row of the 737 with extra leg room for Barry's 6-foot, 7-inch frame.

He settled in with his duffle bag and started thinking about Willie's wife, Lani, and what she was going through at Cape Canaveral in Florida, where the shuttle was going to land.

At some point, Barry realized there was no one sitting in his row.

Or the row ahead or behind him.

All three rows were sealed off with yellow tape.

And people were starting to look.

Barry wondered if they thought he was a convict with a social disease.

Flight attendants kept asking if he was OK.

The co-pilot and later the pilot came back to visit and shared condolences.

Word started to get around the plane about who the man was beyond the yellow tape.

Passengers reach out in Lubbock

The plane landed in Lubbock, where the McCools lived, where Willie graduated from Coronado High School.

As passengers got off, they handed Barry notes on Southwest napkins, expressing their sorrow and best wishes.

Women were crying and wanted to hug him.

At the stop in Austin, the flight crew asked Barry if he'd had anything to eat.

They took him off the plane and got him food from McDonald's and Burger King, also some barbecue and tacos.

In Houston, he waited in line for his rental car.

When he showed the woman his driver's license, she said, "You're Mr. McCool."

She started crying, came out from behind the counter and apologized they had to charge him for the car.

She told Barry she was going to talk to the president of the company.

Barry drove to the hotel room Audrey had gotten for him.

He and Audrey were still figuring out what was going to happen the next day and what they could do.

In Vegas

Back in Vegas, Audrey was getting lots of calls from media.

Because she was a tenured full professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, the school sent over its public affairs officer, who took over handling phones and set up a news conference in the McCools' front yard for early evening.

Audrey dealt with the questions until her colleague cut off the media and said that was enough.

Audrey doesn't remember the questions or most of what she said.

Like Barry, her military training kicked in. The retired colonel had a job to do.

Even if she was in shock the day she lost her oldest son.

Part 2
Shuttle disaster shook family, many others
Kirstie Chadwick and her family came to Cape Canaveral to watch her brother pilot space shuttle Columbia

Kirstie Chadwick and her family came to Cape Canaveral Saturday morning, Feb. 1, 2003, to watch her brother, Willie McCool, pilot space shuttle Columbia home from its 16-day mission.

They were in a viewing area for family members and other guests. The Chadwicks stood atop a set of bleachers with Willie's wife Lani and her two youngest sons.

A big clock counted down toward zero — when Columbia would land. There was chatter on the loudspeakers between Houston and Columbia. Family and friends chatted with excitement. Kids played tag.

Kirstie's dad — Barry McCool — called her from Las Vegas, telling her he'd seen the shuttle fly over his home.

"Willie's on his way home," he told her.

But Willie and his six fellow astronauts never got to Florida.

The loudspeakers went quiet, but at first, no one noticed — Columbia must have hit a dead zone for communications.

The clock hit zero and started counting up.

Kirstie had been to other landings and kept looking to the sky for the shuttle.

Lani became quiet and Kirstie asked her if something was wrong.

"I am not sure, those men down there are really important and they look very worried," Lani told her sister-in-law.

The men were in suits, huddled together in close conversation with agitated body language.

One was NASA chief Sean O'Keefe.

Lani walked down the steps to find the astronaut assigned to her family as an escort.

A few minutes later she rushed back up and said, "something is very wrong. They are taking us now."

Spouses and children were taken away, and a few minutes later the other remaining family members and guests were put on buses.

NASA had not told the families anything yet, so Kirstie called her parents in Vegas from the bus.

After a couple of calls back and forth, her parents told her the shuttle had disintegrated over Texas.

She was on a bus with many people who had become friends.

Not only did they share a loved one on Columbia — but the Chadwicks lived in Florida and helped transport people when they came for shuttle events.

She started quietly telling others the news.

Kirstie told the brother of mission commander Rick Husband, who told his mother.

Willie and Rick shared West Texas ties. Willie graduated from Coronado High School when his family lived in Lubbock in the late 1970s. Rick was from Amarillo and attended Texas Tech.

Kirstie was also trying to take care of her kids — 10-year-old Nikki and 8-year-old Hunter — while also starting to grasp that her beloved older brother was gone.

She started crying.

It freaked out Nikki because her mom was always the strong one.

Nikki started crying.

Nikki had thought her uncle's shuttle was delayed, but as the truth sunk in, she cried more.

"Why, why us, why Willie?" she asked.

Her Florida elementary school had made a big deal about her uncle's mission.

Classes did space-related science projects, celebrating this crew and science experiments on the shuttle.

Kirstie then noticed Hunter was reading a Harry Potter book on the bus.

But he wasn't turning any pages. He was just holding the book open.

How do you prepare a 10-year-old girl and 8-year-old boy for this?

Where is it in the parenting manual?

Hunter stared at the book. He was confused. His mom told him what happened and he could not grasp it. He wondered why his uncle couldn't just parachute to safety.

The bus took the group to an auditorium, where they waited for 45 minutes with no further news, other than more phone calls from family members and others who were watching the news across the country.

People prayed in groups before hearing official word that Columbia exploded 16 minutes before it was scheduled to land.

For the Chadwicks, it would be a long time until life returned to something normal.

La Tuque, Quebec, Canada

After splitting the spouses and children from the others, NASA would not allow Kirstie to contact Lani.

Meanwhile, Willie and Lani's oldest son, Sean, was 22 and attending college in Canada.

He was visiting his girlfriend's family in La Tuque, almost 200 miles north of Montreal, and went to a local school to watch a feed from NASA of his dad bringing Columbia home.

Sean got a bad feeling when Mission Control in Houston kept doing communication checks.

He called his mom in Florida. She had not heard anything. Then they lost the phone connection.

Sean had the phone number of astronaut Dan Tani, a family friend for whom he'd done some house sitting in Houston, where the astronauts lived.

It didn't look good, he told Sean.

Then he said there was a group of American astronauts doing cold weather training in Quebec.

NASA got Sean a ticket for a flight home to Houston from Montreal. His girlfriend and her dad drove him to the airport in Montreal where he met Ellen Baker, one of the American astronauts.

She flew back with him to Houston and he didn't get back until late that night.

It was a long day and for most of it he was in a daze.

His eyes were open and he could hear everything around him, but he also felt like he was floating and not there as he tried to deal with the reality his dad was gone and the whole world watched it on television.

Fort Drum, New York

To Barry and wife Audrey, Willie's oldest son is Marine Sean — Willie's younger brother is Army Shawn.

Shawn, who was elementary school age when the McCools first lived in Lubbock, was watching the landing on television at Fort Drum — in upstate New York — and knew his brother was gone when the shuttle could not be seen.

First disbelief. Then sadness. Then worry for what Lani and the boys would have to go through.

Shawn, called his parents, who had been trained by the military not to react emotionally until they had all the facts. They were mechanical and methodical on the phone that morning — and, he knew, in shock.

State College, Pennsylvania

Al Cantello was at an indoor track meet at Penn State when someone called to tell him NASA was having communications trouble with Columbia.

Cantello was Willie's cross country coach at the Naval Academy about 20 years earlier. He had a couple of midshipmen about to run and he wanted to watch them.

He didn't want to believe Willie may be gone, but the news didn't sound good.

Cantello tried to sit by himself, but as news spread at the meet, people started coming up to him to talk.

After his athletes ran, Cantello asked someone to drive him home.

It was a four-hour drive and a little more than 200 miles from State College — in central Pennsylvania — to Annapolis, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

People called him during the drive because they'd heard Columbia's pilot graduated from the academy.

Cantello hadn't bragged about his former student piloting the shuttle.

One friend was surprised when he called Cantello in the car and the longtime Navy coach said Willie had been one of his guys.

Lubbock, Texas

Charlotte Godlove, the principal's secretary and office manager at Coronado High School, was on her way back from Big Bend on Saturday when she heard about the Columbia tragedy on the radio.

She had been excited when Cindy Wallace, a Coronado assistant principal, sent a letter to Willie thanking him for shooting a video clip for the school and asking if he'd take a Mustang Rowdy Rag into space.

Godlove watched the launch and followed Columbia's mission every day through the media.

When she knew the shuttle — and Willie — were gone, she was sick to her stomach as she tried to process the news.

Shortly afterward, Coronado Principal Jack Booe called on a cell phone, asking if she'd come in early Monday so school administrators could huddle and come up with a plan to decide what they would need to do at the school where Willie once walked the halls.

Philip Riewe, Coronado High School assistant principal, came off the golf course at Shadow Hills that Saturday morning after a round with CHS teachers Ron Upton and Don Coleman before he got a call from Booe asking him to come in early.

When staff came to work Monday morning, they found an impromptu memorial at the sign outside the school.

The sign was a gift of the Class of 1979 — Willie's class.

Flowers, flags, notes and more adorned the sign and paid respect to a Lubbock hero.

Booe stopped by classrooms to check on teachers who'd taught Willie to see if they were OK.

He got on the school's intercom as the school day was ready to start and addressed the campus:

"In the last 16 minutes of a 16-day mission, 39 miles above Texas, the space shuttle Columbia fell to pieces Saturday, February 1, raining debris over hundreds of miles of countryside.

"President Bush addressed the nation with glistening eyes as he said, 'The crew of shuttle Columbia did not return safely to earth, but we pray they are safely home.'

"Among the seven crew members that boarded Columbia, January 16, former Coronado Mustang William C. McCool, known to his classmates as "Cool Willie," commanded the space shuttle for his first flight into space. He never forgot about his high school, carrying a Coronado Mustang spirit towel high into outer space, to be framed later here at Coronado.

"McCool was active in everything from track to science team to NHS, in his years as a Coronado student.

"Former Coronado teacher Ed Jarman recalled McCool's commitment to success by remembering he 'would pick the hardest courses and the toughest teachers at every school, starting in junior high and he met every challenge,'" Booe said.

Through the day, teachers stopped by Booe's office to visit. Some were visibly upset.

Even though Willie had been gone from Coronado almost a quarter of a century, for those who taught and knew him, he would always be one of their kids.

On Monday and later in the week, the assistant principals brainstormed how to pay respect to their former Mustang.

Doug Young proposed the idea to rename the track for Willie. Cindy Wallace came up with a design for the sign. Paul Wheeler had a Navy contact and discussed having a flyover when it was dedicated.

Later in the day, it looked like it might rain and Booe asked student council members to gather the stuff left by the sign in honor of Willie and his colleagues so it wouldn't be ruined.

Part 3
Willie McCool: A timid child grows into an impressive teen
McCool was shy, but was first to class, first to answer tough questions and his toothy grin won people over

When Willie McCool was a little boy he didn't say he wanted to become a test pilot or astronaut.

Shortly after returning from a tour in Vietnam in 1969 — his third tour there — Barry McCool found a timid 8-year-old boy in Cardiff by the Sea, north of San Diego.

Barry was worried Willie wouldn't have the confidence to be self-reliant.

Sometimes when they'd roughhouse on the floor — like dads and kids do — Willie would cry.

For the Marine sergeant, this was unacceptable.

Barry challenged the boy.

Not everyone agreed with Barry's approach.

The bloody nose

One time while wrestling on the floor, Willie lost his temper.

And Willie had a quite a temper. He'd even hold his breath and start to turn blue on occasion.

He started throwing punches at Barry while screaming and crying.

Barry got in a ball on the floor while Willie flailed punches … not worried Willie could hurt him.

But Willie got a good punch inside that ball and bloodied Barry's nose.

Really bloodied his nose.

Willie stopped crying.

Barry thought it was funny.

But more important, it gave Willie a dose of confidence.

Barry started to see a major change in the boy — he started to come out of his shell.

Willie played baseball, was a running back and wide receiver in Pop Warner football, was in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and learned to play violin and trumpet.

All of this added to his confidence and chipped away at whatever pieces of the shell that had surrounded the boy.

Checkmate

Barry taught Willie to play chess and card games … including poker.

He wouldn't let Willie win, even when wife Audrey suggested it.

Barry wanted Willie to earn it — it would mean that much more.

The McCools were living in Duluth, Minn. when Willie was in middle school.

One of his teachers was a chess master and would play against the kids.

Willie became one of his star pupils because of his three-dimensional thinking and visual acuity.

And what he learned in school, he applied at home, determined to beat Barry.

One day, Willie made a move in a game, and said "checkmate."

"You've got to be kidding," said Barry who looked at his son.

Willie was beaming with a grin as big as the cosmos.

Barry never beat Willie in chess again.

As Willie got older, he could win in three moves and would show Barry techniques.

The siblings

Barry made sure daughter Kirstie also knew how to stand up for herself.

When she was only four years old, she told Barry he was pushing Willie too hard.

So he took her outside and explained what he was doing with her brother and started showing her how to defend herself.

But he wanted to make sure she really fought and made her hit him as hard as she could.

Kirstie was in kindergarten when Barry got a call at home from the principal of the kids' school.

Barry wondered what Willie could have done, but the principal told him Kirstie was having a bad day.

He was surprised — she's in kindergarten — what could she do to get in trouble?

Barry got to school to hear Kirstie was pushed down and skinned her knee.

A teacher grabbed her to take her to the nurse.

She was trained by a Marine to fight back when she was grabbed.

So she scratched the teacher, bit the nurse, kicked the principal in the shin and bit her.

Barry was thrilled.

Barry and Audrey both worked. Every morning Audrey made a list of chores for the kids.

Willie and Kirstie were constantly teasing each other and would try and manipulate each other to do their chores.

They were both type A personalities and overachievers, which they also got from their mom.

In Audrey's home you were not allowed to get anything but good grades.

It was just expected.

If you didn't meet expectations, you were reminded in blunt terms.

Willie and Kirstie's younger brother Shawn came along — 10 years younger than his brother.

Shawn's first memory of his brother was an Order of the Arrow Boy Scout ceremony in Guam.

There was a big campfire and it seemed to be a big deal to his dad and brother.

Like most kid brothers, Shawn wanted to tag along with Willie, who let him many times but sometimes would politely tell him he needed to play with his friends.

But if Shawn had problems, Willie was there.

So was Kirstie — who took the defensive lessons Barry gave her along with karate class to become Shawn's defender from neighborhood bullies.

Guam

The McCools went from Duluth, where the average high temperature in January is 21 degrees, to Guam, where the average high temperature in January is in the mid-80s.

While living on the island, Willie became Guam's first Eagle Scout.

And there were more sports.

Willie was playing football for John F. Kennedy High School when he broke his ankle.

Part of his rehabilitation was running.

Willie found out he was a runner, not a football player.

He set records at his high school.

Another attraction to running for Kennedy High was a female classmate named Lani Vallelos.

They had a speech class together and Willie eventually found out Lani was a sprinter.

He'd been swimming in Minnesota and Guam would be great for swimming — but Lani wasn't a swimmer.

Willie followed Lani around like a puppy dog. He was smitten.

But the McCool family's time on Guam was about to end for a move to Lubbock.

Barry was finishing his first assignment as a naval flight officer.

He had been stationed at the Naval Air Station on Guam for the past 3 years and had received orders to a new squadron stationed at the North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado, Calif.

The McCools were heading back to the U.S.

Willie and Lani broke up.

Lubbock

Audrey was looking for a job in the San Diego area, where they'd lived before.

No jobs — so they expanded the search.

Lubbock was building a new medical center and Audrey had been a director of food service for hospitals in the past. She thought she had a job nailed down, but it fell through.

But Texas Tech hired her in the dietetics program in the nutrition sciences department.

Lubbock also worked for the McCools because Barry could fly in and out of Reese Air Force Base west of town when not deployed at sea on an aircraft carrier. With his new assignment at North Island, Barry was going to be deployed on the USS Ranger aircraft carrier and deployments at that time were for nine-month periods.

The day the McCools passed the city limits driving into Lubbock, the car radio announced Elvis Presley had died.

Willie transferred into Coronado High School as a junior.

He was shy and didn't say much.

But he was the first to class, first to turn in his assignments and always first to answer the tough questions.

And his toothy grin won people over.

He would tell friends about the girl he had to leave behind in Guam and it was obvious he still had strong feelings for her.

After awhile, classmates started to appreciate Willie's work ethic and more.

When track teammates would cut out of a workout, he stayed — but he didn't turn them into the coach.

When his friends would party and some were drinking, Willie still had a good time, but didn't need a drink.

When the track coach came up to Willie and said the team needed a personal best from him to win a meet, he did it.

But they also gave him grief for his too-short running shorts and efforts to play guitar.

More than anything, though, they were touched by his enthusiasm and love of life. In just two years at Coronado, he made a huge impact.

The night of his final school assembly, when it was announced he was going to the Naval Academy, he enthusiastically congratulated a classmate for his scholarship to a community college, an act that stayed with that classmate for years.

Part 4
From Annapolis to NASA: After Lubbock McCool's career led to seat on shuttle
Wherever he went, McCool wanted to run competitively

Terry Greenberg - Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

Al Cantello was addressing a group of plebes in 1979.

He asked them what percentage of their life at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. would be committed to the cross country team.

Willie McCool told the coach he thought it would be about 20 percent, along with getting good grades and his education.

"You'll never be a runner here," said Cantello, who started coaching at Navy in the 1960s after throwing javelin for the U.S. in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

Willie had been interested in attending a military academy and one of his friends at Coronado High School applied to the Air Force Academy.

Willie applied to the Air Force and Naval academies.

Wherever he went, Willie wanted to run competitively.

He was eventually accepted at both, but chose to go to Annapolis because of Cantello.

The team's senior leadership was drawn to Willie that first year by his sincere desire to improve and his natural charisma.

They took him under their wing.

He made an impact that first year even off the course.

Plebes had to sing songs on the team bus and they were sometimes racy.

Willie asked everyone to pound on the bus seats and started singing. The song sounded dirty — but it wasn't.

It was so popular, they recorded Willie singing it to play for future classes.

Four years later, he reminded Cantello of that question of commitment and told his coach it was now 90 percent.

Willie had developed into a formidable 10,000-meter runner and was team captain, as voted by his teammates.

They wanted someone who would punish themselves as much, or more, than they did, someone they could draft behind.

Every cross country course varies and the team had different strategies for each meet.

Willie would process the plan and people would rally around him.

It was more than leadership — it was magnetism.

He could pull off anything.

The Army-Navy cross country meet was a big deal in Annapolis.

Willie would walk down the academy's halls and act as town crier.

"Four-and-a-half days 'til Army — are you going to be there?" he said.

Willie should have graduated number one in his class with a degree in applied science but someone turned him in for running with his shirt off.

Midshipmen had to run with their shirts on in the yard area — but it was OK to run without a shirt outside the yard.

He was outside the yard when someone yelled at him to put his shirt on.

The demerits cost him the top class ranking.

In the Navy

He got a master's degree in computer science from the University of Maryland in 1985 and another master's in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in 1992.

Willie finished first in his class in test pilot school — where pilots would take brand new aircraft with major flaws and work out the problems before the Navy would decide to write a check.

He flew EA6B jets — known as Prowlers — a plane with advanced electronics.

More important, he reconnected with Lani — the girl he left in Guam in 1977 when his family moved to Lubbock — and they eventually married.

Someone suggested he apply for the astronaut program.

He wasn't sure.

Willie, Lani and their kids were now in Washington state and he was happy flying the Prowler.

The mid-wing attack jet was not what the Top Gun rock stars wanted to fly, but Willie marched to his own beat.

Lani urged him to apply to the astronaut program, but he didn't want to move the family.

She called Willie's dad Barry and asked him to encourage Willie to apply.

He eventually did — but was rejected.

Willie was angry.

His competitive nature kicked in.

He reapplied — wanting to show he had the right stuff.

A year later he was accepted.

But he still was torn by the thought of moving his family to Houston. The family was happy living near Whidby Island Naval Air Station, north of Seattle.

Lani called Barry again.

He told his son it was a great career opportunity and less than one percent get the chance. He also told Willie he could be with his family and not at sea on a carrier as his squadron was about to leave for a deployment.

And Willie was also concerned about leaving his squadron at this time.

He talked to his commanding officer who told him to take it or he'd kick him out of the squadron.

Willie McCool became an astronaut.

Astronaut McCool

Willie was selected as a pilot — but for awhile wondered if he'd ever fly a space shuttle.

His computer skills were needed.

He designed the interface of a new computer software program for the shuttle.

He went to Russia to help them with components for the international space station. He worked on different parts from different countries that needed the bugs worked out.

Then the shuttle mission he was assigned to fly was scrubbed because their launch vehicle was needed to repair the Hubble telescope.

They were scheduled to launch again for an emergency mission to resupply the space station — but couldn't go because Columbia couldn't dock with the space station.

Willie was somewhat irritated because many of his friends in the program were going into space while he and his crew waited.

Finally, their mission was set with a launch date of January 16, 2003.

Part 5
Life goes on: Constant reminders made it difficult, but necessary
For McCool family returning home, it was hard to return to normal

Terry Greenberg - Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

The McCool family gathered in Houston after the Columbia space shuttle disaster that killed pilot Willie McCool — their son, brother, husband, dad, uncle — and six other astronauts.

There were memorial services — including the nationally televised one with at the Johnson Space Center with President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush. There were more media interviews.

Willie's mom Audrey and sister Kirstie coordinated meals, transportation and interviews. Willie's dad Barry and brother Shawn entertained the little kids.

There was a lot to do every day and not a lot of time to think.

But when many of them returned home, it was hard to return to normal.

Lost childhood

Nikki and Hunter Chadwick, Kirstie's kids, went back to school in Florida.

They couldn't step back into the lives they had before. Kids — even if well meaning — wouldn't let them.

They heard "sorry" all the time. Classmates wanted to know what it was like. They felt they explained it a hundred times a day.

The siblings felt like rock stars — and not in a good way.

There were ceremonies honoring Willie and the Columbia crew — including one at their school where Nikki spoke.

People had the best intentions, but after awhile, the Chadwicks just wanted to be alone to grieve.

All of it forced Nikki and Hunter to grow up faster.

Hunter felt one day he was 8 and then he was 40. He'd go to class and hope the day would end as soon as possible so he could go home.

He lost a lot of his childhood.

But it pulled them closer together.

Like many siblings, they used to fight.

They started to lean on each other for support.

They also started relating better to older kids.

Back in Vegas

Barry and Audrey found a massive amount of flowers, cards and letters waiting when they returned to Las Vegas.

They received condolence emails from Russian cosmonauts.

People made them quilts.

Audrey was teaching at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and Barry was a master's student who also taught.

But they still had Columbia-related work, too.

Audrey worked with Willie's wife Lani to set up Willie's funeral at the Naval Academy so his track team, roommates and others could honor him.

The McCools attended close to a dozen events in Vegas honoring their son and his colleagues.

During a visit to son Shawn, they visited a memorial in Syracuse, N.Y. A local high school had an experiment on the shuttle.

None of this kept them from grieving.

After years in the military, they lived every day with the possibility you might not come home.

Plus, Audrey was from hardcore German stock. You just deal with it.

Barry was Irish — you have a drink and get up the next day.

People told them they were heroic for what they went through. They said there was no difference between what they went through and other people who lost children.

It's just their tragedy made front-page news.

Not everyone understood.

The McCools were calm and cool during media interviews — even when a Vegas television reporter asked Barry how he felt about NASA killing his son.

"NASA didn't kill my son. Fate killed my son," said Barry.

They started to hear that people wondered if they truly loved Willie because they didn't get as emotional as others.

But Willie would not want people to abort their lives, they felt.

You grieve for the rest of your life, but life goes on.

Younger brother

In upstate New York, Shawn McCool dealt with media requests for a month or two after coming back from Houston.

But then he was left alone. He had time to grieve.

And he got back to his life.

He was raising his family and learning to fly helicopters — influenced by his brother and dad.

Back to Lubbock

The McCools were looking to leave Las Vegas as the state and university faced serious financial issues.

Texas Tech offered Barry an interview, things worked out and they headed east for a second tour of duty in Lubbock.

They liked the people in Texas.

They also liked no state taxes.

Barry and Audrey were also in a town where they could drive on 34th or 82nd streets and be reminded of Willie — the track at Coronado High named for him, the prominent statue at Huneke Park.

It didn't bother them — thy felt it was an honor.

Barry made presentations around Lubbock to groups about Willie and his fellow astronauts.

"We don't want to forget our heroes," he tells people.

And he's sure Willie — known as much for his humility as his smarts and talent — would be mortified by all of it.

Nikki to Tech

Nikki hated high school — she had a hard time relating to other kids whose issues and living to party seemed juvenile after what she'd gone through.

Willie's interest in helping developing countries influenced his niece and she thought she could help overseas with nursing skills.

So she ended up at Texas Tech, where she was impressed with the nursing program.

And her grandparents were here.

Little things

For Nikki — it's flyovers. For her grandfather — it's hearing Pachelbel's Canon in D.

Flyovers remind Nikki of funerals. Her mom didn't want to go to funerals for a long time after Willie died. Flyovers still get to Nikki — but not as much.

When Coronado High School named the track for Willie in 2003, the famous classical piece was played while Barry was waiting to speak.

Since then, sometimes when he hears it, his eyes start to tear.

Israeli astronaut's widow carries on after tragedy
It's a day Israelis will never forget: when national pride abruptly turned to national tragedy

Aron Heller - Associated Press

It's a day Israelis will never forget: Feb. 1, 2003, when national pride abruptly turned to national tragedy.

People gathered around their TV screens to watch the anticipated return of Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, from a 16-day journey in space aboard the American Columbia shuttle. A hero's welcome awaited, but as people watched the live broadcast, unbelieving, the shuttle craft disintegrated upon re-entering the atmosphere, killing Ramon and his six crewmates.

For Ramon's widow, Rona, it was the first in a pair of cruel blows. Six years later, her oldest son, Asaf, who had followed in his father's footsteps to become an Israeli air force fighter pilot, was killed in a training accident.

Ramon, 48, is still unable to discuss the loss of her son. "I live that every moment, but at the same time try to still look for meaning in life," Ramon said in a phone interview.

She said she has slowly tried to recover, leading a foundation formed in memory of her husband and son and counseling others who are coping with tragedy.

As the country's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon was a national hero, and Israelis closely followed his accomplishments. Ramon's image while floating in space, a big smile on his face, was shown repeatedly on TV broadcasts.

Though he was not religious, Ramon, who was 48 when he was killed, insisted on keeping Jewish kosher dietary laws in space, since he saw himself a representative of the Jewish people. He consulted a rabbi on how to observe his faith in orbit.

A son of a Holocaust survivor, he also took several meaningful items into space, including a pencil sketch of the moon drawn by a young Jew who later perished at the Nazi Auschwitz death camp. Ramon also took a miniature Torah scroll rescued from the Holocaust, along with other religious items.

Ten years later, the memory of the Columbia accident is still strong in Israel. Though the country is accustomed to national tragedies, the Columbia disaster was especially painful. An uplifting journey had captivated a nation and elicited great hope and promise, yet in a minute it turned into an outpouring of grief.

"What I remember most from that day was the expectation, the joy and the longing to see him return. The great loss that followed left me heartbroken," Ramon told The Associated Press. With the families of the other astronauts, she was at the Florida landing site, waiting for the shuttle. "I remember the moment we realized what had happened, and they removed us from the landing site. I just looked up at the sky and said `God, bring him back to me.'"

Ilan Ramon, a fighter pilot who took part in Israel's bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, has become a national icon. Dozens of schools and other institutions are named after him. Each year, NASA sends a delegation to a space conference held in his honor. This year's is in progress now.

Rona Ramon largely stayed out of the public eye for years following his death, trying to make sense of her loss. "Realizing in a moment that your life has changed forever is a huge shock," she said. But on Sept. 13, 2009, she was forced back into the spotlight by the death of their oldest son.

Capt. Asaf Ramon, who was 21, was killed when his F-16 warplane crashed in a routine training flight. Inspired by his father, he had excelled in his training and was awarded his pilot's wings by President Shimon Peres. Asaf had expressed hope that he, too, would one day become an astronaut.

The pair of tragedies inspired Rona Ramon to earn an M.A. in holistic health from Lesley University in Massachusetts. She has branched out to psycho-spiritual coaching in hopes of better helping others cope with personal tragedies.

"The decision to go study emerged from the crisis I went through," she said. "Only by directly facing it could I cope."

Her studies have helped her recognize that she is now coping with "anniversary grief."

"Time is tricky. Over time you lose objectivity," she said. "Sometimes it feels like it happened ages ago and sometimes it feels like it just happened."

Over the past few years she has found comfort in her work at The Ramon Foundation, a nonprofit she established that promotes personal and social excellence through space, flight, science and technology. She also gives speeches across Israel and offers grief counseling to others.

She has three surviving children. One son is studying music in college. The other, with her consent, is a combat soldier in the army and her daughter is in high school.

Ilan's parents, who also became well-known figures in Israel during the Columbia mission, have since passed away.

On her way to Tuesday's opening of the Annual International Ilan Ramon Space Conference, hosting 14 heads of space agencies from around the world, including NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Rona Ramon said Tuesday that she mostly felt pride in her family.

"I'm surrounded by so many friends and so much support," she said. "When I think of Ilan, the first thing I think about is his smile. That is his legacy."

Space draws Israeli students in memory of Ramon
Visitors inspired by Israeli astronaut who died aboard Columbia

Jennifer Sangalang - Florida Today

What's one way to get students interested in pursuing science and technology? Send them to the Kennedy Space Center.

About 44 Israeli high school students and three teachers from Bersheva, Israel, are visiting Brevard through Feb. 6 as part of an exchange program. They attend the same school, Makif Gimel, that Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon graduated from.

Had he lived through the shuttle Columbia tragedy, which marks its 10th anniversary on Friday, Ramon would have spread the message in Israel about the importance of science and technology. These kids and others before them in this program will do that in his honor.

"There was a surge of interest in that field thanks to Ramon," said Jeff Fishkin, a coordinator of the exchange program who works in logistics for NASA and has been very active with the Jewish Federation of Brevard since the mid 1980s. "These students are very smart, and they take college courses. They also get involved with projects that deal with robotics and rocketry."

Fishkin has worked with the Israeli students and local host families since 2004, along with a coordinator in Israel, Kee Koch. Koch receives about 300 applications that have to be whittled down to a group of 44 young men and women.

Part of the agenda is to check out theme parks in Orlando, then they'll meet their host families at Temple Israel in Viera with the second leg of their trip focusing on visits across the Space Coast. Some of the destinations include Eau Gallie and Cocoa Beach Jr./Sr. high schools, NASA on Thursday, a memorial service on Friday, and the Astronaut Hall of Fame on Feb. 4.

While most of the host families are Jewish, some are Christian and they have a love for Israel, Fishkin said.

"The beauty of this thing is some of the families who have been hosting for so long still hear from the students' past travels," he said, adding one host family attended the wedding of their former exchange student. "That shows you how relationships are built."

How Worms Survived NASA's Columbia Shuttle Disaster

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

When the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated upon re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board, NASA scientists expected that the 80 science experiments aboard the shuttle were destroyed as well.

But in the days after the tragic Columbia shuttle disaster on Feb. 1, 2003, scientists began realizing that wasn't the case. Various salvageable experiments were recovered from the wreckage, including a live group of 1 millimeter-long roundworms, or nematodes, known as Caenorhabditis elegans.

No one expected that the nematodes could survive the intense heat of re-entry, but the C. elegans got lucky, said Nathaniel Szewczyk, a scientist who worked with the nematodes in the aftermath of the crash.

"They sustained some heat damage to exteriors, but that's about it," Szewczyk said.

The thermos-size metal container holding the nematodes was housed inside the locker of a crew compartment that was reinforced specifically to protect the materials inside. Once that compartment ruptured, however, the nematodes still survived the crash to Earth thanks to the locker's build, Szewczyk said.

The C. elegans stayed alive upon impact because by the time that part of the shuttle fell to the ground, it had already decreased in speed, allowing the nematodes to touch down more gently.

It took some time for the experiments to be released into the hands of the researchers. All materials from the shuttle were kept under tight watch as the investigation into the cause of the crash was still ongoing, Szewczyk said.

Most of the experiments on board the shuttle involved observing how certain genes were expressed differently when in space versus on the surface of the Earth. Because researchers didn't have access to the worms immediately after the crash, most of the results from those experiments were lost. However, important science still came from the tragedy, Szewczyk said.

"From an astrobiology standpoint, the important thing was that if you had a multicellular organism going through the atmosphere you can have interplanetary transfer of life by natural means, and Columbia demonstrated that," Szewczyk said. "It was a fortunate thing to demonstrate that in the unfortunate circumstances that there were."

After Columbia, populations of C. elegans were sent up for experiments on the space shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station that have helped researchers get a more detailed picture of what life in microgravity can do to an organism. Some of the work done on these nematodes even relates directly to how humans experience space travel.

Like astronauts losing muscle mass, while in space, the nematodes show signs of muscle loss. Nematodes as well as humans also appear to have some diabetic symptoms while living in zero-gravity.

Columbia's ill-fated final flight marked NASA's last shuttle mission purely aimed at scientific research in orbit.

The shuttle's STS-107 astronaut crew, which included commander Rick Husband, pilot Willie McCool, and mission specialists Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown and Ilan Ramon, worked in two shifts to perform a host of science experiments inside Columbia's SpaceHab module. The shuttle, meanwhile, remained in its own orbit and did not visit the International Space Station.

Once space shuttle missions resumed in 2005, every flight was destined for the space station in order to complete construction of the orbiting laboratory. NASA's space shuttle fleet retired in July 2011 after the final flight of the shuttle Atlantis during the STS-135 mission.

The offspring of the Columbia nematodes are now housed in the Caenorhabditis elegans Genetic Center run by the University of Minnesota. Some of those Columbia roundworm descendants were launched into space in May 2011 during NASA's final flight of the shuttle Endeavour before that orbiter was retired.

Tragedy's lessons continue to teach

John Kelly - Florida Today (Commentary)

Ten years later, the lessons of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven astronauts resonate.

NASA will focus its efforts on honoring the fallen explorers, and that's appropriate. Commander Rick Husband and his crew are heroes for the cause of space exploration, and their sacrifice is worthy of remembering.

Also worth remembering a decade after the accident and another decade from now are these lessons, since those charged with making space flight as safe as possible for humans must be diligent in dealing with known safety issues:

• By the time Columbia was fatally wounded by a piece of falling foam, everyone at NASA seemed to know that this debris phenomenon happened on most flights, and they had somehow convinced themselves that lightweight foam insulation could not do serious damage to the spaceship's heat shielding.

They were wrong and their assumptions were, well, assumptions in direct contradiction of easily available evidence. A review of agency records from every shuttle flight showed that (even a review done by non-engineer reporters such as my colleague Todd Halvorson and myself). The record showed foam fell off on most flights, foam did damage to the orbiter on every flight, and sometimes inflicted serious enough damage to prompt safety reviews. Yet, by the time of Columbia, the problem was not fixed and engineers' and managers' guards were down.

• Schedule pressure is part of managing any project, but it can't take precedence over safety for human space missions.

NASA's lingering problems meeting project goals on the International Space Station project ramped up pressure within the agency, some coming from political leaders in Washington. Top managers were insistent on finishing space station construction by a certain date and that meant the shuttle program managers needed to keep an ambitious flight pace.

The result, investigators said, was bad decisions were made about going forward with flights in late 2010 even though shuttle team members had been concerned by some newly developing issues with foam debris. Concerns were raised, but the team's leaders ultimately decided they understood the risk, accepted it, and kept flights moving ahead.

• Failure is not an option is not just a movie line. One disturbing development throughout Columbia's mission was the number of missed opportunities by managers even after it was realized that the shuttle was hit by debris, possibly seriously damaged, and that some engineers were predicting some eye-popping worst-case scenarios.

Email exchanges among top managers, engineers and others showed that some shuttle managers decided not to take action beyond the computer analysis of potential damage; some took a "there's nothing we could do anyway" attitude to the crisis; some declined help from other government agencies; and still other leaders appeared to be less than engaged with the overall severity of the situation. The bottom line: the problem wasn't taken seriously and possible rescue scenarios were given up on.

If you're thinking, "No one wants to rehash all this." You're dead right. No one does. But they're wrong. Former Administrator Sean O'Keefe, in the wake of the accident, said "we get it" that the agency had dropped the ball and made big mistakes. And, one thing he did right in the return-to-flight effort was to make everyone in decision-making positions at NASA read and reread the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's on-point, no-holds-barred final report.

Everyone working on NASA's human flight programs would do well to dust off their copy of the report or, if they can't find a hard copy, to type "CAIB report" into their favorite internet search engine and spend some time reading.

Maybe that's the best way this week to remember Columbia's Rick Husband, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla and William McCool.

Remembering the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia

Sen. John Cornyn - Houston Community Newspapers (Commentary)

Ten years ago this week, on February 1, 2003, America and the world received the tragic news that Mission Control at Johnson Space Center had lost contact with the Space Shuttle Columbia while it was crossing the heavens at nearly 15,000 mph. At approximately 9:00 a.m., within seconds of the last communication received from the Columbia crew, residents in Texas and Louisiana reported hearing a loud noise and seeing debris falling from the skies.

When the shuttle failed to land on schedule at 9:16 a.m., NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe notified President George W. Bush and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. The flag mounted on the countdown clock at Kennedy Space Center was lowered to half-staff. Soon after, the President ordered the nation's flags to fly at half-staff and in a live television address, alerted the nation, "The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home."

Six Americans and one Israeli—the first astronaut in Israel's history—comprised the heroic crew of the Columbia. They were: Colonel Rick Husband, Lt. Colonel Michael Anderson, Commander Laurel Clark, Captain David Brown, Commander William McCool, Dr. Kalpana Chawla, and Colonel in the Israeli Air Force, Ilan Ramon.

They left behind family members, including parents, spouses, and young children. Commander William McCool's parents remembered waking up early on the morning of February 1 to watch the shuttle make its way across the sky to Florida. Commander McCool's mother said, "It was a very beautiful sight. I guess if you will, it was the last time we saw him."

In the years following the tragedy, memorials across the country were constructed in honor of the Columbia crew. In 2003, Amarillo's airport was renamed the Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport in honor of the Amarillo native and commander of the Space Shuttle Columbia. In 2004, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe dedicated a memorial in honor of the crew at Arlington National Cemetery in a private ceremony for family members, friends and former astronauts.

In 2011, the Patricia Huffman Smith Museum opened to the public in Hemphill, Texas, which was a key search area for debris in the days following the disaster. Members of the Hemphill community and Texans from all over volunteered in droves to assist NASA in the search for debris and contributed to the recovery of more than 80,000 pieces that would prove critical to the investigation. The museum is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Space Shuttle Columbia, the first of our nation's shuttle fleet to journey into the heavens, its 28 missions, and the seven astronauts who lost their lives on its final mission. This year, on February 1, the Sabine County Columbia Memorial Committee, which spearheaded the museum's creation, will host "The Legacy Lives on: Remembering Columbia" 10th anniversary memorial.

Today we remember with gratitude the seven souls who were lost aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. In pursuit of knowledge and the exploration of our universe, these brave individuals faced exceptional dangers and ultimately sacrificed their lives in the name of science and exploration. On this tenth anniversary of their death, I hope we each honor their legacy by challenging ourselves to dream, to achieve more, and to reach farther than ever thought possible. We must continue the noble work of the Columbia and her crew and remain a nation that is steadfastly committed to the exploration of that enormous expanse of unvisited territory—the next frontier.

Senator Cornyn serves on the Finance and Judiciary Committees. He serves as the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee's Immigration, Refugees and Border Security subcommittee. He served previously as Texas Attorney General, Texas Supreme Court Justice, and Bexar County District Judge.

Ten years later east Texas remembers Columbia

Beth Kassab - Orlando Sentinel

Ten years later, the moment I remember most about the Columbia shuttle tragedy took place in a Sunday school class at First Baptist Church in tiny Alto, Texas.

The half-dozen congregants silently passed around photos of pieces of the space shuttle that fell there the day before, when Columbia broke up as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.

A piece of metal the size of a shoe box in a woman's front yard. A scrap of what looked like scorched heat shield, in the middle of a country road.

There was a deep reverence as volunteer firefighter Jeff Duplichain shared the photos he had taken of the debris he helped catalog.

This one-stoplight town was already in mourning that Saturday when they heard the roar that shook their homes. The Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003, happened the same day as the funeral for a popular high-school senior — one in a class of just 47 — who had died in a car accident earlier that week.

Alto's people already were grieving a very personal loss when a national loss started raining down on them.

The Columbia tragedy became intensely personal for so many people in rural east Texas, where many of the shuttle pieces were recovered.

Like the Challenger accident before it, Columbia is that rare breed of catastrophe so unexpected, so wrenching, that we remember exactly where we were when we heard about them. We remember what we were doing, who we were with.

But unlike Challenger, which broke up over the Atlantic, Columbia fell on lawns, in parking lots and on rooftops.

Long after the television crews and reporters like me left town, people there continued to stumble on pieces of Columbia.

"Things just kept turning up," said Duplichain, the firefighter who brought the photos to the Sunday school class.

I called him this week and discovered that the tragedy lingered for years.

"People would be out in the woods hunting and come back with pieces of the shuttle," he told me. "People had grown accustomed to it. They knew the difference between a regular piece of metal and a piece of the shuttle."

Bruce Partain, president of the Chamber of Commerce in neighboring Nacogdoches County, said he can't help but reflect on how deeply shaken his community was by being thrust into the middle of the nation's heartbreak.

Back then, I met Partain at a makeshift command post at the county jail, where local law enforcement organized and managed searches.

"I have been thinking about it," he said when I reached him this week. "The astronauts and the thousands of support people — all of those people really are heroic. So when the accident happened and our community just happened to be in the pathway of that, we were given a task."

People mobilized. Volunteers helped search the fields and woods. More volunteers helped to feed the searchers with trays of sandwiches and baked goods.

Partain still marvels at something else.

"The fact that no one was injured on the ground was really amazing," he said. "There were some really big cylinders and you know they hit hard. To not have one house where somebody was hurt, you have to think about that and wonder how did that happen."

Not a single injury was reported from falling debris, though the pain of Columbia's loss was felt deeply in the communities that recovered the seven astronauts and much of the shuttle.

On Friday, many of us will remember where we were 10 years ago when Columbia broke up. The people in Alto, Nacogdoches and other east Texas towns will remember how a national disaster touched their lives in a very personal way.

Remembering space shuttle Columbia
10 years ago, shuttle Columbia met its fiery end over Texas skies. We pause...

Houston Chronicle (Editorial)

Why is it that the most awful events never fail to remind us precisely where we were and what we were doing - right down to the smallest detail - when they burst in on life's quotidian?

Pearl Harbor was that moment for the Greatest Generation. For baby boomers, it was the Kennedy assassination. And for Americans older than their late teens in 2013, especially Houstonians, the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia, 10 years ago, is seared in memory.

It was a Saturday. One of those picture-perfect Texas winter mornings - brisk and crystal clear with the promise of a glorious afternoon and evening for doing Saturday things. And then the horrible news came: A routine landing of the shuttle Columbia had gone terribly wrong. Seven souls had perished in a fiery, out-of-control descent over those blue Texas skies.

We remember the shock. The panicked search for signs of survivors, hoping against hope. The reports of shuttle wreckage in East Texas pastures. The steady, matter- -of-fact tone of NASA's professionals as they set aside personal feelings to tell us of the unthinkable.

We pause today, 10 years later, to remember those aboard the Columbia: Commander Rick Husband; Pilot William McCool; Kalpana Chawla; Michael Anderson; Dr. Laurel Clark; Dr. David Brown; and Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli in space. They left behind grieving loved ones, including 12 children now aged 15 to 32.

We honor their courage and their spirit of adventure in the name of expanding horizons for humankind. They have a place in NASA's pantheon of heroes who gave their all, alongside the crew of the Challenger, lost in a fiery explosion on another bright wintry morning in January 1986.

All of this reminds us of the risks inherent in space exploration. The shuttle program was an unqualified success in terms of return on investment, but the loss of lives is beyond price.

The program has ended, but we hope our political leadership is in earnest about honoring this nation's commitment to pioneering in space. It is inconceivable to us that the United States would ever do less than lead the world in this compelling pursuit.

While we recognize the growing role that private space entrepreneurs can and should play, these are no substitute for the resources and commitment that can be brought to the task by government, properly directed and led.

One idea that is fundamental to keeping us in the lead in space comes from U.S. Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, who would remove the space agency budget from the political cycle in order to accommodate projects that need more certain and long-term funding.

Doing so would be a suitable way of honoring the memory of the Columbia crew and others who have given their all.

If Space Shuttle Is Doomed, Do You Tell the Crew?

Seth Borenstein - Associated Press

A NASA top official wrestled with what he thought was a hypothetical question: What should you tell the astronauts of a doomed space shuttle Columbia?

When the NASA official raised the question in 2003 just days before the accident that claimed seven astronauts' lives, managers thought — wrongly — that Columbia's heat shield was fine. It wasn't. Columbia, NASA's oldest shuttle, broke apart over Texas 10 years ago Friday upon returning to Earth after a 16-day mission.

But the story of that question — retold a decade later — illustrates a key lesson from the tragedy, says Wayne Hale, a flight director who later ran the shuttle program for NASA.

That lesson: Never give up. No matter how hopeless.

And to illustrate the lesson, Hale in his blog tells for the first time the story of his late boss who seemingly suggested doing just that. The boss, mission operations chief Jon Harpold, asked the now-retired Hale a what-if question after a meeting that determined — wrongly — that Columbia was safe to land despite some damage after takeoff.

"You know there is nothing we can do about damage to the (thermal protection system)," Hale quotes Harpold a decade later. "If it has been damaged, it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done until the air ran out."

When Harpold raised the question with Hale in 2003, managers had already concluded that Columbia's heat shield was fine. They told astronauts they weren't worried about damage from foam insulation coming off the massive shuttle fuel tank during launch, hitting a wing that allowed superheated gases in when the shuttle re-entered the atmosphere. No one was aware of the seriousness of the damage at the time.

This was a what-if type question that conveyed a fatalistic attitude about the heat shield system being unfixable, which was "a wrong-headed cultural norm that we had all bought into," Hale said in a Thursday telephone interview.

"There was never any debate about what to tell the crew," he said.

In fact, NASA officials were overconfident in the heat shield on Columbia. A day after launch, NASA saw video of the foam from the shuttle's fuel tank hit the shuttle wing, something that had happened before. NASA officials studied the damage and determined it wasn't a problem.

NASA managers even sent the crew a 15-second video clip of the foam strike and "made it very clear to them no, no concerns," according to the independent board that later investigated the accident. Eight times, NASA had the opportunity to get a closer look at the damage— using military satellites — and NASA mistakenly ignored those chances to see how bad the problem was, the accident board concluded.

And had NASA realized the severity of the problem, the space agency would not have just let the astronauts die without a fight or a word, despite Harpold's hypothetical question, Hale said.

"We would have pulled out all the stops. There would have been no stone left unturned. We would have had the entire nation working on it," Hale said. Ultimately, Hale said he thinks whatever NASA would have tried in 2003 with limited time and knowledge probably would have failed.

And the astronauts would have been told about the problem and their fate had engineers really known what was happening, Hale said.

When NASA started flying shuttles again, Hale told the new team of mission managers: "We are never ever going to say that there is nothing we can do."

NASA developed an in-flight heat shield repair kit.

The space shuttles were retired in 2011. Harpold died in 2004.

Hale said he is now writing about the issue because he wanted future space officials not to make the mistakes he and his colleagues did. The loss of the Columbia astronauts — people he knew — still weighs on Hale.

"You never get over it. It's always present with you," Hale said. "These are people I knew well. Several of them, I worked closely with. I was responsible for their safety. It's never going to go away."

Columbia tragedy: "I think the crew would rather not know."

Eric Berger - Houston Chronicle's SciGuy

Friday marks the 10th anniversary of the disintegration of space shuttle Columbia. To mark this somber event, one of the central figures in the shuttle program, Wayne Hale, has been writing a series of lucid blog posts about his recollections of the tragedy, the causes that led to it, and much more.

At the time of the launch, Hale was training to become Launch Integration Manager, and in 2005 he became the space shuttle Program Manager. Wayne has graciously agreed to let me cross-post some of his work here as a guest blog post, and I will be doing so during the next couple of days.

This post talks about the space agency's review (or lack thereof) concerning the tile damage sustained during liftoff.

After Ten Years: Working on the wrong problem

One of the toughest problems the Ascent Flight Director faced was how to get the crew back home safely if the shuttle engines quit during the launch phase. We studied and worked out procedures and techniques for over thirty years. Single engine failures were automatically handled; it was the multiple engine out cases that were tough. The orbiter is a glider with a terrible life over drag ratio. Many of the situations we just didn't have enough range to get to a runway. Plopping the crew down in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was not a satisfactory answer; stretching the glide to make a runway – like Shannon in Ireland – that was a much better solution. The orbiter does a belly flop during re entry to dissipate the energy; this keeps the temperature down on the heat shield; particularly the hottest part of the wing leading edge which is made up of 02 inch thick composite material: reinforced carbon carbon. At 40 degrees nose high, the temperatures there stayed right around 3,000 degrees F for about half an hour. If the nose were lowered, the temperature climbed, but if the wing stayed intact, the lift over drag ratio was much better. During the early 1990's we worked very hard with the RCC experts to determine exactly how much we could lower the nose, increase the glide, make the runway, and not destroy the wing. For transatlantic aborts, that number was 31 degrees nose high. The recognized expert on the RCC was Dr. Don Curry of Johnson Space Center. He knew everything there was to know about the wing leading edge materials, structure, testing, and capabilities.

During the last week of Columbia's flight, I was in Houston and attended the MMT on Monday morning in person. Calvin Schomburg of JSC's Engineering organization gave the discussion of preliminary results on possible damage to the shuttle tiles from the ascent debris strike. Much has been made of this analysis in the CAIB report. There were flaws in the analysis, but post accident testing showed that the bottom line was correct: a glancing foam strike on the underside of the left wing would have damaged the soft thermal tiles but probably not to the point at which fatal heat would reach the interior of the wing. Calvin was a recognized expert on the shuttle tile system. After discussion of other minor issues on the mission and the status of the ongoing experiments, the MMT was adjourned.

In the hall outside the meeting, I encountered Don Curry. I asked him if there was any concern with the RCC. His reply 'Oh, the RCC is tough stuff. You know during qualification testing we even shot ice at it. The RCC is OK.' That was good enough for me. The expert had spoken. It never occurred to me to ask anyone else; nor did the question come up formally during the MMT review.

And of course, the accident investigation – all those pieces picked up in East Texas – showed that the tiles were intact; the RCC had taken the strike – and had broken.

So all the discussion in the accident report about the flaws in the tile analysis are simply not applicable. We were working the wrong problem. The hard RCC panels in the very front of the wing, not the soft silica thermal tiles on the bottom of the wing were at issue.

I spent a lot of time the early part of the week in the Mission Evaluation Room where the engineering analysis teams were headquartered; I sat through more than one MMT; and I visited with my fellow Flight Directors in the Flight Control Room. All was quiet, nobody talked about any serious concerns about anything; just the usual logistical administrivia of getting on with a routine shuttle mission.

Jon Harpold was the Director of Mission Operations, my supreme boss as a Flight Director. He had spent his early career in shuttle entry analysis. He knew more about shuttle entry than anybody; the guidance, the navigation, the flight control, the thermal environments and how to control them. After one of the MMTs when possible damage to the orbiter was discussed, he gave me his opinion: "You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS. If it has been damaged it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?"

I was hard pressed to disagree. That mindset was widespread. Astronauts agreed. So don't blame an individual; looks for the organizational factors that lead to that kind of a mindset. Don't let them in your organization.

After the accident, when we were reconstituting the Mission Management Team, my words to them were "We are never ever going to say that there is nothing we can do." That is hindsight.

That is the lesson.

And finally, an article from the New York Times dated April 13, 1981 – the day after Columbia launched on STS-1…

Bringing the Craft Back Down: A Time of High Risk

John Noble Wilford - New York Times (April 13, 1981)

APE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Getting a spaceship up is a task of near-maximum risk and anxiety. All the fire, thunder and vibration carry a message of manifest peril. But getting a spaceship down can be equally risky, and never more so than in the case of the space shuttle Columbia.

If a significant number of the spacecraft's heat-protective tiles are missing or damaged, the consequences may be unpredictable. But if the tiles are sound, the Columbia's descent will be a remarkable feat of engineering enterprise and precision.

There will be no splashdown, as in the past, with the wide ocean to aim for. Instead, if all goes according to plan, the Columbia must slow down from a velocity 25 times the speed of sound, drop out of orbit and glide to a touchdown on a runway, a desert strip at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

That operation will be what one project official called the foremost "unknown unknown" of the mission. It will occur as the Columbia undergoes the last stage of the metamorphosis in shape and function that began with a successful rocket-like launching today. Its last transformation, for a return to earth, sets the shuttle apart from all other vehicles that have flown in space.

Fuel Tank Cast Off

Two minutes into the ascent, the Columbia's 149-foot-long solidfuel rockets were cast off, the fuel having been consumed in the initial struggle against the earth's gravity. More than six minutes later, just short of orbit, the big fuel tank fell away, its supply of propellants for the Columbia's engines exhausted. What had been a mammoth energy machine, fighting to win the sky, was reduced to the one part for which the whole had been created: a 122-foot-long boxy vehicle with stubby delta wings.

Tomorrow, if the mission is on schedule, the Columbia will be transformed again, from spacecraft to aircraft to glider making an unpowered landing on the hard-packed desert sand. It must do this safely and smoothly to confirm the fundamental concept, the concept of a reusable spacecraft routinely coming and going between earth and space, that has driven the development of the shuttle, at a cost of nearly $10 billion.

About an hour before the landing, John W. Young and Capt. Robert L. Crippen, the Columbia astronauts, will start putting the shuttle's reusability to the test. Strapped into their couches in the cockpit, the astronauts will punch in computer commands to fire the 44 small thruster rockets, the reaction-control system situated forward and aft, that will turn the Columbia through 180 degrees, until it is traveling tail first.

Slowed by 'De-Orbit Burn'

Over the Indian Ocean at an altitude of 173 miles, the Columbia's two orbital maneuvering-system rockets, in the aft section, will fire for two and a half minutes in a "de-orbit burn." By blasting against the direction of flight, the rockets will slow the spaceship from its orbital speed of 17,500 miles per hour so it starts dropping out of orbit. The centrifugal force of its orbital speed will give way to the pull of earth's gravity. It will be 57 minutes to touchdown.

The astronauts will fire the thrusters again, turning the Columbia so it again travels nose first. Four of the spacecraft's computers will be making rapid, simultaneous decisions, interacting with the Columbia's guidance and navigation system. Computer commands will automatically fire the thrusters to keep the nose of the descending ship pitched up 40 degrees. In this way, when the Columbia encounters the upper atmosphere, the underside of its fuselage and wings will bear the brunt of the frictional heat generated by atmospheric drag, which will also slow the Columbia's descent. Plunging into the atmosphere over Wake Island, 27 minutes after the de-orbit burn and 75 miles above the earth, the Columbia's white and black body will begin to glow red hot.

Deeper into the atmosphere, when temperatures of some surfaces exceed 2,500 degrees, the Columbia must pass a crucial test. The 31,000 silica heat-protective tiles covering the ship's aluminum skin must hold firm. Should crucial tiles rip off a heat-vulnerable area, such as the underbelly, the Columbia could overheat and possibly disintegrate.

On previous manned spacecrafts the heat-shielding was a material that charred and flaked off when it passed through the earth's atmosphere. It was thus unacceptable for a reusable vehicle.

Will Lose Radio Contact

With the Columbia enveloped in electrified gases created by the heat, the astronauts will lose radio contact with Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. They will be on their own, their computers tracking the course, descent rate and other vital signs. By this time, the Columbia will have made its final transformation, from spacecraft to aircraft. The thrusters will be switched off, and the computer will operate the elevons, flaps in the wings that turn and bank the vehicle. Since the Columbia has no jet engines for atmospheric flight, a design compromise to save money and time, the astronauts will be flying a powerless 80-ton glider.

According to the plan, the Columbia will cross the California coast at the Monterey Peninsula while traveling more than 4,500 m.p.h., 26 miles high, diving steeply and heading south toward Bakersfield. The astronauts will take manual control, though the computers could handle matters if necessary.

The final approach to the landing site will start when the Columbia is some 11 miles up and its velocity drops below the speed of sound, roughly 767 m.p.h. Manipulating the flaps and rudder, the astronauts will maneuver their craft through giant S-curves to slow it as they home in on their landing site. They will probably pass over Edwards Air Force Base at 50,000 feet, loop around in a U-turn and head for runway 23. Finally, the astronauts will pull the ship out of its steep dive, lower the landing gear and ease into a touchdown at a speed of 200 m.p.h.

END

Keep the shuttle flying

Friday, February 1, 2013

Fwd: SPECIAL EDITION: Columbia - 10 Years Later (Feb. 1, 2013)...

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