It was five years ago today, on a Saturday morning in 2003, that the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the Earth’s atmosphere:
NASA has launched seven shuttle missions since the loss of seven astronauts aboard Columbia five years ago on Friday, but the disaster still resonates as the space program prepares for its most ambitious year yet since it resumed orbiter flight.
Beginning with the Atlantis orbiter’s planned Feb. 7 launch to the international space station, NASA hopes to launch up to six shuttle flights this year — five of them dedicated to orbital construction. The lessons from Columbia are always close by, mission managers said.
“I think every day about Columbia and how that came about, and how we can prevent similar events,” NASA shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said this week, attributing the accident to what Apollo astronaut Frank Borman called a “failure of imagination.”
Columbia broke apart while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere early on the morning of Feb. 1, 2003, bringing to a tragic end what had until then been a successful 16-day science mission. The shuttle’s destruction claimed the lives of mission commander Rick Husband, pilot Willie McCool and mission specialists Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon — Israel’s first astronaut
I remember having the television on in the computer room of my old house that morning. Listening to the news report as the landing progressed until, suddenly, it was clear that something had gone wrong. When I turned around and looked at the television screen and saw nearly a dozen streaks of light and smoke in the sky and got the same sick feeling I’d gotten watching the Challenger launch 17 years earlier.
Rather than remembering those images though, I think we should remember these images of the Columbia’s final flight into space:
