![]() “That’s called a cognitive bias because our only accidents had happened during those times. “Throughout my flying career, even (American) astronauts thought 99% of the risk was in sitting on that pad in a fully fueled rocket and during ascent,” she said. After the accident, she was selected to lead the Space Shuttle Program Safety and Mission Assurance Office, enabling the safe return to flight of the Space Shuttle. She served as an astronaut on four missions, the last one in 2002. Nancy Currie-Gregg, professor of engineering practice in the Wm Michael Barnes ’64 Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Department of Aerospace Engineering, started her career with NASA in the 1980s. The post-disaster investigation identified the engineering reason for the failure, but more than that, they reported how workplace culture issues at NASA had also led to the disaster. The debris was eventually transferred to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where officials reconstructed the vehicle to try to determine the root cause of the accident. Remains of each crew member were recovered, and 36% of the shuttle was found, which easily beat the 5% they originally thought they’d recover, thinking most of the vehicle had burned up. Lee, who served as incident commander at a base in Corsicana, Texas, said the recovery effort paid off. In the end, 23 square miles of waterway and 2.28 million acres of forest and field were covered through ground and air searches. The goals: ensure public safety, recover the crew and retrieve evidence to learn what caused the accident. Disaster field offices were established across the state to help representatives from 290 federal, state and local agencies, as well as volunteer groups. 1 through Memorial Day weekend that year, more than 15,000 personnel were involved in the recovery effort. Within hours of the disaster, people were on the move to start the recovery effort.įrom Feb. But they were all wrong.”Īs the shuttle broke apart, the debris field stretched as far north as Fort Worth, Texas, and as far southeast as Fort Polk, Louisiana, where three main engine turbo pumps were buried 14 feet in the soil. “They thought there was no way that light-weight foam could hit and punch a hole in the wing. “The foam on the external tank is the consistency of a Styrofoam cup, and the leading edge of the wing is made out of reinforced carbon that’s probably a quarter-inch, maybe a half-inch thick,” Lee said. However, when the shuttle missed its landing time back on Earth, NASA officials knew something was very wrong. At the time, Lee, industrial engineering former student and chief of NASA’s Office of Emergency Management at the Johnson Space Center, said people thought there was no way that would cause a hole in the wing. Insulation foam from an external tank broke off and hit the left wing of the shuttle. It was determined later the cause of the fatal event happened two weeks before, when the shuttle launched, 81 seconds into the flight. The disaster shocked the nation and left NASA officials with two questions: What happened? How do we make sure it doesn’t happen again? Evidence from debris showed this damage caused the wing to break off and the vehicle to break apart, killing all seven astronauts on board. Hot plasma that was heated to 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit entered the left wing and melted the interior, burning through sensors and hydraulic lines and eventually destroying structural integrity of the wing. 1, 2003, the Columbia shuttle re-entered Earth’s atmosphere but never touched down. He was also Israel's first astronaut.“Columbia is a part of our history, and we need to remember and learn from it,” said Ronald Lee ’86. ![]() He flew combat missions in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Ramon, 48, is a fighter pilot and the son of a survivor of Auschwitz. The shuttle, the oldest orbiter in the NASA fleet, was carrying seven astronauts, including Israeli Air Force Colonel Click here for the latest headlines from Reuters It was not immediately clear if this had anything to do with the accident. Later, during the launch, some insulating foam from the external fuel tank broke off and struck the left wing of the shuttle. 16, when some thermal tile damage was discovered but then considered minimal. The only anomalies appeared to be on launch day, Jan. The 16-day mission appeared to proceed without incident. NASA later declared an emergency and kicked a search and rescue operation into high gear. It was scheduled to land at 9:16 AM ET, but a space shuttle contingency was declared at Mission Control in Houston after communication with Columbia was lost at roughly 9 AM. Television images appeared to show Columbia breaking up in the air, with multiple contrails breaking off from the spacecraft.
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