re: 22 Years Ago Today - Space Shuttle Columbia Accident

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I remember the teacher wheeled in the tube TV & we watched it in elementary school.

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That was Challenger...1/28/1986.

I had met Michael Anderson just after he completed his ASCAN training. He was doing his time “in the barrell” and did a talk at my dad’s work. My old man let me skip school that day and go to work with him because I wanted to meet an astronaut, even if they had not yet flown in space.

My dad had a scanner and we would listen to Mission Control on that, especially if the shuttle was due to pass right over us. He was sitting on the back porch listening to the scanner, and waiting for the sonic booms. Communications went silent and when the time had passed for the booms and they did not happen, he knew something was up. He went inside and turned on the tv and saw the breaking news.

I was in Australia at the time and my dad called me. It was about 11:00pm or so there. I got out of bed and watched the news until around 3:00am. I still have a newspaper and a couple of magazines stashed away.

I was playing baseball in high school and we had practice or a game and was expecting a sonic boom while on the field. Remember wondering why it didn't happen and found out when I got home. It was definitely a Saturday.

I'm a NASA junky and have supported the agency for decades. I was working at MSFC at the time and was watching NASA TV that morning at home drinking coffee. When the communications from the vehicle were 60 seconds late, I called my NASA customer and said turn your TV on - something is wrong.

The building I worked in at MSFC had ~100 folks in it and we had a large conference room w/NASA TV - I remember watching the Columbia launch on that mission and commenting to a few folks how disappointing it was that there were less than 10 of us watching the launch - it had become too routine to most of the folks and frankly a lot of them only saw it as an 8 hour a day means to an end.

And yes, it was known that a large chunk of ice from the external tank hit the leading edge of the left wing during ascent and the engineering community that analyzed the incident were not shocked when the vehicle disintegrated during re-entry.

trivia fact - although the Shuttle looked like a large, lumbering vehicle during the first few seconds of launch, by the time the tail cleared the launch pad, the vehicle was traveling >100 mph.

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Seen a lot of people talk about Challenger and Columbia, suggesting it was administrative negligence at NASA that doomed both crews. Apparently they filmed the launch and knew the wing was damaged. Some people say they could have spun up another shuttle and got it up there and transferred the crew to bring them home but instead NASA decided to roll the dice and pretend nothing happened on the launch. I don't know if that's accurate or not.

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Ground cameras at LC-39 showed the ET foam-to-Orbiter RCC edge impact. This was observed by a film review team at KSC the day after launch - standard review. The impact was unprecedented. This team tried to elevate the concern up the NASA Mgt chain. There it got bogged down in typical NASA mgmt. horse$%^!.

A request to use a military satellite to observe the extent of the damage in orbit got lost in space.

The hope would've been that had NASA mgmt acted promptly, Columbia had enough supplies to last until a rescue mission could've been accelerated, launched, and the astronauts rescued. Columbia would've been boosted into a higher orbit, abandoned, and left until a subsequent repair mission could've been launched.

A rescue mission would've been ambitious. But that is what the team at KSC reveled in. "Don't tell me that it can't; tell me how we can."

There's a small museum in Hemphill TX dedicated to this and the recovery efforts of the area. Has a lot of personal belongings of the crew.

ETA - don't know why the video won't embed. Is there an issue now with videos embedding, or embedding at a given timestamp? The point of interest in the video is 13:20. youtube

Thread got me curious and I found a video on youtube. Cued up to a spot where an email was sent to the crew once they were in orbit. It mentions the damage and downplays the severity. I wonder if the crew thought about this during re-entry.

One thing I've always wondered was if they could have gotten different sensor readings during the ascent, since the wing was damaged. Seems like some differences in temperature or something like that would have been picked up by sensors, telling them that the integrity of the two wings at least differed, and perhaps that could have allowed an abort decision before orbit. I don't know if that's feasible or not.

Both accidents were absolutely a result of administrative negligence.