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The foam chunk struck the wing - did Columbia make it back? · Space Exploration Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 8.58 in the morning on February 1st, 2003, a
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: heat shield tile fell from the sky over Littlefield, Texas.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Columbia was still flying. The vehicle it had protected for
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: 16 days was still alive, still carrying seven people home,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: and it was already coming apart. That tile landed on
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Texas soil 51 seconds before mission control lost contact with
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: the crew. By then, nothing could be done. The question
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: that would consume investigators, engineers, and a grieving nation for
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: months was not how the breakup happened. The question was
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: why no one had tried to stop it, and whether,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: with 16 days in orbit, there had been enough time
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: to try. STS-107 launched with a hidden wound, and its
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: crew was never told their ship might not bring them home.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: A mission that launched with a hidden wound, a crew
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: that was never told their ship might not bring them home,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: and an institution that had spent years learning to look
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: the other way. The numbers alone are staggering. 83,900 pieces
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: of debris recovered across East Texas and Southern Louisiana. 84,900
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: pounds of wreckage. 38% of the orbiter's total weight scattered
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: across hundreds of miles of sky. And at the center
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: of all of it, a piece of foam insulation roughly
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: the size of a small suitcase moving it up to
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: 840 feet per second, that struck Columbia's left wing 81.7
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: seconds after launch. Neither the crew nor anyone on the
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: ground noticed when it hit. That invisibility is where this
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: story really begins. Columbia had been flying since 1981. By
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: January 2003, she had completed 27 missions. STS-107 was her 28th,
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: and it had been delayed 13 times from its original
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: launch date of January 11th, 2001, two full years of postponements.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Each time, the mission was bumped for other priorities, a
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: crowded manifest, schedule pressure, the relentless arithmetic of a space
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: program running on a budget that had been cut by
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: 21% between 1991 and 1994. When Columbia finally lifted off
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: on January 16th, 2003, the crew of seven had been
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: waiting a long time. Rick Husband commanded. William McCool flew
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: as pilot. Michael Anderson served as payload commander. Kalpana Chawla
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: was flight engineer. David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Aylan Ramon
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: rounded out the crew as mission specialists. They were carrying
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: the Space Hab Research Double Module, a packed 16-day science mission,
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: 80 experiments running continuously, a crew that had trained for
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: years to be exactly here. 81.7 seconds into the climb,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: a piece of foam broke free from the left bipod
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: ramp of the external tank. It was not the first time.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: That is the fact that makes this story something other
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: than a simple accident. Foam strikes had been recorded on
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: 65 of 79 shuttle missions reviewed by investigators. The bipod
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: ramp area specifically had shed foam six times before STS-107.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: After the STS-50 mission, NASA formally classified such strikes as
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: an accepted flight risk. In October, 2002, just three months
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: before Columbia's final launch, the STS 112 mission sustained a
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: bipod phone dent that was not treated as an in-flight anomaly.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: The agency had developed a name for this kind of reasoning.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Normalization of deviance. A dangerous thing happens once, nothing catastrophic follows,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: and so the bar quietly moves. It happens again. The
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: bar moves again. After enough repetitions, The dangerous thing stops
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: feeling dangerous at all. The foam that struck Columbia's left
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: wing on January 16th measured between 21 and 27 inches
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: long and 12 to 18 inches wide. It hit the
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: wing's reinforced carbon-carbon panels 0.2 seconds after breaking free, traveling
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: at somewhere between 625 and 840 feet per second. The
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: RCC panels on the wing's leading edge were designed to
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: withstand the plasma heat of re-entry. Temperatures reaching nearly 3,000
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: degrees Fahrenheit outside the vehicle against a maximum aluminum skin
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: tolerance of 350 degrees. The tiles and panels were the
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: only thing standing between those two numbers. Neither Rick Husband
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: nor anyone at mission management saw the strike happen. Launch
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: cameras captured it on film, but the footage wasn't reviewed
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: until the following day. On day two of the mission,
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: The photo working group chair asked flight director Wayne Hale
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: about obtaining on orbit photography of the wing. A debris
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: assessment team was formed. Engineers from NASA, United Space Alliance,
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: and Boeing to model what the foam might have done.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: Boeing's own software predicted damage exceeding tile thickness. That result
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: was dismissed as a software inaccuracy. The modeling tools used
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: for the RCC panels had been calibrated for ice strikes,
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: not foam. Running 15 scenarios, They predicted significant damage in
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: exactly one. The team requested Department of Defense imaging assets
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: to photograph Columbia in orbit. That request was rescinded by
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Mission Management Team Chair Linda Hamm after she consulted with
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: others without consulting the debris assessment team itself. The orbiter
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: was never imaged. On January 23rd, Flight Director Steve Stitch
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: sent a message to Commander Husband and Pilot McCool. It
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: informed them that a foam strike had occurred during ascent.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: It told them there was no cause for concern. The
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: crew read that message and flew on. The debris assessment
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: team formally concluded on January 26th that there were no
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: safety concerns. On January 31st, the mission management team held
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: a meeting. Crew safety was not discussed. Somewhere above them,
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: seven people were running experiments, sleeping in shifts. eating packaged food,
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: and listening to wake-up music that mission control selected each morning.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: On January 27th, Laurel Clark had requested a song by
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: the Scottish band Runrig. The mission was going well. The
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: science was producing results. The crew had no reason to
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: think anything was wrong. They were never given one. The
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: morning of February 1st, 2003, began with a countdown. Columbia
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: was 16 minutes from home. Mission management at Johnson Space
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Center ran through the entry checklist with the practiced ease
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: of 112 missions before this one. The deorbit burn had
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: executed cleanly at 8.15 and 30 seconds, two minutes and
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: 38 seconds of engine fire that bled orbital velocity and
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: aimed the orbiter at Kennedy Space Center's runway. Entry interface,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: the point where atmosphere begins to matter, was scheduled for 8.44
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: and nine seconds at 400,000 feet At that altitude, the
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: air is thin enough to be nearly nothing. But at
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Mach 25, nearly nothing is enough to kill you. The
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: thermal protection system, thousands of reinforced carbon-carbon panels and ceramic
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: tiles bonded to the orbiter's skin, was the only barrier
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: between the crew and temperatures approaching 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: aluminum airframe beneath those tiles had a maximum tolerance of
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: 350 degrees. That gap, 2,650 degrees, was the margin Columbia
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: had always flown on. Sixteen days earlier, one piece of
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: foam had quietly rearranged what that margin meant. At 8.44
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: and 9 seconds, Columbia hit entry interface over the Pacific.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: Hot gas began to flow. For the first four and
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: a half minutes, nothing registered on the data feeds at
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: mission management. The orbiter was in a communications blackout, as expected.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: The flight dynamics officers watched their screens. The entry was nominal.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: What they could not see was what was happening inside
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: the left wing. The foam strike at 81.7 seconds after
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: launch had punched through the leading edge of the wing.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: The reinforced carbon-carbon panels designed to absorb re-entry heat. The
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: hole was invisible from the ground, invisible from orbit, invisible
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: in every model the debris assessment team had run with
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: miscalibrated software. But superheated plasma at 3,000 degrees does not
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: need a large opening. It needs any opening at all.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: By 8.53 and 46 seconds, Columbia was crossing the California
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: coast at Mach 20, 3. At 230, 1,600 feet, the
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: wing's leading edge had reached 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Observers on
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: the ground watched a bright streak cross the pre-dawn sky.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Some filmed it. The streak was shedding debris. Pieces of
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: Columbia's left wing burning off in real time, visible to
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: the naked eye from the California coast while the crew
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: sat strapped in their seats 16 stories above the desert.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Inside the crew cabin, the instrument panel was beginning to
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: show contradictions. At 8.58 and 21 seconds, the westernmost piece
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: of Columbia's left wing separated and fell to earth near Littlefield, Texas.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: The vehicle was still flying. The crew was still alive.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: 18 seconds later, at 8.58 and 39 seconds, the backup
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: flight software began throwing fault messages. The crew saw conflicting
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: instrument readings. The reaction control system thrusters were firing continuously,
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: trying to hold the orbiter's attitude against forces that the
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: flight computer could not account for because no flight computer
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: had ever been programmed to account for a left wing
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: that was dissolving. Rick Husband and William McCool were working
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: the problem. The flight data recorder, found weeks later near Hemphill, Texas,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: would show that at approximately 900 seconds after entry interface,
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: the autopilot was switched to manual and then reset to automatic.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Someone made that choice. One of them, or both, was
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: still thinking, still trying. At 905 seconds, McCool's final switch
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: configurations were recorded. He was attempting to restore hydraulic pressure,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: He was doing exactly what the emergency procedures called for
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: in exactly the sequence they called for, against a failure
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: mode that had no procedure, because no one had written one.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: At 918 seconds, catastrophic structural breakup began. At 925 seconds,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: the forward and aft sections of the orbiter separated. At
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: 935 seconds, the crew module depressurized. The crew lost consciousness
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: within seconds. At 9.16, the scheduled landing time, the runway
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: at Kennedy Space Center was empty. Mission management had lost
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: signal at 8.59 and 32 seconds. The last transmission from
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Rick Husband had been cut off mid-sentence. At 9.12 and
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: 39 seconds, before that runway time, before the silence could
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: be fully processed, mission management received a phone call. Someone
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: had seen the news coverage. The breakup was already on television. 83,900
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: pieces of Columbia were falling across East Texas and into
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: Southern Louisiana. The largest collection of spacecraft debris in American
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: history was beginning to settle into pine forests, fields, and
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: riverbeds across two states and somewhere in that debris field
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: in aluminum canisters that had been secured in the space
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: hab module were containers of C. elegans worms, a biology experiment.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: The crew had tended for 16 days. They would be
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: found alive on April 28th. The crew would not be.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: The debris recovery took months. Thousands of volunteers and emergency
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: workers searched across East Texas and into Louisiana. A grid
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: so wide it covered two states. By February 11th, the
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: last remains had been recovered. Within three days of the breakup,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: some remains from every crew member had been found. The
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: search coordinators had promised families they would not stop. They
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: kept that promise. On March 27th, 45 days into the search,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: a Bell 407 helicopter went down in the Angelina National Forest,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: mechanical failure. The pilot, Jules F. Meir Jr., and Charles
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: Krennic of the Texas Forest Service were killed. The recovery
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: of Columbia claimed two more lives before it was finished. 83,900
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: pieces were eventually catalogued. 84,900 pounds of material, roughly 38%
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: of the orbiter's total weight. Piece by piece, the investigators
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: assembled what had happened, not to accuse anyone, but to
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: understand the physics of a failure that had been years
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: in the making. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board released its
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: final report in August 2003. The physical cause was unambiguous.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: The foam strike at 81.7 seconds after launch, January 16th.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: A piece of foam roughly 21 to 27 inches long,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: 12 to 18 inches wide, traveling at up to 840
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: feet per second. When it struck the left wing's reinforced
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: carbon-carbon panels, the strike lasted two-tenths of a second. No
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: one on the ground or aboard noticed. From that moment,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: the outcome was physics. But the board did not stop there.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: The contributing cause, the board wrote, was NASA's organizational culture.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Not a single person, not a single decision. A system
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: that had learned to treat the unacceptable as routine. Foam
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: had struck the orbiter on 65 of 79 missions reviewed.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: The bipod ramp foam had been implicated six times before.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: After a strike on STS-50 in the early 1990s, the
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: agency had formally categorized such events as an accepted flight risk.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: The software the debris assessment team used during STS-107 was
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: calibrated for ice strikes, not foam. It predicted damage exceeding
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: tile thickness in multiple scenarios. The team dismissed its own
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: results as inaccurate. The board's conclusion was precise and unsparing.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: NASA had not functioned as a learning organization. The contrast
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: the investigators drew was specific. In December 1988, After a
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: debris strike on STS-27, mission management immediately ordered an inspection.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Fourteen years later, the same category of event produced no inspection,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: a rescinded imagery request, and a message to the crew
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: on January 23rd that there was no cause for concern.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: The crew never knew anything different. The board also concluded
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: that a rescue was theoretically achievable. Atlantis was already in
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: preparation for a March launch. An expedited mission to orbit
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: reaching Columbia before the lithium hydroxide carbon dioxide scrubbers were exhausted.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: February 15th, at the absolute latest, was assessed as possible.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: On-orbit repair was judged possible in concept, but with low
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: likelihood of success. Neither option was ever formally considered during
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: the mission. No one asked the crew to extend their stay.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: No one told them why they might need to. The
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: changes that followed were concrete and immediate. The bipod foam
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: ramp was removed and replaced with electric heaters that eliminated
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: the ice accumulation that had driven the ramp's original design.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: 22 temperature sensors and 66 accelerometers were added to each wing.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: An orbiter boom sensor system was created specifically for on-orbit
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: thermal protection inspection. The tool that would have answered the
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: question in January 2003. Shuttle flights were suspended for more
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: than two years. When STS-114 Launched in July 2005, every
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: procedure the CIIP had recommended was in place. The foam
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: strike that destroyed Columbia was not a surprise. It was
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: a prediction. The data existed. The engineers who saw it
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: clearly were not wrong. They were not heard. On October 28, 2003,
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: the names of all seven crew members were added to
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: the Space Mirror Memorial at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: on Merritt Island, Florida. Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Elon Ramon. Stone cut
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: with names does not explain what happened at 81.7 seconds.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: It does not explain the 16 days of science that followed,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: the nearly 80 experiments the crew ran in the space
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: hab module, the biology growing in the canisters, the worms.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: But it holds something the investigation report cannot. The fact
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: that seven people flew toward the sun and worked and
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: laughed and played music and looked down at the earth
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: for 16 days and that they believed they were safe.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: The flight data recorder was found near Hemphill, Texas on
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: March 19th, 2003. Its data was intact. The final seconds
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: before loss of signal were reconstructed from its contents, McCool's
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: switch configurations. Husband's last transmission cut off mid-word. the autopilot
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: cycling to manual and back. Every action the crew took
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: in those final minutes was consistent with training. They were
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: doing exactly what they had been taught to do, against
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: a failure mode for which no procedure existed. Laurel Clark
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: had asked for a run-rig wake-up call on January 27th.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: A song was played. Her copy of the band's album,
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: The Stamping Ground, was recovered from the debris field. Her
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: husband and son later presented it to the band. That
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: is the kind of detail that resists summarizing. It is
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: just true. On April 28th, weeks after the breakup, biologists
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: examining the recovered canisters from the space hab module found C.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: elegans worms alive. The aluminum containers had protected them through re-entry,
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: through the debris field, through weeks in a Texas pine forest.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: The experiment the crew had tended was still running. Life
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: in a sealed canister had completed the mission. A single
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: heat shield tile had landed near Littlefield, Texas at 8.58
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: and 21 seconds, while Columbia was still in the sky
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: above it. That tile was supposed to be part of
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: a system that held 3,000 degrees outside and 350 degrees
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: at the aluminum skin. It was on the ground before
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: the vehicle it had protected was gone. The gap between
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: those two moments, the tile on Texas soil, the orbiter
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: still flying, is where the entire story lives. What the
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: tile could not tell anyone, falling alone into a Texas field,
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: was that the damage that sent it falling had happened
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: 16 days earlier, in 81.7 seconds, and that the people
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: responsible for understanding that damage had looked at the numbers.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: and decided the numbers were wrong. The seven names on
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: the Space Mirror Memorial are not a verdict. There was
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: no trial. There were no charges. What there is is
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: a record 65 of 79 missions, a rescinded imagery request,
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: a meeting where crew safety was not discussed, and a
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: message sent to a commander telling him there was nothing
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: to worry about. He flew home trusting that message. Six
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: other astronauts flew home trusting that same message. This show
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: is made by Oboe Media.