The place to be in America if you wanted to solve the problem of cheap access to space was SpaceX’s small factory in El Segundo, California. Building an institution that performed the complex engineering tasks of spaceflight, on budget and on schedule, while avoiding complacency and buck-passing, still remained beyond the reach of the US space program. In both cases, worried engineers were challenged by managers to prove conclusively that their vehicle was unsafe, without being given the resources to do so. The investigators identified a disturbing number of parallels between the destruction of Columbia and the Challenger disaster, seventeen years earlier, where a rubber ring had been the cause.

And not just missed it, but forgotten about it, according to the accident investigators: Early in the life of the space shuttle, foam debris was considered a serious problem. As flight after flight went off without a hitch, engineers got complacent and didn’t examine what might happen in a worst-case scenario. During its inquiry, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that a hasty rescue mission with another orbiter might have saved Columbia’s crew in time-though it would have faced the same risk from falling foam.Ī hasty rescue mission with another orbiter might have saved Columbia’s crew in timeįor all the thousands of hours spent inspecting engines, worrying about filters to keep the mix of breathable air right in the orbiter, and even stationing extra security around the launch site in case of a terrorist attack, NASA had missed the danger posed by the anti-ice foam. Even if an effort to inspect the damage had been made, there was little that could have been done to repair the problem in flight. They crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. Exactly how deeply, we have no idea-NASA officials refused to ask their colleagues at the Pentagon to peek at the wings with a spy satellite or a ground telescope, and no astronauts were sent on a space walk to assess the damage.ĭespite serious misgivings among the engineers on the ground, the mission’s managers did little to address the problem or even warn the astronauts about the enormous risks they were taking simply by coming home. It hit the left wing moving about five hundred miles per hour and tore through the protective heat shielding. 1, 2003.Īs Columbia took off in January 2003, the foam ramp broke off its external tank almost a minute and a half into flight. Scott Lieberman Debris from the space shuttle Columbia streaks across the sky over Tyler, Texas on Feb. Instead, it was something they had to remember to replace while refurbishing the reusable vehicle.ĪP Photo/Dr. Experience had taught NASA that these “foam ramps” could break off during launch, but the launch managers initially didn’t see this as a flight risk. Where the tank was joined to the rocket with aluminum spars, they sprayed over the joints with foam and cut it to form an aerodynamic shape. To prevent ice damage, they covered the fuel tank with spray-on foam insulation. When planning this maneuver, NASA engineers worried that the ice that formed on the metal surfaces of the external tank when it was filled with supercooled liquid propellants could fall on the orbiter and damage it. “I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen,” one future NASA administrator said of the shuttle’s rollout. This was controversial, since it exposed the astronauts to danger.

In flight, the shuttle would roll and effectively fly upside down, with the tank “above” and in front of it. One of the design compromises in the creation of the shuttle was an enormous orange external tank that carried the fuel and liquid oxygen used to power the orbiter into space, before being jettisoned. The foam was part of the space shuttle itself.

Nasa space shuttle columbia