Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster, February 1, 2003: What Happened

The space shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas on the morning of Saturday, February 1, 2003, as it returned from a 16-day science mission. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. Mission Control in Houston lost contact at 8:59 a.m. Eastern time, about 16 minutes before Columbia was due to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The cause traced back to the first minutes of the flight, when a piece of foam struck the shuttle’s left wing during launch.

What Happened to Columbia on February 1, 2003

Columbia was flying mission STS-107, the orbiter’s 28th flight and the 113th of the shuttle program. It had launched from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center at 10:39 a.m. on January 16, 2003.

The return began on schedule. The crew fired Columbia’s engines for the deorbit burn at 8:15 a.m. EST, and the orbiter reached the top of the atmosphere, about 400,000 feet up, at 8:44 a.m. About four and a half minutes later, a sensor in the left wing recorded higher-than-normal strain, a reading stored on board rather than sent to the ground. As Columbia crossed into California airspace, observers saw flashes of brightening around it that were later understood as debris coming off.

The orbiter passed over Utah, Arizona and New Mexico and into Texas. Commander Rick Husband’s last radio call was cut off mid-sentence, Mission Control lost the signal at 8:59:32 a.m., and the orbiter began breaking apart less than a minute later.

Debris was seen falling over Texas and came down across East Texas and into Louisiana. That afternoon President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the White House. “The Columbia is lost; there are no survivors,” he said.

The Seven Astronauts of STS-107

Crew member	Role
Rick Husband	Commander
William McCool	Pilot
Michael Anderson	Payload commander
Kalpana Chawla	Mission specialist
David Brown	Mission specialist
Laurel Clark	Mission specialist
Ilan Ramon	Payload specialist, Israel

Ramon was the first Israeli astronaut. Chawla, on her second spaceflight, was the first woman born in India to fly in space. The mission itself was a dedicated research flight. The crew worked in a SPACEHAB research module on more than 80 experiments, from biology and physics to studies for the European Space Agency.

Why Columbia Broke Apart

The physical cause was a piece of foam insulation weighing about 1.7 pounds. Roughly 82 seconds after liftoff, it broke away from the left bipod ramp of the external fuel tank and struck the reinforced carbon-carbon panels that protected the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing.

The strike left a hole. Sixteen days later, during reentry, superheated air entered the wing through the breach and weakened its internal structure until the wing failed. The orbiter lost control and broke apart.

Foam had come off the tank on earlier flights, and engineers had seen strikes before without losing a vehicle. That history mattered to the investigation.

The Search and the Investigation

The recovery effort was enormous. Searchers worked across Texas for about four months, coordinated from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, and recovered about 84,000 pieces of Columbia, roughly 38 percent of the orbiter by weight. The Texas Army National Guard, the Coast Guard, the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Forest Service, the Civil Air Patrol and local volunteers all took part, and the debris was shipped to Kennedy Space Center for study.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, chaired by retired Navy Admiral Harold Gehman, released its report on August 26, 2003. It found that the accident had organizational causes as well as a technical one. The board cited schedule pressure tied to building the International Space Station, budget limits, workforce reductions and what it called “reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices.” News coverage summed up the finding in the board’s phrase “broken safety culture.”

The board issued 29 recommendations, 15 of which had to be met before any shuttle could fly again.

How NASA Changed After Columbia

The shuttle fleet stayed on the ground for two and a half years while NASA worked through the board’s return-to-flight recommendations, including reducing foam shedding from the tank and improving imaging of the orbiter. Discovery returned to flight on mission STS-114 on July 26, 2005.

The disaster also shortened the shuttle’s future. In January 2004, Bush announced a new space exploration plan that called for retiring the shuttle once the International Space Station was finished. The program flew its 135th and final mission in July 2011, when Atlantis landed at Kennedy Space Center on July 21.

The crew is remembered in several places. A memorial to the STS-107 astronauts was unveiled at Arlington National Cemetery on February 2, 2004, near the memorial to the Challenger crew. On Mars, NASA’s Spirit rover explored the Columbia Hills, seven hills each named for a member of the crew.

To see the date in context, open the full 2003 calendar. The return to flight appears on the 2005 calendar, and the final shuttle landing on the 2011 calendar. The day-of-the-week tool will confirm that February 1, 2003, fell on a Saturday.