Remembering Columbia, five years later

By Tariq Malik

updated 5:32 p.m. ET Feb. 2, 2008

NASA has launched seven shuttle missions since the loss of seven astronauts aboard Columbia five years ago, but the disaster still resonates as the space program prepares for its most ambitious year yet since it resumed orbiter flight.

Beginning with the Atlantis orbiter's planned Feb. 7 launch to the international space station, NASA hopes to launch up to six shuttle flights this year — five of them dedicated to orbital construction. The lessons from Columbia, however, are always close by, mission managers said.

"I think every day about Columbia and how that came about, and how we can prevent similar events," NASA's shuttle chief Wayne Hale said this week, attributing the accident to what Apollo astronaut Frank Borman called a "failure of imagination."

Legacy of Columbia
Columbia broke apart while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere early on the morning of Feb. 1, 2003, bringing a tragic end to what had until then been a successful 16-day science mission. The shuttle's destruction claimed the lives of mission commander Rick Husband, pilot Willie McCool and mission specialists Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon — Israel's first astronaut.

Months later, investigators would trace the physical cause of the accident to a suitcase-sized chunk of foam that popped free from Columbia's external fuel tank during its launch. The foam punched a hole in the orbiter's heat shield along its left wing leading edge, leaving it vulnerable to the superheated atmospheric gases during re-entry.

Investigators also faulted NASA's internal culture for contributing the accident, a point the space agency has worked hard ever since to prevent from resurfacing.

"I think we had a culture that was very adversarial in a lot of ways, where bad news was not particularly well received," Hale told Space.com, adding that the agency has since strived to foster more open communications. "I think that has allowed a lot of the workforce to feel much more comfortable in bringing things forward that they would have been more hesitant to in the old days."

Bill Ingalls / NASA via AP A freshly placed wreath adorns the Columbia memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia after NASA's Day of Remembrance ceremony on Thursday.

NASA held an official Day of Remembrance on Thursday to recall Columbia's crew, as well as astronauts killed in the Challenger accident in 1986, the 1967 Apollo 1 fire and others who died in the pursuit of space exploration.

Astronauts, agency officials, dignitaries and Columbia crew family members gathered at a public memorial service Friday at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor's Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

"I'm amazed that it's been five years," Evelyn Husband-Thomas, the widow of Columbia's commander, said during the service. "This morning I could not stop thinking about Rick and Willie, and Kalpana and Mike and Laurel and Ilan. All of our families went through so much that day. We so miss them and we will never forget them."

NASA chief Michael Griffin stressed that the agency must always remember that human lives, and the nation's space program, ride on its daily decisions.

"The more we remember those real reasons, the longer it will be before we have another cause for mourning," Griffin said in a statement.

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