NASA
Twenty years ago today, lead-colored skies and cold air greeted Milt Heflin as he pulled into the large parking lot outside Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
It’s a space shuttle Columbia It was supposed to return to Earth after a two-week mission, but the center was quiet on Saturday morning. The chief of NASA’s flight director’s office, he found the observation room almost empty when Heflin stepped into his control of the mission. While his seven astronauts on the shuttle make final preparations to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, Heflin is the only other resident of the room, Ron on a mission named Epps. Had a friendly chat with his chief.
Through a large glass window, they looked out over Mission Control. As the shuttle’s ground orbit began to traverse the United States, crossing the southern side of the state and approaching Florida, Heflin began to sense that everything was going wrong. “From the movement of the flight controller, I felt something was wrong,” he said.
Heflin and Epps fell silent and listened closely to the mission’s audio. Soon, they saw John Shannon, his Director of Mission Operations, rush up from his position behind his Director of Flight and grab a large notebook with flight emergency procedures. Shannon left the control room and entered the viewing room after a while. Heflin knew where Shannon was going. That’s his Jefferson D. Howell suite, the director of the nearby Johnson Space Center.
As Shannon passed the viewing room, Heflin asked, “John, what’s wrong?”
Shannon provided the simple answer, “I lost them.”
he was referring to seven astronauts on board Columbia— Commander Rick Husband, Pilot William C. McCool, Specialist Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel Clarke and Ilan Ramon. They died around 9:00 a.m. local time when the shuttle’s thermal protection system failed, caused by a blob of foam hitting the spacecraft’s wing two weeks before launch. First, the shuttle’s crew cabin was depressurized, followed by a violent rotation of the spacecraft, allowing hot gases to enter the spacecraft as it flew over Texas.
This happened 20 years ago on February 1, 2003. Hefrin’s voice choked as he looked back on that dreadful morning. “It still breaks me today,” he said in his recent interview.
Collapse of safety culture
The loss of the space shuttle was a tragic tragedy for NASA, the nation, and the world. Mission His Specialist Chawla was born in India and immigrated to the United States in 1982. Payload His Specialist Roman was the first Israeli astronaut.
The shuttle was grounded for over two years and returned in August 2005 to allow NASA to complete construction of the International Space Station using its massive payload bay. In 2011, the winged vehicle was permanently retired.
For NASA, an analysis of the results from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board produced a damning indictment against NASA’s safety culture.
“Cultural traits and organizational practices harmful to safety have been allowed to develop,” the report said. NASA engineers and decision makers relied on past successes on the Shuttle as a proxy for sound engineering practices. In addition, organizational barriers stifled disagreements and made it difficult for junior employees to bring safety concerns up to management.
Simply put, NASA was complacent.
NASA/Wikipedia
of ColumbiaIn the case of , managers had observed foam falling from the shuttle’s external tank during many previous launches.It hadn’t seriously damaged the space shuttle before, so why should it this time? requested three times images of the shuttle that may have been damaged in space. ColumbiaThe mission management team at , chaired by Linda Ham, clarified that they had virtually nothing to discuss about the issue.
As such, the fatal damage to the Orbiter’s left wing was not discovered until too late to save the seven astronauts on board. ColumbiaThey became the third major crew loss in the space agency’s history.
