Columbia arrived at Kennedy Space Center needing lots of work
Twenty-four years before Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during its return to Earth killing all seven astronauts on board, the Sentinel Star wrote about the repair work the brand-new orbiter already needed just days after it rolled off the assembly plant.
In March 1979, workers at Kennedy Space Center had to begin gluing 7,000 heat-shield tiles onto Columbia’s surface after its arrival from California to Florida.
The expensive tiles, part of the technology that allows a craft to be re-used, have long been a headache for the space shuttle program.
But the cause of the February 2003 Columbia disaster was a hole in the orbiter’s left wing, which was hit by a large piece of foam that had broken off its external tank seconds after liftoff 16 days earlier.
The damaged wing held up fine in space, but could not withstand the searing heat of re-entry.
“This problem with foam had been known for years, and NASA came under intense scrutiny in Congress and in the media for allowing the situation to continue,” according to Space.com.
The Columbia tragedy is often described as “unthinkable.” Many people, even some within NASA, considered launch to be the most dangerous aspect of a space mission, especially after the Challenger disaster 17 years earlier.
Early in the morning of Feb. 1, 2003, a photographer who got up before dawn to capture Columbia’s path over California noticed with alarm a “big red flare come from underneath the shuttle,” according to the 2008 book “Comm Check...: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia” by former Orlando Sentinel space editor Michael Cabbage and William Harwood.
The spaceship was hurtling uncontrollably toward Earth at thousands of miles per hour.
When it broke apart on its way to Kennedy Space Center, its debris was scattered across hundreds of miles in Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas.
The KSC Visitor Complex displays some pieces of the recovered remains.
But most of the nearly 84,000 remnants are in storage in KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building and aren’t open to the public.
In the shuttle’s beginnings, on March 26, 1979, the story about the patch work the Columbia needed in Florida ran at the top of the front page of the Sentinel Star newspaper.
The craft had arrived at Kennedy Space Center a day earlier, on
March 25, 1979.
KSC crew were excited about the brand-new vehicle — at the time, the most complex machine in the world other than the human bodies it was to carry.
But they were also exhausted by the sheer amount of work that fell to them.
After four years of construction in California amid myriad technical delays, Columbia still needed not only months of tile-gluing work, but it was also left to workers here to install its three main engines.
The tragedy nearly a quarter-century later devastated the space program and the nation.
Columbia, after its maiden flight in April 1981 — the first shuttle to reach space — was in operation for 22 years and 28 missions.
The Columbia mission astronauts who were killed were Rick Husband, commander; William C. McCool, pilot; Michael P. Anderson, payload commander/mission specialist 3; mission specialists David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark; and Ilan Ramon,
payload specialist 1.
“Comm Check” explores problems with NASA culture, such as how the agency had rejected an offer by the Pentagon to use spy cameras to capture images of Columbia’s breached wing in orbit.
“NASA’s best and brightest … failed to recognize the signs of an impending disaster,” according to the book’s promotional summary.