Sixteen days after Columbia lifted off, a chunk of insulating foam that struck its left wing during launch proved fatal: superheated gas breached the wing during re-entry, tearing the orbiter apart 200,000 feet above Texas. All seven crew members died, including Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon. The disaster grounded the shuttle fleet for over two years.
Engineers had actually flagged the foam strike during the mission, but NASA management, drawing on a normalized history of minor foam debris events, concluded it posed no serious risk and made no attempt to inspect the damage using military satellite imagery that was offered and declined. It was a fatal echo of the organizational failures that doomed Challenger seventeen years earlier.
As Columbia re-entered the atmosphere over California, sensors began failing one by one on the left wing, unnoticed patterns that in hindsight told the whole story. Residents across Texas watched and photographed a bright streak breaking into multiple pieces, and debris ultimately scattered across a stretch of land more than 500 miles long.
The seven astronauts — Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, William McCool, and Ilan Ramon — represented a strikingly diverse crew for its era. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report excoriated NASA's safety culture, and the tragedy accelerated the eventual retirement of the shuttle program in 2011.
Key people: Rick Husband, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla