20 years later, Sen. Mark Kelly reflects on the space shuttle Columbia disaster - PBS NewsHour
Miles O’Brien:
So, where were you when it happened? There are moments in time that trigger that question. The loss of the space shuttle Columbia is one of those occasions. It happened the first day of February 2003. We remember as if it were yesterday. The junior senator from Arizona, Mark Kelly, certainly does.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ):
I was asleep. And I had planned to get up and watch the landing, something on TV. I got a phone call from my brother. And he just says that they lost — lost communications and they lost tracking at the same time. And, at that point, I knew that this was not likely to turn out as any of us had hoped.
(snip)
Miles O’Brien:
In East Texas, debris was scattered over 2,000 square miles. Soon after Kelly landed, he heard a body was found in Hemphill.
Sen. Mark Kelly:
We recovered one of my classmate's remains.
Miles O’Brien:
Three of the seven on board were in his class, Laurel Clark, Willie McCool, and Dave Brown. He helped recover them all.
Obviously, you go into this business, you know the risk. But, in a way, it's an abstract. And then, when you see that, what goes through your mind at that point?
(snip)
Miles O’Brien:
But it was all avoidable. The orbiter disintegrated in the searing heat of reentry because there was a gaping hole in its heat shield.
It happened 16 days earlier on launch day; 81 seconds after Columbia left the pad, a suitcase sized piece of foam, part of the insulation covering the external fuel tank, hit the leading edge of the left-wing. Everyone saw it, including me at the launch site.
There was a piece of debris which struck the shuttle as it came off. And this is made of what's called carbon-carbon. If something fell on that and caused some damage, who knows what the implications of that might be.
As soon as I saw this video after launch, I called my NASA sources. Engineers were looking at it. They determined looking, very closely at these high-speed, very close, close cameras that they have, that this was not a significant issue. They said that foam had been flying off shuttle fuel tanks since day one. How much had this been kind of ingrained into being something that just happens?
Sen. Mark Kelly:
And we spend a lot of time and effort on engineering and engineering analysis and trying to chase down anything that could be an issue. And this one, for some reason, it just got dismissed.
Miles O’Brien:
In July of 2003, the accident investigation board did what NASA should have done years before, run a test. And there it was, the smoking gun. Just shy of a year later, President Bush announced the shuttle was on its way to retirement. Where do you think we would be if the Columbia accident hadn't happened?
Sen. Mark Kelly:
I think we would have still retired the space shuttle. Maybe it would have been a couple years later. The space shuttle was designed to fly a lot of flights. It wasn't designed — designed to last for 30 years. So we started seeing more problems come up with it. And we started to realize that this — we can't fly this forever.
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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/20-years-later-mark-kelly-reflects-on-the-space-shuttle-columbia-disaster
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and served on the User Interface Committee that provided my team feedback on our mission at NASA.
I can still hear her voice in my head from our numerous contacts and conference calls.
This was before she joined the astronaut program.
This day always makes me a little bit sad.
In fact, as was told to me by many design engineers that were with NASA from the 1970s... the Space Shuttle was designed to be a prototype... a proof of concept vehicle that would be later refined after only one was made and was to be flown only a few times. A later shuttle would be developed using the knowledge gained from the Space Shuttle. But then the budget cutbacks started... the nation lost interest in space and NASA... and we stopped really having a goal in space (Mars was next, but beyond the capacity of the technology of the time)... and the USSR quit trying to 1 up the USA. so we ended up with "The Flying Brick" as the shuttle was known inside NASA.
Godspeed KC.
