On This Day in History: February 1

The Columbia shuttle disaster

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Am I a bad person for thinking At least they got to go into space? I mean, Challenger blew up 73 seconds after liftoff, and that’s the shuttle disaster everyone remembers. But Columbia blew up too. The crew had spent over two weeks in space, and when it was time to come home the ship disintegrated upon re-entry.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 1, 2003--

In 2017, I rode the “Vomit Comet,” a converted 727 aircraft that had the chairs removed and the walls padded. The plane was flown in multiple parabolic maneuvers (climbs and dives) to give 30 seconds of weightlessness each time to a couple dozen passengers. And it was way fucking cool. I got to do it for free because I wrote an article about it. My son is still pissed I didn’t pay the five grand to bring him along.

Anyway, space travel is awesome. And also hella fucking dangerous. But just like sailors dropping like flies from scurvy or drowning in storms while exploring the world, exploding spacecraft won’t stop humanity’s efforts to slip the surly bonds of Earth. On Challenger, three of the astronauts had never been to space, and they wouldn’t get to fulfill that dream.

It had been 17 years and three days since the Challenger disaster when Columbia came apart on its return to Earth on February 1, 2003. They knew something was up, because the damage that caused the disaster took place upon liftoff; a piece of foam insulation from one of the external booster tanks flew off and hit the left wing of the shuttle. That sort of thing had happened on previous shuttle missions, causing minor damage, but for the crew of Columbia it proved fatal.

Engineers knew there was damage and were concerned it was worse than the other times, but NASA management limited the investigation because, well, there was fuck all that could be done; there was no way for them to fix it in space. So, they relied on thoughts and prayers, which panned out as well as it usually does. As the ship flew just shy of Mach 20 at 200,000 feet above Earth, the heat shield was penetrated through the damaged wing and prompted the death spiral that ripped the spacecraft apart over the course of a minute and a half.

All seven crew members died, but several weeks later aluminum canisters were found among the debris that contained one-millimeter-long worms in petri dishes that were on the shuttle for biological research purposes.

The worms had survived.

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