Another horrible day in history due to an engineering failure

STS-107 flight insignia

I didn't realize the two Space Shuttle disasters happened around the same time of the year. The Challenger Disaster happened on January 28, 1986 while the Columbia Disaster happened on this day - seven years later in 2003. The time between the two was long enough for us to think all the problems had been solved. The problem that destroyed Challenger and killed her seven astronauts had been solved. But a new problem arose with Columbia.

Like with Challenger, Columbia's problems started at launch. With Challenger, though, it didn't take long for the problem to escalate from a leak in a tank to the destruction of the vehicle. With Columbia, the initial problem went unnoticed for 16 days - until the craft had completed its mission and was on its way home.

On launch, a piece of insulation broke off and hit the heat shielding tiles on the wing of the spacecraft damaging one of them. With that damage, the wing was no longer protected from the heat of re-entry. Hot gasses entered the wing through the damaged area and destroyed the wing from the inside. Once that happened, Columbia's fate and the lives of her crew were sealed.

This was another case of an engineering failure that was made worse by bad decisions from the managers. As I said in my previous post about the Challenger Disaster, "It seems that disasters of this magnitude are not usually the result of one mistake. They are the result of cascading mistakes." Damage from dislodged insulation was known to happen before this time. It should have been studied and solved then. But even without that, the dislodged piece of foam was observed on launch day and some engineers were concerned about it but, again, nothing was done. There is a very good write-up of this disaster in the Wikipedia article, "Space Shuttle Columbia disaster". There you will see that if the investigation had been allowed to continue, they could have found ways to either repair the damage or save the astronauts by allowing them to stay on the International Space Station until another Shuttle could come to rescue them.

I'm sorry that so many of my articles about the history of engineering are about engineering failures. I do believe it is important that we learn from our mistakes. But, I will try to focus more on the triumphs of our profession. It's also good to celebrate the things that go right. We need to face the future with the hope that we can make things better.