February 1, 2003

Columbia

Breaking up over Texas, sixteen minutes from home

3,624 held · 60 days 7 died 9 named here

Died that day

7

They were at work, or on their way, or had gone in after somebody.

David Mcdowell Brown Ilan Ramon Kalpana Chawla Laurel Blair Clark Michael P Anderson Rick D Husband William C. McCool
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NASA in-house videography of mission control during the final minutes of descent. Loss of signal between the orbiter and mission control at about 5:15. The flight director acknowledges the contingency at 11:50.

A piece of foam insulation had come off the external tank during launch sixteen days earlier and struck the leading edge of the left wing. Engineers asked for satellite photographs of the damage and were refused.

On re-entry the hot gas found the hole. The orbiter came apart over east Texas at two hundred thousand feet, and debris fell across two states.

Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon were killed. Ramon was the first Israeli in space and carried a drawing of the Earth seen from the moon, made by a fourteen-year-old boy in Theresienstadt who did not survive it.

The search covered two thousand square miles. Jules Mier and Charles Krenek were killed when their helicopter went down looking for the wreckage, which gives this day a second roll.

Seven were killed aboard Columbia. Two more were killed seven weeks later, searching the ground for what fell.