COLUMBIA SPACE SHUTTLE DISASTER

Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster

Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster

Introduction

The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it returned to Earth on February 1, 2003, from a sixteen-day mission, killing all seven astronauts on board. It was the second deadly disaster in the twenty-two-year history of the space shuttle program; the Challenger shuttle had exploded shortly after lift-off in 1986, killing all seven of its astronauts. A special commission appointed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to investigate the Columbia accident found disturbing “echoes” from the disaster seventeen years earlier. In a damning report made public August 26, the panel said the space agency had failed to learn vital safety lessons from the Challenger accident and had developed an institutional “culture” that enabled mistakes to occur. Systemic failures at NASA were just as responsible for the Columbia tragedy as were technical ones, the panel said. (Chien 2006)

NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe reassigned key managers of the shuttle program and said the agency already had begun to carry out all of the twenty-nine recommendations made by the investigating panel. “We get it,” he said in response to the report. “We clearly got the point.” President George W. Bush also promised to support the space agency as it implemented required changes, including reforms in the shuttle program. At year's end, however, Bush reportedly was considering a fundamental redirection of the nation's space program that eventually would eliminate the space shuttle program along with some of the space initiatives it supported, notably the Hubble space telescope. Bush was expected to announce his plans early in 2004. (Godwin 2003)

Discussion

As a new agency during the 1960s, responsible for putting humans in space and eventually on the moon, NASA was the most glamorous arm of the federal government. NASA astronauts became national heroes, and space program inventions were put to daily use in millions of homes and offices. The space agency boasted of a “can do” spirit that inspired public confidence in the government even during the troubled times of the cold war, racial divisions in the civil rights era, and protests against the Vietnam War. But a series of accidents and missteps gradually ate away at NASA's public credibility: a January 1967 fire that killed three astronauts aboard their Apollo space craft during a test at the Kennedy Space Center; the Challenger explosion; the discovery in 1990 of flaws in the Hubble telescope after it was orbiting in space; and the losses in 1999 of two missions to Mars, one resulting from a simple engineering miscalculation. Over the years Congress and several presidents starved NASA of funding for basic organizational and safety missions, and during the 1990s the agency was driven by a “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy that critics said emphasized speed and cost savings over quality. More than a dozen commissions and investigating panels reported that NASA had allowed routine mistakes, taken too many safety matters for granted, and generally lost its edge. These same problems, and more, seemed to contribute to ...