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Retrace the final, tragic flight of the space shuttle Columbia, from its launch to its catastrophic end on Feb. 1, 2003.
The disastrous loss of the shuttle Columbia is firmly enshrined in human memory and popular culture. But as so often happens, much of what people think they remember has become more myth and garble than actual reality.
This is a normal process: Sometimes it helps humanize the inhuman horror by camouflaging events that are too painful to remember as they were. Sometimes the events need to be fit into wider narratives, to reassure us that they had more than random significance.
But for those who want to help themselves, and others around them, to stick to the facts, in tribute to the fallen, I've composed my own list of myths — some harmless, some not so much. This is a continuation of earlier myth-busting work by others.
The biggest misconception is what I call "Myth Zero." This pernicious and poisonous myth is that the disaster was an "accident" — suggesting that it was caused by factors beyond human control, and was just one of those things that should be expected and tolerated on the space frontier.
As investigators later determined — and as some experienced safety analysts warned beforehand — the root cause was a series of bad decisions made by people who ignored traditional and time-tested strict safety standards. The disaster was a consequence of that flaw, not of the essential and unavoidable nature of spaceflight. In such a culture, disasters were not accidental, but inevitable.
Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin often pointed out that spaceflight is so very difficult that humans can handle the hazards only if they're at their best. If we relax from relentless vigilance, spaceflight will kill, and has killed. But in the end it is usually the softness of humans, and not the hardness of space, that is to blame.
Here, then, are the top 10 typical myths surrounding the Columbia's loss on Feb. 1, 2003, and the realities underlying them:
1. The vehicle blew up when it hit the atmosphere.
Columbia was lost when the air drag across its left wing, created by turbulence around a growing hole on the leading edge, jerked its nose to the left too strongly for steering rockets to overcome. It then turned end over end at least once before aerodynamic braking broke its back and tore it into pieces. The crew cabin was then crushed and torn apart by the severe deceleration.
2. The vehicle was flaming and trailing smoke.
The streaks in the sky over east Texas that morning were essentially meteoric effects resulting from Columbia's speed — about Mach 15 — and its 40-mile altitude. Fragments of the spacecraft ionized the thin air that they passed through. There was enough frictional heating to scorch some of those fragments as they continued to fall, but no flames or smoke in the traditional sense.
3. The crew died instantly.
Equipped with spacesuits and parachutes, the crew would have had time to experience the initial tumble and breakup for several seconds, and to hope that they might be thrown free and descend safely by parachute. At least one of the astronauts had neglected to fasten their helmet and gloves, and died of asphyxiation. Others were killed by the blunt force trauma suffered during collisions with swirling cabin fragments. Had the ship been slightly lower and slower when it disintegrated, some of the astronauts might well have been saved by their bailout suits.
4. The spacecraft was crippled by 'space lightning' during re-entry, but NASA covered it up.
A widely circulated image taken in California showed the shuttle's fireball streak with a zigzag line catching up with it. Two effects produced this optical illusion. First, a shuttle re-entry typically leaves a persistent streak across the sky that lasts several minutes. Second, the camera was taking a time exposure on a tripod, so when the "open" button was pushed, it briefly shook, laying down the zigzag.
5. The foam came off because of EPA regulations banning stronger glue that used Freon.
The Environmental Protection Agency did ban CFC-11 in the mid-1990s, and NASA eventually selected an alternative — but it wasn't used in the section of the external tank where the fatal chunk tore off. A different foam, not covered by the EPA regulation, had been used there, so the cause of the shedding had nothing to do with environmental concerns.
6. A secret nuclear-powered Israeli spy device was on board.
The presence of Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, sparked many conspiracy theories, as did post-disaster search instructions to be cautious around some specific types of debris. But the cautions related to hazardous chemical fuels always carried on shuttles, and there was no room in the cargo manifests or electrical power budgets for any super-secret dangerous payload.
7. Satellite photographs captured the vehicle exploding in space.
These grisly images were an Internet hoax using stills from a science-fiction movie.
8. The astronauts had earlier relayed photographs of an ominous crack or dent in the spaceship's wing.
The images in Israeli newspapers and across the Internet actually showed the front wall of the payload bay, not the wing at all. And the cracks and dents were normal non-hazardous structural features.
9. NASA knew the spaceship was fatally damaged but decided not to tell the crew.
This newborn myth consists entirely of exaggerated or misrepresented excerpts from a recent blog posting by former NASA official Wayne Hale. He reported a private conversation during the mission that speculated what might be best in the event lethal damage were discovered. No official decision was ever made, because nobody thought there was any need. Columbia's astronauts were fully informed of the actual results of NASA's analysis, which determined that the impacting debris had not hit a vital region of the heat shield. That conclusion was found to be erroneous only in hindsight.
10. Nostradamus had predicted the disaster in a quatrain referring to seven who perish in a ship descending from the sky over Texas.
The purported quatrain, like a similar prophecy about the 9/11 terror attacks, is a complete hoax. Its author has never been tracked down.
There are many other lunacies on the Internet. Other, more obscure myths have involved the Tesla death ray, the secret HAARP system in Alaska, or numerology, or corporate espionage, or a UFO attack, or solar storms that zapped the shuttle. One tall tale has the same astronaut being "bumped" from both the shuttle Challenger and Columbia.
On the 10th anniversary of the disaster, it's fitting to remember those who were lost in the mission: commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark. It's also fitting to remember the two searchers who died in a helicopter crash during the recovery effort: pilot Jules F. Mier Jr. and Charles Krenek. But such remembrances require authentic memories.
More about the Columbia tragedy:
- 10 years later, Columbia's loss still stings
- Shuttle tragedies serve as warnings to NASA
- NASA celebrates its fallen astronauts
- Film finds uplifting story amid Columbia's loss
- Special report on the Columbia tragedy
NBC News space analyst James Oberg spent 22 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer. He is the author of several books on space history and space policy.
Leave a Comment:
Alex Jones says it was all a hoax by the CIA so Obama could come into your house and take your space shuttle.
Speaking of myths,
Heat from reentry is from Aerodynamic heating (compression of air), not friction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamic_heating
Re frictional heating, thanks for raising an old favorite myth of mine ['frictional heating'] -- and you are absolutely right, as a rule entry heating is compressional in nature and then conducted back through air layers to the structure [from lunar distances, transported by thermal radiation from the glowing plasma sheath] . In this case in the high Mach region with turbulent flow and tumbling objects, laminar flow had mostly vanished and heating was generated largely due to atmosphere impact directly on structure rather than air-to-air compression. In other words, friction. Or at least that's the way the entry aero gurus told it to me. But the general point is valid, and i chose that word so as not get off on a tangent into hypersonic aerodynamics. Attaboy for the comment.
lunar distances?
Right tragedy but wrong date. It was January 28, 1986. Otherwise overall good reporting.
Umm... you're thinking of Challenger, this story is about Columbia. Definitely different tragedies.
Hey, James Oberg! It's hard to believe that you are a "NBC News Space Analyst" when you can't even use proper English. The subject of that sentence is "one", which is singular. So, why did you use "their", a plural possessive pronoun, to modify helmet, etc.? You should have used "his" or "her", which are also singular and in keeping with the subject "one". You are the type person who, if you were actually a member of the space team, would interpret the metric system of measurement as the English system, thereby generating multiple errors and inconsistencies. Go back to school and learn your trade.
Hey Scales,
You are the type of person who while pointing out gramatical errors in a story, makes them in his/her posting.
Pot, meet kettle.
No, it's a good question. The answer is, in terms of medical privacy, I decided NOT to use 'him' or 'her' because I did not want to disclose the gender of the person who did this. It was a deliberate choice, and I hope the grammarians will forgive me. And no, I won't tell you which astronaut I was talking about.
Please let me retract my first comment. I saw the picture of the liftoff and mistakenly thought of Challenger. Columbia of course was lost during re-entry.
We'll forgive you. They were both traumatic.
Indeed both were traumatic -- even for us in India when as schoolkids we watched challenger going into space live --- i think because a teacher was going into space for the first time. And then it exploded. It was just unbelievable. Live television makes these memories stick with you forever.
And for India, the personal loss with Columbia of the incredible astronaut Kalpana Chawla. :-(
On balance, India has also given the world a sunny commander of the International Space Station, and many other amazingly talented and well-spoken space specialists. We are in your debt, Bharat.
TimoA, nope, they have the right date. January 28, 1986 is the Challenger tragedy. I knew that because Columbia happened after we bought our home, which wasn't until 1988.
In your effort to debunk the crazy myths about Columbia one is left with an impression that all was well and no errors were made. This tragedy clearly demonstrated incompetence and errors at the highest level at NASA. The best way to dispel crazy myths is to tell the complete story.
How the heck did you get that out of the story? Did you miss this part?
"The biggest misconception is what I call "Myth Zero." This pernicious and poisonous myth is that the disaster was an "accident" — suggesting that it was caused by factors beyond human control, and was just one of those things that should be expected and tolerated on the space frontier.
As investigators later determined — and as some experienced safety analysts warned beforehand — the root cause was a series of bad decisions made by people who ignored traditional and time-tested strict safety standards. The disaster was a consequence of that flaw, not of the essential and unavoidable nature of spaceflight. In such a culture, disasters were not accidental, but inevitable.
Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin often pointed out that spaceflight is so very difficult that humans can handle the hazards only if they're at their best. If we relax from relentless vigilance, spaceflight will kill, and has killed."
Seems to me he's pretty clear about the "incompetence and errors... at NASA."
Here is my problem with the 'Myth Zero' portion of the article. It says that it wasn't an 'accident' because we were careless. I have worked on the space program as well, but not so long as the author. I think this comment implies that we as human beings are capable of doing everything perfectly and that that when we deviate from established systems of doing it perfectly then that is when accidents happen. My problem with this is that we are humans, and as such we are neither always logical, nor always consistent. Period. There is no 'system' which you can put into place to get around this, since it would be a system designed and executed by... wait for it... yes, you guessed it; human beings.
A rocket is effectively a carefully controlled bomb with unbelievable numbers of moving parts and systems which must work in perfect unison... all operated by flawed beings. No, the 'Myth Zero' is actually the myth that the space shuttle was ever a big friendly space bus. It is a rocket, and thus carries risk and danger to human life... even when you do your best, and work really hard. That is why we honor the brave men and women who are willing to climb into those chairs. To sell this tragic event as something which tries to white wash that inherent danger, I believe takes away from the respect that we owe these people.
Just my two cents :)
I agree with what you say there with the exception that I don't know that the myth of the space shuttle being a "big friendly space bus" has ever been perpetuated among adults.
The inherent danger of space flight is - in my opinion - pretty well known and understood quite clearly by the vast majority of the population. Nothing in the article above changes that - in fact, providing quotes like "spaceflight is so very difficult that humans can handle the hazards only if they're at their best. If we relax from relentless vigilance, spaceflight will kill, and has killed." only enforces that idea.
Nowhere do I get the impression that the article is trying to imply that if only we dot all of our i's and cross all of our t's is spaceflight is a walk in the park. However, it is saying that if we don't do that - if we get careless, cut corners and make ill-advised decisions for ill-advised motivations - that already incredibly dangerous trip becomes even more dangerous - to the point of not simply living with the risk of disaster, but flat- out inviting disaster.
I see no attempt to white wash anything here - but am happy to agree to disagree on that.
Michael - you make a good point. However, there is a difference between human error and human negligence. Human error refers to the fact that humans make mistakes due to the fact that they are not perfect. Human negligence refers to situations in which mistakes could have been avoided if the humans making the decisions were more diligent about choosing the path dictated by wisdom, science and experience. For example, the Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986, was due to human negligence. The weather had been unusually cold at the space center in Florida, with temperatures dropping below freezing. The cold hardened the O-rings on the fuel tanks. The ensuing explosion was completely avoidable if Reagan had not been so anxious to get a teacher in space in order to garner favor with USA teachers that he ordered that the shuttle should leave on schedule rather than waiting until the cold snap passed. Those tragic deaths were completely avoidable were it not for interference from a president who was already showing signs of dementia. As with all politicians, PR was more important than human lives.
Perhaps the author of the article should have referred to Myth Zero as human negligence rather than human error.
Scales - all good points, except for one:
The Reagan myth. There has not been one substantiated piece of evidence produced to support that claim. The decision to launch has been examined under many microscopes, and the mistakes along the chain of the decision easily spotted, well documented and those making the call easily identified. Nowhere is Reagan in that chain - unless you put faith in another baseless conspiracy theory.
The comment about Reagan and the launch decision is correct and well-documented except that it applied to Space Shuttle launches in general. At that point the program was far, far over budget and the military was pulling out because the ships could not be turned around quickly enough to be of value. Reagan ordered, not that specific flight, but for all flights in general to get up to at least 12 launches a year. The original design turnaround was 54 launches a year, just under one every two weeks. The turnaround at the time was more than 8 weeks.
Also the five shuttles were designed for 100 missions for a total of 500 missions. But they were literally falling apart and had patches on patches. To make it worse, the provisions for incorporating new technology was very poor. This was resulting in things like the astronauts using laptop copmputers and then manually inputting data because the shuttle computers were so old and slow. The shuttles had only accomplished 135 missions in all.
So Reagan was very concerned at the time about the Space Shuttle program in general since it was waaaaay over budget and was literally falling apart around his eras.
Chris, I've never seen any of this Reagan documentation you refer to. The schedule pressure on launches in early 1986 was coming exclusively from the unslippable Jupiter window in May and the double Centaur launch plan, with nobody in charge with the cojones to say 'delay one of them a year'.
"Perhaps the author of the article should have referred to Myth Zero as human negligence rather than human error."
Yes, perhaps. It's a valid distinction -- but please keep in mind the word-length constraints we deal with. Yet even in the world of 'human error', it is negligent to design a control system such as Faster-Better-Cheaper that does not accommodate such unavoidable human errors by providing independent checks and double checks, to detect and correct them. That negligence is what let human error slip through on the great robot Mars fleet debacle of 1999.
Hard to believe it's been 10 years since that awful day.
The bad thing is that every American Astronaut death has been because of direct human error.
The Apollo Fire on the launch pad: Three killed because they chose to pressurize the capsule with the MOST flammable / most dangerous accelerant gas possible - pure oxygen. Pure oxygen, when in the presence of ANY spark with ANYTHING even remotely flammable will cause an acceleration of a minor spark into a full fledged conflagration and will burn hard and hot until it consumes everything. Simply paying attention to common knowledge about the danger of pure oxygen environments and using an inert gas would have prevented this disaster.
Challenger explosion on lift off: Badly designed and badly assembled/maintained joints in the body of the solid rocket boosters and the choice to go ahead and launch in temperatures well below what were normal minimum temps for launch caused a joint to 'open' enough to allow a leak of hot exhaust gases from the side of the solid fuel booster through one of those joints that basically acted like a cutting torch and burned it's way into the liquid fuel tank and 'boom'.
Columbia breakup / destruction on re-entry: Detailed in the story above.
Space Flight is dangerous - but when you add humans being stupid to the mixture, you get a disaster.
With the exception of Gus Grissom and AS-204, a clear cut case of shear stupidity, I would say congress is to blame for shrinking NASA's budget to the point that gross negligence was required simply to carry out the agencies primary directives.
I wouldn't necessarily blame the Challenger failure on bad design or assembly. The O-ring seals were designed to operate within a certain range of parameters and NASA management took a very conscious decision to operate outside of these parameters that particular time despite the advice of the subject experts. A case of PR triumphing over engineering know-how and the ultimate price being paid.
"I would say congress is to blame for shrinking NASA's budget"
Congress being stingy with the budget is definitely part of the problem, but not all of it. The biggest problem is all of the strings attached to most NASA funding. They don't just get a budget to "build the next generation of spacecraft". They get a budget with numerous requirements that they use certain suppliers, from certain states and from certain districts. NASA in the past few decades has become far less about space exploration, and more about spreading as many tax dollars to as many influential districts & donors as possible. The result is a space agency that is far more adept at politics than it is at spacecraft design. The agency needs to be turned back over to the engineers, with a fixed, long term budget. The politics game isn't working, we've had at least 3 different (National Aerospace Plane Venture Star, Ares, SLS*), none of them have yet to produce even a base prototype for an attempted launch. And no The Ares I-X doesn't count, besides the SRB housing & fuel not one of the components on that flight was intended to be on the final craft.
I remember waking up to both shuttle disasters. The first, I was in college, and woke up and then remembered the shuttle was suppose to launch. I turned on the TV and was wondering what they were talking about. I knew something was wrong, but it took about 15 minutes before they got into specifics again.
The second, again, turned on the TV not knowing and found news coverage of a disaster. I really wanted to go out searching for debris, but couldn't get away.
During college and in 2003 I was working a lot of nights.
I knew they would find a way to blame the Jews. Oy.
Republicans fault this happened! Diverting NASA money to war and not spending enough on food stamps and such... Rabble rabble - REPUBLICANS ARE EVIL!!! Trust me - I'm a super edumacated MSNBC user! RABBLE!!
No, actually, you're just an idiot.
Idiot, troll, whatever...
Just another Joe idiot.
[The biggest misconception is what I call "Myth Zero." This pernicious and poisonous myth is that the disaster was an "accident" — suggesting that it was caused by factors beyond human control, and was just one of those things that should be expected and tolerated on the space frontier.]
It's tolerated, encouraged even, to think likewise of traffic crashes, and the media persists in that perpetuation, and that ice and fog attack some motorists but not others.
I recall a state patrol officer telling me that only very rarely does weather "cause" a vehicle crash (ie, a tornado). It almost always is people driving unsafely for current conditions, noting that in some conditions, driving at all would be unsafe (such as down a hill during freezing rain).
It's even more fun trying to drive UP.
And driving into a freezing rain from a non-freezing area.
A nice article about a very sad and tragic event in time. Columbia and crew, you will not be forgotten.
Notice how any small event, a fender bender, a couple of people fighting and one dies, your neighbor choking in his food are just normal everyday things that happen and no one screams conspiracy?
Really have to wonder why (and how) people come to think that any big event is somehow different? Is it just the size and the number (or importance) of people that they think this way?
Gallagher had a joke.
"I hate crowds. Too many people. Ever notice that? The bigger the crowd the more people show up for it? Small crowd nobody shows up?"
Kind of like the conspiracy theorists. Small event they don't say anything. Big thing and it HAS to be something behind it.
Here's to millimeters and milliseconds.
Aerodynamic heating, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aerodynamic heating is the heating of a solid body produced by the passage of fluid (such as air) over a body such as a meteor, missile, or airplane. It is a form of forced convection in that the flow field is created by forces beyond those associated with the thermal processes. The heat transfer essentially occurs at the vehicle surface where aerodynamic viscous forces ensures that the flow is at zero speed relative to the body for a very thin layer of molecules at the surface.
Link to "viscous forces" … Viscosity, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Viscous forces)
The viscosity of a fluid is a measure of its resistance to gradual deformation by shear stress or tensile stress. For liquids, it corresponds to the informal notion of "thickness". For example, honey has a higher viscosity than water.
Viscosity is due to friction between neighboring parcels of the fluid that are moving at different velocities. When fluid is forced through a tube, the fluid generally moves faster near the axis and very little near the walls, therefore some stress (such as a pressure difference between the two ends of the tube) is needed to overcome the friction between layers and keep the fluid moving. For the same velocity pattern, the stress is proportional to the fluid's viscosity.
Aerodynamic heating vs. friction, neary the same thing for these purposes; measured in millimeters and milliseconds.
Salvaging Value:
Conclusion if this misunderstanding were delivered at a NASA process meeting it could have been treated in one of several ways; It could have been dismissed as attempt to down grade the meeting objective to consider a difference without a distinction; it could have been taken that a team member was woefully undereducated and needed remedial studies; it could have simply been off topic, irrelevant to the conversation, or that it was deficiency of some other area entirely. It was entirely not with the mission, given the importance of a "NASA process meeting", but because any input is to be taken seriously, any investigation could have taken resources better used elsewhere.
Taken with small ocean of salt, the missed definition could have resulted in a less that serious objective to design a craft to withstand the aerodynamic forces, by all means possible including using additional hardware and fuel to slow the craft to safer speeds.
This is left to the future, because we are not at ready to embrace "concept" designs that include alternatives, rather than exclude alternatives.
The elemental exercise to start with is to go back to the existing documented records, show how the shuttle design as selected from the alternatives to meet the stated goals. If we can understand that the program needed to narrow the selection, then with lot more effort we could entertain how to broaden that selection, study those details and produce a successor to the shuttle, this is process that we can do now, but it would be fantasy to have considered previously alternate design and alternate objectives. Today we have some modest capability of computer assisted designs that in my opinion have barely been used to dynamically explore new designs before they are needed.
Key to the Problem: "that flaw"
This suggests rigor as expected, but revamped 'system' where better designs avoided the possibility of bad decisions. The design of the flying yard as critically dependent on a fragile tile system pushed to the very limit to enable high speed reentry. If there was no way to improve the 'toughness' or resiliency of the tile system, then avoiding high speed reentry would better choice.
The wonder is that we have lost so few in so dangerous an endeavor.
There are a number of tragedies noted in this article. Obviously, the personal tragedy involving the loss of life and the affects of that loss on the families of those involved. The tragedy of losing a multi-billion dollar piece of hardware and the personnel that were such a critical element of our space program. The tragedy of losing our manned space program because NASA has become so risk averse. The tragedy that people are so incapable of telling the difference between credible information and drivel. And finally the tragedy that, as a society, we've become so blame fixated that we must ALWAYS find a culprit... preferably one that won't fight back too much.
Being risk averse didn't get us into space. It didn't get us into the air. It didn't get us across the oceans. It didn't get us out of our caves, or off of our trees. We salute those who were brave enough to take those risks so the rest of us could follow in their footsteps. At the end of the day it's a good thing to learn from our tragedies. It's just not good to wallow in them.
Thyere is a big difference between being risk-adverse and realistic about risk. The Apollo program is proof that a program can be mindful of risks and still make great strides. The Apollo 3 tragedy was the result of a poor decision, not because of a risk-adverse environment. The program functioned under a "Go/No-Go" environment, where 1 objection could halt a flight until the situation was remedied. And yet we made it to the moon.
We can still do the same. We just have to acknowledge the risks (big difference between 100 to 1 & 100,000 to 1 risks). Acknowledge, fix, & move on. And keep moving.
Hi sweet friends of nasa , I believe is necessary the parachute in space travel , also important is a special robot-computadora for check possible technical error of the techniciens in moment they are magnufacturing the ''spaceship'' , but the super tough material very good for spaceship ., other wonderful idea is a spaceship to inside of other spaceship , in case accident the spaceship inside never will destroy (no destroying) it to separate inmediatelly of the other spaceship , it is other good idea. spanish: una persona experta en diferentes areas en arte , cencia etc. por un programa radial dijo que las naves de nasa deben ir por el polo norte al espacio , porque sino alteran la afmosfera. I want to travel to mars planet too. grateful hisidoro peña , thank.
This was a CIA domestic operation. Alex Jones has all the details.