• Leaders look back at the Columbia tragedy — and look ahead to Mars

    Bill Ingalls / NASA

    A commemorative wreath adorns a monument to the crew of the shuttle Columbia at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on Friday, the 10th anniversary of the shuttle's destruction and the astronauts' deaths.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    President Barack Obama and NASA's leaders paid a 10th-anniversary tribute to the space shuttle Columbia's fallen astronauts on Friday — and pledged that the lessons learned would be applied to future space odysseys, including eventual trips to Mars.

    "As we undertake the next generation of discovery, today we pause to remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice on the journey of exploration," Obama said in a statement released by NASA. "Right now we are working to fulfill their highest aspirations by pursuing a path in space never seen before, one that will eventually put Americans on Mars."

    The shuttle Columbia's catastrophic breakup on Feb. 1, 2003, killed seven astronauts, forced a two-year grounding of the three remaining space shuttles and led to stepped-up safety measures at the space agency. The disaster also led Obama's predecessor, President George W. Bush, to plan for the retirement of the shuttle fleet once construction of the International Space Station was complete. The last shuttle mission flew eight years later, in 2011.

    Bush's space vision called for a new generation of vehicles to be built for trips back to the moon by 2020 — but Obama shifted the focus of exploration to a near-Earth asteroid in the mid-2020s, with trips to Mars and its moons starting in the mid-2030s.

    'We will never forget'
    In his own 10th-anniversary statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the sacrifices made by the crew of Columbia's last mission will inspire future explorers.

    "We will never forget these astronauts, nor all those who have lost their lives carrying out our missions of exploration — the STS-51L Challenger crew; the Apollo 1 crew; Mike Adams, the first in-flight fatality of the space program as he piloted the X-15 No. 3 on a research flight," Bolden said in an agency statement. "These explorers, and their families, have our deepest respect. We work every day to honor and build on their legacy and create the best space program in the world — to infuse it with the life and vitality that they worked so hard to achieve."

    Bill Ingalls / NASA

    NASA Administrator Charles Bolden looks on as Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin gives a salute during a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Friday. The ceremony paid tribute to astronauts who died in the Apollo 1 fire of 1967 as well as the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 2003 Columbia tragedy.

    Slideshow:

    Retrace the final, tragic flight of the space shuttle Columbia, from its launch to its catastrophic end on Feb. 1, 2003.

    Launch slideshow

    On Friday morning, Bolden laid a wreath in honor of the agency's fallen astronauts at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where monuments to the Columbia and Challenger crews have been erected. Earlier in the week, he attended a spaceflight conference held in Israel to honor Ilan Ramon, that country's first astronaut, who died in the Columbia tragedy. The other victims included Columbia commander Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark.

    Memorial ceremonies also were conducted in Texas, where the Columbia wreckage fell to earth, and at Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex in Florida. The focal point of the Florida ceremony was the Space Mirror Memorial, which bears the names of NASA fliers who died in the line of duty.

    Roots of the tragedy
    At that ceremony, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, acknowledged that the roots of the Columbia disaster went "all the way back to the first shuttle launch in 1981." Even then, NASA knew that ice and pieces of foam insulation could fly off the shuttle's external fuel tank and strike the orbiter — but the fact that no severe damage was done "reinforced the idea that all was well," Gerstenmaier said.

    That view changed dramatically when Columbia was felled. Investigators determined that the leading edge of Columbia's left wing was fatally damaged by a piece of flying foam during launch, setting the stage for the breakup 16 days later during atmospheric re-entry. NASA was reminded that "even small problems can surface as major failures," Gerstenmaier said.

    "Ten years ago, it would have been easy to pull back from the frontier of space, and say it was too risky to pursue," he said. "Instead, we dedicated ourselves to improving how we pushed the boundaries of space exploration, and we vowed to continue with our eyes open. We cannot be afraid of risk, and we cannot be ignorant of it, either. Our lasting tribute to those we have lost is to carry on with the cause that they believed was worth the ultimate sacrifice."

    Other speakers at the Florida ceremony included Evelyn Husband-Thompson, the widow of Columbia's commander, who has since remarried. She recalled how she and other family members anticipated the return of their loved ones on that fateful Saturday morning 10 years ago, only to be jolted into a nightmare of "fear, uncertainty and horror."

    NASA

    Evelyn Husband-Thompson, the widow of Columbia commander Rick Husband, speaks at a memorial ceremony conducted Friday at the Space Mirror Memorial at Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex.

    "The grief journey has been difficult, complicated and surprising," she said. Over the past decade, she has drawn comfort from her friends, her family and her faith. She noted that the Columbia crew's legacy includes educational initiatives, scholarships, museum exhibits, and even the name of the airport near her home in Texas: Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport.

    "Just as a forest fire reduces beautiful foliage to ashes, those ashes ultimately become nourishment for new, healthy growth," Husband-Thompson said. "There are indeed small, green shoots of hope that are springing up in our lives."

    More about Columbia:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Top 10 myths surrounding NASA's Columbia space shuttle disaster

    Slideshow:

    Retrace the final, tragic flight of the space shuttle Columbia, from its launch to its catastrophic end on Feb. 1, 2003.

    Launch slideshow

    By James Oberg, NBC News Space Analyst

    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:

    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.

  • Ten years later, Columbia's tragic loss serves as a warning to NASA

    NASA / Getty Images file

    A NASA video focuses on a piece of debris falling from the external tank, then striking the left wing of the space shuttle Columbia during its launch on Jan. 16, 2003. Investigators say the damage led to the shuttle's destruction 16 days later during atmospheric re-entry.

    By James Oberg, NBC News Space Analyst

    HOUSTON — Ten years ago, the Columbia tragedy showed that not everyone at NASA had learned the most important safety lesson from the shuttle Challenger disaster, more than a decade earlier. Will the new teams now stepping forward into the American spaceflight arena have to relearn the same bitter lesson?

    Beyond the tragic loss of life, the greatest tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia was that NASA should have known better. As an organization and as a team, the agency learned nothing new from the 2003 disaster. Rather, the disaster was a harsh reminder of what NASA had forgotten. Or, as the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel, wrote, "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."

    After the Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts were lost, an independent investigation board delved deeply into the immediate causes of the disaster. But the board's director, retired U.S. Navy Adm. Harold Gehman, set his team an even more profound task. He wanted them to find out why, just 17 years after operational errors and bad engineering decisions doomed the space shuttle Challenger and its seven astronauts, the same types of management flaws had reinfected NASA's culture and struck again with equally hideous results.

    The fundamental safety rule had been to base no belief purely on hope. Safety was a quality that had to be explicitly verified. To assume that all was well unless there were visible hazards was imprudent and irresponsible. Convenient, unverified assumptions of goodness had led to the loss of Challenger and its crew — and Gehman wanted to find out if the same kind of lapse had led to Columbia's loss.

    Slideshow:

    Retrace the final, tragic flight of the space shuttle Columbia, from its launch to its catastrophic end on Feb. 1, 2003.

    Launch slideshow

    Over the ensuing months, as investigators developed these deeper insights through extensive interviews and document reviews, they regularly conducted news briefings to answer questions about what they were discovering. I attended those briefings as a newly hired space analyst for NBC News, and I had a tough question on my mind.

    "How much of your 'NASA safety culture' assessment," I asked, "could have been written before the accident?"

    Gehman paused, thought deeply, and then sighed. “Maybe three-quarters of it,” he acknowledged.

    This was a dramatic moment: NASA itself could have done the diagnosis and come up with the get-well prescription without the cost of seven lives.

    No accident
    As it turned out, neither the 2003 Columbia disaster, nor the 1986 Challenger disaster, nor the robotic Mars mission failures of 1999, nor the cascade of near-death experiences of American astronauts aboard the Russian Mir space station in 1996 and 1997, were "accidents" in any traditional sense of the word. They weren't out-of-the-blue surprises, striking without warning. They didn't happen because "space is hard," as NASA apologists repeatedly proclaimed. It wasn't because we were pushing a fearsome frontier and just had to expect, and accept, such losses.

    These bad things happened mostly because attitudes toward safety got soft. And as complacent carelessness and time-saving shortcuts crept into the culture, many people had noticed, had given warnings, and had been ignored.

    There were many members of NASA's space team who continued to keep faith with the rigorous standards that had gotten America to the moon in the Cold War space race. Those space workers would later come to feel they were betrayed by their colleagues who had dropped the ball, and broken the chain, and made conscious choices that had lethal consequences.

    It wasn't a matter simply of hindsight. People inside and outside had been noticing the shift and raising objections to increasingly careless management choices, as front-line workers were overruled for schedule and budget reasons.

    As a senior worker at the Johnson Space Center in the mid-1990s, I had been assigned more and more safety-related duties in addition to my primary specialization, orbital design work. As I learned more of the principles of flight safety, I saw more and more disconnects with the way it was being practiced, especially with regard to the diplomatically motivated "shuttle-Mir" program.

    Following a series of near-fatal crises while American astronauts were aboard Mir in 1997, NASA managers prepared arguments for continuing the project — a continuation directed by White House officials. One manager wrote, "Despite concerns, there is no hard evidence that Mir is currently unsafe." Another asserted, "The experts that we had asked, the majority of them, determined that there were no technical or safety reasons to discontinue the program."

    I had already learned enough about NASA's "best practices" to recognize that these officials had it completely backward. In the real world, you don't assume safety and seek evidence of danger — especially when working with the Russians, who regularly covered up flight hazards. You must decide positively to continue only after a thorough hazard review, and without it, you do not continue. If a vocal minority, or even one engineer objects, you address those concerns head-on.

    Looking back, looking forward
    After leaving the NASA program in 1997, I was able to write more candidly about these safety concerns, both with respect to the mismanagement of a fleet of Mars robots in 1999 and a book chapter on Mir safety in 2002

    I concluded an article written for Scientific American with a warning: "NASA will have to address its systemic weaknesses if it is to avoid a new string of expensive, embarrassing and perhaps in some cases life-threatening foul-ups."

    Quoting retired colleagues whose judgment I had learned to respect, I noted in a 2000 report for New Scientist that critics were accusing NASA of "repeating the errors that led to the Challenger disaster."

    "The consequences of a future accident could, also, be fatal," I wrote, three years before the Columbia disaster. "So far, no more human lives have been lost, but the question NASA must answer is whether this will continue."

    So when Admiral Gehman acknowledged that an accurate diagnosis of the systemic flaws leading to the disaster could have been made before seven astronauts died, I knew he spoke the truth. And I knew that the next generation of "safety hawks" and pain-in-the-ass picky whiners in the space effort would need to be more effective than I was.

    Those chapters are yet to be written.

    More about 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.

  • How the Columbia tragedy unfolded — and led to NASA's tough transition

    Slideshow:

    Retrace the final, tragic flight of the space shuttle Columbia, from its launch to its catastrophic end on Feb. 1, 2003.

    Launch slideshow

    NASA observed its annual "Day of Remembrance" for fallen astronauts on Friday with ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, as well as at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and other NASA centers. In this 10th-anniversary commentary, NBC News' longtime Cape Canaveral correspondent, Jay Barbree, looks back at the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew:

    By Jay Barbree, NBC News

    CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — On the morning of that fateful Saturday, the first day of February 2003, the Columbia astronauts prepared their ship for its landing at their Florida launch site.

    Touchdown was set for 9:16 a.m. Eastern time, and on Columbia's 255th trip around Earth in 16 days, commander Rick Husband was given the "go" to put on his brakes and leave orbit.  The senior astronaut was flying Columbia backward and tail-up when he ignited the ship's two orbiting maneuvering rockets. Twelve thousand pounds of thrust pounded against Columbia's forward speed for two minutes and 38 seconds.  The burn was "right on the nose," and it slowed the big shuttle's forward motion just enough to drop it out of orbit.

    Columbia slammed into Earth's atmosphere at 400,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean.  This is when a spacecraft skips along the upper surface of the planet's air, much like a stone skipping across a lake. The first effects of re-entry heat can be felt when the shuttle penetrates the atmosphere.  Its surface grows hotter and hotter as it plows deeper and deeper into the thickening air. The plasma sheath around the shuttle is hotter than the molten lava pouring from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano.

    In physics, plasma is a highly ionized gas containing an approximately equal number of positive ions and electrons.  The super-hot plasma is the product of friction created by a fast-moving object through air.  It first appeared to Columbia's astronauts as a faint salmon glow.  Nearing the California coast, Columbia was dropping like a rock. Its nose-up attitude was focusing the plasma's heat on the reinforced carbon-carbon panels covering the shuttle's nose and the leading edges of its wings.

    Dec. 31, 2008: NASA releases information about what the astronauts went through in their final moments onboard the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. NBC's Tom Costello reports.

    "This is amazing," pilot Willie McCool said.  "It's really getting, uh, fairly bright out there," he added, staring at the growing intensity of the fire outside.

    Veteran commander Rick Husband smiled. It wasn't his first re-entry.  He knew this was only the beginning of the blast furnace that was yet to come.  "Yeah, you definitely don't want to be outside now," he told his pilot.

    Columbia crossed the California coast at 8:53 a.m. Eastern time, 23 minutes away from its Florida touchdown.  Below, two news photographers had set up their cameras to get a view of the returning shuttle, but instead of seeing the perfect trail of plasma they expected, the photographers saw a big red flare shoot from underneath Columbia.

    The two looked at each other. Was that thing coming apart?

    Six minutes later, Columbia crossed the sky 40 miles above north central Texas. The super-hot plasma sped freely through a six-inch hole in Columbia's left wing, made by a chunk of falling tank foam on launch day. The blast melted the ship's inner structure.  America's first space shuttle was ripped into more than 84,000 pieces, killing Columbia's dedicated crew of seven.

    Following a seven-month investigation, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, chaired by retired Navy Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., issued a scathing report, confirming that the "the foam did it" and indicting NASA as a co-conspirator. The board declared that "the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with the accident as well as the foam." Its report cited eight missed opportunities to detect the problem during the flight, and identified schedule pressures and communications breakdowns as contributing factors.

    NASA decided to retire its space shuttle fleet after meeting its obligations to complete the building of the International Space Station, and drew up plans for safer rockets and spacecraft.

    President George W. Bush approved a new generation of space vehicles, aimed at sending astronauts to the moon under a project named Constellation. Then, along came Barack Obama. The new president canceled Constellation, and since then, NASA has struggled.

    Today, 10 years after the Columbia tragedy, America's $6.6 billion Florida spaceport sits mostly idle. Several projects are trying to get started. Private companies are working on spaceships that could launch astronauts from U.S. soil again starting sometime in the next several years. NASA is developing a launch system that could be sending Americans beyond Earth orbit a decade from now. Meanwhile, about 8,400 NASA employees and contractors are caretakers of what was once the home of the world's leader in space exploration. Those with vision have moved on to more promising projects, while many of those who are left mark time and cut grass.

    More about the Columbia tragedy:

    Jay Barbree is in his 55th year with NBC News as a space analyst, correspondent and consultant. He is the only journalist who covered all 166 flights by American astronauts from U.S. soil, and is now writing a book on Neil Armstrong's life of flight.

  • 'Mission of Hope' finds uplifting story within the shuttle Columbia tragedy

    Watch the trailer from "Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope."

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    "Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope" puts a fresh spin on the 10-year-old story, turning the tragic loss of Columbia and its crew into an uplifting tale of the human spirit. How does the hourlong TV documentary, premiering Thursday night on PBS stations, pull that off? By focusing on one of the Columbia tragedy's casualties, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon — and his connections to an even bigger tragedy, the Nazi Holocaust.

    The tale's crucial pivot point is a miniature Jewish Torah scroll that was treasured by a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany: Ramon brought the scroll with him on the ill-fated mission, as a symbol of endurance. Even though the scroll was lost in the Columbia's catastrophic breakup in the skies over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003, its symbolism endures, thanks to "Mission of Hope."

    "The film is not about the Columbia accident," director Daniel Cohen told NBC News. "The film is about a journey of hope. When I first started making the film, I thought I was making a documentary about the Holocaust. Then I peeled back the top layers and started to look inside, and I said, 'Wait a minute — there's a lot going on inside the story.'"

    Let's start with the sacred scroll: During a death-camp bar mitzvah, the scroll was given to a teenager named Joachim "Yoya" Joseph at Bergen-Belsen by the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, a fellow prisoner at the camp. The rabbi didn't survive, but Joseph did, and the Torah held a place of honor in Joseph's office when he grew up to become an Israeli space scientist.

    Ramon, a decorated Israeli combat pilot, also had a Holocaust connection. His mother was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. But his connection with Joseph came in a different context: After Ramon's selection to be Israel's first astronaut, he worked with Joseph on an experiment to analyze the distribution of airborne dust over the Mediterranean and Middle East regions. Ramon noticed the scroll in Joseph's office, and asked if he could take it with him on his spaceflight. 

    Joseph's experiment flew on Columbia — and so did his scroll. During one of the mission's downlinks, Ramon showed off the palm-sized treasure and told Joseph's story. "This Torah scroll was given by a rabbi to a young, scared, thin, 13-year-old boy in Bergen-Belsen," Ramon said. "It represents more than anything the ability of the Jewish people to survive. It represents their ability to go from black days, from periods of darkness, to reach periods of hope and faith in the future."

    West Street Productions / Herzog

    A scene from "Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope" shows Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon walking to Columbia's launch-pad entryway.

    NASA via West Street / Herzog

    Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon holds up a miniature Torah scroll during Columbia's final mission in 2003, as fellow astronaut Laurel Clark and mission commander Rick Husband look on.

    Unfortunately, Feb. 1, 2003, was a black day. The shuttle broke up into pieces during its descent, killing Ramon and the rest of Columbia's crew: Rick Husband, William McCool, Mike Anderson, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla and David Brown. Investigators determined that a piece of foam insulation that flew off Columbia's fuel tank did undetected damage to the leading edge of Columbia's left wing during launch. Sixteen days after liftoff, as the mission was ending, the hot gases of atmospheric re-entry blasted through the breach and destroyed the shuttle from the inside.

    Ramon's remains were recovered and returned to Israel. Searchers even recovered the diary that he kept during the flight. But Joseph's little Torah scroll was never found. Cohen, a self-avowed space nut, said he followed the Columbia coverage closely — and took notice of a news item "buried in the back of the newspaper about this little Torah scroll that Ilan carried with him."

    "I thought, wow, what a powerful new way to tell a Holocaust story to a new generation," Cohen said. He got in touch with Joseph, and over the course of several years, the filmmaker pieced together the story.

    Joseph appears in the movie, although he passed away during post-production and never saw the finished product. "Mission of Hope" also draws upon interviews with Ramon's widow, Rona, as well as with Israeli investigators and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Candid footage of the Columbia crew's training, shot by Brown, adds a personal touch to the work.

    "The overriding message of the Columbia crew ... is what they brought to each other because of their diverse background," Cohen said. "They brought the magic of diversity to each other, yet woven through that is this story of the Holocaust and this terrible tragedy."

    As he gathered the footage and the interviews, Cohen struggled with a problem: He wanted to focus on the message of hope, but it seemed as if the final chapter of the story was filled with loss and despair. "The dilemma was, how do you end this film?" he said.

    Then he heard that another miniature Torah scroll had surfaced, in the possession of Henry Fenichel, another survivor of the Bergen-Belsen death camp who became a physics professor in Cincinnati. Fenichel was willing to have the scroll flown aboard another space shuttle flight, at the request of Rona Ramon and under the care of Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean.

    "I thought, you just ended my film for me," Cohen said.

    The "Atlantis Torah" flew aboard the shuttle Atlantis in 2006, on the first space station assembly mission planned in the wake of the Columbia tragedy. "It goes from the depths of despair to the heights of hope," MacLean told reporters.

    More than six decades earlier, when Joseph received his "Columbia Torah," the rabbi who gave it to him asked the boy to promise he'd tell the story of the scroll if he survived.

    "Now our documentary continues the promise," Cohen said. "Woven into that is our mission to tell the story of Columbia's crew and their missions. On the 10th anniversary, we will all pause and remember the horror of the moment, a searing moment in history. But at the same time, we'll remember who these people were, and what they brought to us."

    More about the Columbia tragedy:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • NASA celebrates its fallen astronauts

    NASA presents a video tribute to the astronauts of the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia tragedies.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    This should be the saddest week of the year for NASA — which is marking the anniversaries of three fatal tragedies, including the 10th anniversary of the shuttle Columbia's catastrophic breakup. But the way NASA Administrator Charles Bolden sees it, this week is not just about mourning 17 dead astronauts.

    "I think this is not a memorial. It's a celebration, because of what they made possible," he told NBC News this month during a visit to Seattle. "We're commemorating them, and we're thanking them by continuing to move forward — and not dropping back and dwelling on the pain. They'd be pretty angry, I think, if they saw that."

    The week of celebration — and, yes, of commemoration — begins on Sunday with the 46th anniversary of the 1967 Apollo 1 launch-pad fire. The 27th anniversary of the 1986 Challenger explosion follows on Monday. This year, NASA is focusing the most on Friday, the 10th anniversary of the Columbia tragedy, which has been set aside as the agency's "Day of Remembrance" for all of its fallen astronauts.

    Ever since the loss of Columbia and its crew of seven, NASA has organized solemn commemorations during the last week of January.

    "We honor the memory of all three crews that were lost over the history of human spaceflight," Bolden explained. "We thought it was fitting that it be somewhere around the dates of those three losses. We think about this every day, to be quite honest. But we take these particular times and set them aside, when we can let everyone else around the world join us and help celebrate."

    There's that word again.

    "I use the term 'celebrate' because we have to remember that, yeah, we lost some valiant people — but what their sacrifice brought is what we should really be thinking about: the fact that they dared to challenge and do things differently," Bolden said. "Because of what they did, we're well on the cusp of going deeper into space than we've ever gone before."

    Each tragedy took a terrible toll — and in each case, NASA learned from its mistakes:

    Apollo 1's three astronauts were Gus Grissom, one of the Mercury 7 pioneers; Ed White, the first American to do a spacewalk; and rookie spaceflier Roger Chaffee. They died during a pre-launch test at the launch pad when bad wiring sparked a blaze in the pure-oxygen environment inside their sealed capsule. After the fire, engineers overhauled the wiring system, switched over to a less flammable oxygen-nitrogen mix and redesigned the hatch to open outward instead of inward. Years later, Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong observed that the accident provided "the gift of time" — a chance to change a lot of things for the better. "We got that added benefit, but we regret the price we had to pay," Armstrong said.

    January 27, 1967:Β The crew of Apollo 1, Command Pilot Virgil 'Gus' Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee were killed when a fire ripped through the spacecraft's cabin during a launch pad test. NBC's Bill Ryan reports.Β  Β 

    Challenger's crew of seven was led by commander Dick Scobee, but the best-known flier was Christa McAuliffe, who was tapped to be the first teacher in space. The other astronauts were Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ron McNair and Greg Jarvis. Their space shuttle blew up 73 seconds after launch, due to a bad seal on one of the solid rocket boosters. The investigation led to a redesign of the boosters, which worked without fail ever since. It also pointed up the problem of "go fever," which led NASA to give the go-ahead for launch amid dangerously low temperatures. Reforms in management procedures gave astronauts, engineers and contractors more of a role in ensuring launch safety. 

    January 28, 1986: NBC's Dan Molina reports on the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and its crew of seven.

    Columbia's crew included Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, as well as commander Rick Husband, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla and William McCool. The shuttle broke up over Texas during its descent at the end of a 16-day science mission. Investigators concluded that flying foam insulation from the external fuel tank damaged the left wing during launch, setting the stage for the Feb. 1 tragedy. The fuel tank was redesigned, emergency rescue plans were updated, and an array of cameras was added to the shuttle to watch for damage. The investigators also pointed to lapses in NASA's "safety culture." The George W. Bush administration followed up on the investigative panel's recommendations and decided to close down the space shuttle program once construction of the International Space Station was complete. That day finally came on July 21, 2011, with the landing of the space shuttle Atlantis.

    Dec. 31, 2008: NASA released new information about what the astronauts went through in their final moments on board the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. NBC's Tom Costello reports.

    Bolden said the successful operation of the space station and the rise of a new generation of commercial space vehicles would not have been possible if it weren't for the sacrifices made by the fallen astronauts. Rather than shutting down America's space program, political leaders gave the go-ahead for more ambitious plans to go beyond Earth orbit, and ultimately to Mars.

    "If we didn't have that coming along, then what would have been the point of losing them?" Bolden said. 

    To recognize those sacrifices, Bolden will attend a space conference being conducted in Ramon's honor this week in Israel, and then will return to Washington in time for Friday's wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. NASA's space centers are planning commemorations as well: Officials at Johnson Space Center will participate in memorial events in Texas on Thursday and Friday. Kennedy Space Center's ceremony is scheduled for 10 a.m. ET Friday at the visitor center's Space Mirror Memorial. That Florida observance is open to the public and will be broadcast on NASA TV.

    Stay tuned for more about NASA's week of sad celebration in the days ahead — and feel free to add your own reminiscences and tributes as comments below.

    More about NASA's space tragedies:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.