The US might be aiming to put astronauts back on the moon, but for years it turned its back on crewed missions after the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
Its space program suffered a catastrophic setback when all seven astronauts were killed when the shuttle broke up while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere 20 years ago on Feb. 1, 2003.
It was the second shuttle disaster after the Challenger explosion of 1986, which also killed the crew and led to sharp criticism of the safety culture at NASA.
Photo: AP
The shuttle fleet was grounded for more than two years, and the disaster sparked a major shift in US space flights.
Then-US president George W. Bush announced that the costly program would be retired.
For years after the last shuttle flight in 2011, NASA found itself dependent on Russia for transport to the International Space Station until Elon Musk’s Space X began flying passengers there in 2020.
As well as the moon, Washington is now preparing for a crewed mission to Mars, scheduled for the late 2030s or early 2040s.
Columbia broke up at 61,900m over eastern Texas and disappeared from radar screens at 9am, 16 minutes before it was due to land.
Flaming debris from the 80-tonne craft was caught streaking across the sky over the southern US by local TV stations, with parts scattered over Texas and Louisiana.
Bob Molter from Palestine, Texas, told National Public Radio how he saw the shuttle break up in the sky.
“There was a big boom that shook the house for more than a minute, and I went outside because I thought there had been a train accident on the nearby line,” he said. “I looked up and saw the trails of smoke zig-zagging, going across the sky.”
When Columbia took off on its 28th flight on Jan. 16, 2003, for a 16-day mission to carry out experiments, it had been in operation for over 20 years.
Flight STS-107 was launched under extremely tight security in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and also due to the presence on board of Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon.
A probe revealed that the shuttle disintegrated due to damage caused by a piece of foam from the external fuel tank that took a chunk out of the orbiter’s left wing during liftoff.
This left it unable to withstand the extreme temperatures generated by re-entry.
The shuttle program was born in 1972 under then-US president Richard Nixon, and went on to become a major focus of US human spaceflight ambitions over the next four decades.
The fleet served like space trucks, carrying more than 1,500 tonnes of equipment to help build the first space telescope, Hubble, and later the International Space Station.
The agency resumed shuttle flights in July 2005, continuing to fly missions to the space station until 2011.
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