Columbia

On this date 8 years ago I was awoken by a phone call from my father, who told me that the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry and that all hands were lost over Texas.  It took me a few minutes to understand what he was saying and why there was absolutely no hope of seeing seven parachutes carrying the crew to a safe landing.  I held some hope anyway and it wasn't until after I saw the footage of those faint contrails in the blue sky that I truly accepted that the crew was gone. 

As the years have passed I've thought of that day often, and I realize that I mourn the loss of the vehicle as much as I do the crew, which is not the case with Challenger.  This probably has something to do with my age at the time of the accidents, but also because Columbia was the first Space Shuttle, I watched her first lift-off, saw the "Hail Columbia" IMAX film in 1982, and even featured her in my thesis.  Columbia was the first, and in my opinion, best of the fleet and I was sad for her when I found out that she was too heavy to reach the International Space Station's orbit, thus reducing her usefulness in the post-ISS world. 

Unfortunately its hard not to view the tragic end of the STS-107 mission as the beginning of the end of the Shuttle program, and for the short term the winding down of our country's human spaceflight program.  Longtime opponents of Shuttle saw the damage to the heat shield as an inherent weakness that threatened to call into question the Shuttle program right down to its fundamentals. 

The Deep Beam disagrees, and in fact sees the Space Shuttle as one of the pinnacles of human achievement, that provides a unique and important capability that has no peer, and sadly no replacement.  OV-102 Columbia will be sorely missed, as will her crew.

Commander Rick Husband

Pilot William McCool

Payload Commander Michael Anderson

Mission Specialist 1 David Brown

Mission Specialist 2 Kalpana Chawla

Mission Specialist 4 Laurel Clark

Payload Specialist 1 Ilan Ramon


Hail Columbia!