Bush eventually selecting it on the advice of the NASA Administrator, Richard Truly. Amongst the entries, Endeavour was suggested by one-third of the participating schools, with President George H.W. As part of the process, NASA ran a national competition for schools to name the new orbiter-the criteria included a requirement that it be named after an exploratory or research vessel, with a name "easily understood in the context of space" entries included an essay about the name, the story behind it and why it was appropriate for a NASA shuttle, and the project that supported the name. Assembly was completed in July 1990, and the new orbiter was rolled out in April 1991. A major refit of the prototype orbiter Enterprise was looked at and rejected on cost grounds, with instead the cache of structural spares that were produced as part of the construction of Discovery and Atlantis earmarked for assembly into the new orbiter. And he vowed that the space agency would never again leave anyone behind.Endeavour appears to straddle the stratosphere and mesosphere in this 2010 photo taken from the International Space Station.įollowing the loss of Challenger, in 1986 NASA was authorized to begin the procurement process for a replacement orbiter. Wayne Hale is the only person at NASA who publicly accepted blame for the "normalization of the abnormal." He went on to lead NASA's return to flight for the space shuttle program. For years foam had been coming off the external tank and hitting the shuttle, and for years NASA had come to accept foam debris as normal. A piece of foam the size of a briefcase – weighing 1.67 pounds – slammed into Columbia's left wing during blast off, gouged a hole in the protective tiles, which left the shuttle vulnerable to the brutal temperatures of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.īut investigators soon found more than foam was to blame. The painful investigation in the year that followed determined foam was the physical cause of the accident.
In central Texas, thousands of people at that moment were observing the orbiter break up at Mach 18.3 and 207,000 feet.Ī few minutes later is when Cain ordered the doors locked and the computer data saved. check," he repeated every 15 to 30 seconds, but with no response. Shuttle Columbia Crew Not Told of Their DoomĪbout three minutes after all data stopped, astronaut Charlie Hobaugh, who was the capcom in Mission Control, began transmitting in the blind to Columbia on the UHF backup radio system. They had also noticed highly unusual buildup of sensor telemetry in the preceding few minutes. I was thunderstruck and astonished again."Įngineers at Mission Control thought they were seeing an unusual but non-critical data drop-out. Had he spoken to our engineering director about this? I wanted the director of JSC engineering to be informed. "I made a phone call to the manager of the shuttle engineering office, the same person that had relayed the 'No" message to me from orbiter management. In an exclusive interview with ABC News in 2003 he detailed how his requests were repeatedly denied. It was agonizing for Rocha, who had begged the Mission Management Team to ask the Department of Defense to use whatever it had to take high resolution photos. They had no robotic arm to look at the wing, no way to repair the wing if they had damage, and it would take much too long to send up another space shuttle to rescue the crew. The crew was on a science mission, nowhere near the International Space Station. At that time NASA had no options for repair. Fuzzy video showed foam breaking off the orbiter's external fuel tank and hitting its left wing during blast off.
Several engineers at the space agency suspected something was wrong. The dilemma for mission managers is that they simply didn't know if the space shuttle was damaged.
Orbiting in space until your oxygen ran out. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?"Ī bleak assessment. If it has been damaged it's probably better not to know. "After one of the MMTs (Mission Management Team) when possible damage to the orbiter was discussed, he (Flight Director Jon Harpold) gave me his opinion: 'You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS (Thermal Protection System). Recently he wrote about the debate in his blog, recalling a meeting to discuss the dilemma: Wayne Hale, who later became space shuttle program manager, struggled with this question after the deaths of the Columbia crew 10 years ago.
It was a question that faced NASA's Mission Control considered after initial suspicions that something might be wrong with the shuttle Columbia as it was making its doomed reentry in 2003. 31, 2013 — - What would you tell seven astronauts if you knew their space shuttle was crippled on orbit?
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