Forty-three years after the space shuttle Columbia touched down from its maiden mission, CNN is set to air a four-part series chronicling the orbiter’s ill-fated final return to Earth.
“Space Shuttle Columbia: Last Flight,” a new documentary co-produced by the BBC and Mindhouse Productions, looks back at STS-107, the winged spacecraft’s 28th mission that ended in tragedy on February 1, 2003. The program includes new features. Interviews with members of the families of the crashed astronauts and some of the NASA managers and engineers who supported the flight and later contributed to learning why Columbia and its crew were lost.
“If you work in human spaceflight, this is the worst thing that can happen,” says astronaut Ellen Ochoa in the third episode of “Final Flight.” Ochoa was at Mission Control when Columbia reentered the atmosphere when it broke up after a successful 16-day science mission in Earth orbit.
The first two hours of “Last Flight” premiered last Sunday (April 7) and will air again on Saturday, April 13 starting at 8pm EDT/PDT. CNN will then premiere the remaining two episodes at the same time the next day; This will coincide with the anniversary of shuttle Columbia’s STS-1 landing in 1981.
Relating to: Columbia Lost: Space.com’s STS-107 Archive
As described in the documentary, the issue that determined Columbia’s fate was known to NASA engineers almost from the first day the orbiter took flight. The foam covering the shuttle’s external tank and attachment points to the spacecraft can fall off during launch, and depending on when and where these releases occur, the foam can hit and damage the orbiter.
It was one such event that left a hole in the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing, causing hot plasma to compromise the integrity of the orbiter’s hull, which subsequently led to the spacecraft’s breakup and the deaths of the STS-107 crew. , commander Rick Husband, pilot Willie McCool, mission specialists Laurel Clark, David Brown, Michael Anderson and Kalpana Chawla, and Israeli payload specialist Ilan Ramon.
“I didn’t know there was anything alarming at the time,” says Michael’s wife, Sandra Anderson. “Yet there were people doing it.”
Relating to: Columbia Disaster: What happened and what NASA learned
As the accident investigation revealed, engineers at NASA became aware of the foam impact soon after it occurred on January 16, 2003, and immediately began questioning whether it posed a risk to the safety of the vehicle and crew. Rodney Rocha, the shuttle’s chief structural engineer, was among those who requested, and were rejected, the use of military assets, or spy satellites, to provide the images needed to determine how serious the damage from the foam impact was.
“I was describing all the feedback we were getting from management, two weeks of complete frustration and anger,” Rocha said, describing a conversation he had with his wife the night before Columbia’s re-entry into the country.
NASA managers, who dismissed Rocha’s concern and ignored the foam as the cause of the tragedy even after Columbia was lost, could not be reached and were therefore not interviewed for “Last Flight,” according to CNN.
In addition to focusing on the cause of the tragedy, “Last Flight” also profiles the STS-107 astronauts through memories shared by their spouses and children, as well as final images taken aboard space shuttle Columbia. Mark Kelly, now a U.S. senator, is also interviewed because several of the crew were friends of his who were selected together to become astronauts.
Kelly was also the first person from NASA to arrive in East Texas, where debris from Columbia and the remains of the crew fell from the sky.
“There were thousands and thousands of pieces of the space shuttle everywhere,” Kelly says. “This wasn’t something I was trained for.”
“Space Shuttle Columbia: The Last Flight” (previously published in the UK as “The Space Shuttle That Crashed to Earth”) focuses on the legacy of the space shuttle and the deaths of NASA’s STS-107 crew were not in vain.
“Our viewers have long been fascinated by stories about space exploration,” Amy Entelis, vice president of CNN Worldwide, said in a statement. “This episode in the space shuttle program captured the nation’s attention and is equally fascinating in its retelling.”
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