Welcome to TBO.com. Skip directly to: our Keyword Search, Section Navigation, Content.

TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

TBO.com - Tampa Bay Online

TBO > News > Breaking News

NASA Reports Graphic Details Of Columbia Deaths

NASA

Rick Husband, Kalpana Chawla, William McCool (front row) and David Brown, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson and Ilan Ramon (back row) died in the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003.

The Associated Press

Published: December 30, 2008

Updated: 12/30/2008 06:48 pm

Space Shuttle Columbia

The space shuttle Columbia broke apart in flames 39 miles in the air as it streaked over Texas at 12,500 miles an hour toward its landing strip in Florida, Saturday, Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven astronauts, six Americans and an Israeli.

The Crew

Name: Rick Husband
Commander: Husband, 45, was an Air Force colonel from Amarillo, Texas. The former test pilot was selected as an astronaut in 1994 on his fourth try. He made up his mind as a child that that was what he was going to do with his life. "It's been pretty much a lifelong dream and just a thrill to be able to get to actually live it out," the married father of two said in an interview before Columbia's launch, his second spaceflight.

Name: William C. McCool
Pilot: McCool, 41, was a Navy commander from Lubbock, Texas. He graduated second in his 1983 class at the Naval Academy, went on to test pilot school and became an astronaut in 1996. This was the first spaceflight for McCool, who was married with three sons, ages 22, 19 and 14.

Name: Michael P. Anderson
Payload Commander: Anderson, 43, was the son of an Air Force man and grew up on military bases. He was flying for the Air Force when NASA chose him in 1994 as one of only a handful of black astronauts. He traveled to Russia's Mir space station in 1998. The lieutenant colonel, who lived in Spokane, Wash., was in charge of Columbia's dozens of science experiments. "I take the risk because I think what we're doing is really important. If you look at this research flight and if you really take an opportunity to look at each experiment...the potential yield that we have is really tremendous," he said. He added: "For me, it's the fact that what I'm doing can have great consequences and great benefits for everyone, for mankind."

Name: David M. Brown
Mission Specialist 1: Brown, 46, was a Navy captain, pilot and doctor. He joined the Navy after a medical internship, then went on to fly the A-6E Intruder and F-18. He became an astronaut in 1996. Columbia's mission was his first spaceflight. When asked in a recent interview about the risk of flying in space, Brown, who was single, said: "I made a decision that is part of my job, I would incur some real risk as a routine part of my job when I joined the Navy and started flying...airplanes off of ships, particularly airplanes off of ships at night. And I think that was a decision that I made some years ago and the decision to go fly in space is just an extension of that.

Name: Kalpana Chawla
Mission Specialist 2: Chawla, 41, emigrated to the United States from India in 1980s and became an astronaut in 1994. At the time, she wanted to design aircraft - the space program was the furthest thing from her mind. "That would be too far-fetched," the engineer had said. But "one thing led to another" and she was chosen as an astronaut after working at NASA's Ames Research Center and Overset Methods Inc. in Northern California. On her only other spaceflight, in 1997, she made mistakes that sent science satellite tumbling out of control. Other astronauts had to go on spacewalk to capture it. "I stopped thinking about it after trying to figure out what are the lessons learned, and there are so many," she said. "After I had basically sorted that out, I figured it's time to really look at the future and not at the past."

Name: Laurel Clark
Mission Specialist 4: Clark, 41, was a diving medical officer aboard submarines and then a flight surgeon before she became an astronaut in 1996. She had been on board Columbia to help with science experiments. "I think my family has a fairly practical and pragmatic view of this whole thing, and that's that the actual launching into space is much more dangerous than any of the other security concerns," said Clark, who lived in Racine, Wis., and was married with an 8-year-old son. She added: "There's a lot of different things that we do during life that could potentially harm us and I choose not to stop doing those things."

Name: Ilan Ramon
Payload Specialist 1: Ramon, 48, was a colonel in Israel's air force and the first Israeli in space. His mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp, and his father fought for Israel's statehood alongside grandfather. Ramon fought in Yom Kippur War 1973 and Lebanon War 1982. He served as a fighter pilot 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, flew F-16s and F-4s. He was chosen as Israel's first astronaut in 1997, then moved to Houston the next year to train for shuttle flight. His wife, Rona, and their four children _ ages 5 to 15 - live in Tel Aviv. Before Columbia launched, Ramon had repeatedly said he was not nervous or afraid about his safety aboard the space shuttle. "I think the only thing that will worry me is the launch sequence and the systems and the launch, being launched on time. The tenseness is there because everybody wants to be launched on time with no failures. That's it. Once you're there, you're there," he had said in a recent interview.

Astronaut information provided by The Associated Press

When the first of many loud alarms sounded on the space shuttle Columbia, the seven astronauts had about a minute to live, though they didn't know it.

The pilot, William McCool, pushed several buttons trying to right the ship as it tumbled out of control. He didn't know it was futile. Most of the crew were following NASA procedures, spending more time preparing the shuttle than themselves for the return to Earth.

Some weren't wearing their bulky protective gloves and still had their helmet visors open. Some weren't fully strapped in. One was barely seated.

In seconds, the darkened module holding the crew lost pressure. The astronauts blacked out. If the loss of pressure didn't kill them immediately, they would be dead from violent gyrations that knocked them about the ship.

In short, Columbia's astronauts were quickly doomed.

A new NASA report released today details the chaotic final minutes of Columbia, which disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003. The point of the 400-page analysis is to figure out how to make NASA's next spaceship more survivable. The report targeted problems with the spacesuits, restraints and helmets of the Columbia crew.

Many of the details about the astronauts' deaths have been known — they died either from lack of oxygen during pressure loss or from hitting something as the spacecraft tumbled and broke up.

However, the new report paints a more detailed picture of the final moments of the Columbia crew than the broader investigation into the accident five years ago.

Astronaut Pam Melroy, deputy study chief, said the analysis showed the astronauts were at their problem-solving best trying to recover Columbia, which was starting to crack up as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere with a hole in its left wing, damage that had occurred at liftoff. "There was no way for them to know that it was going to be impossible."

The crew had lost control of the motion and direction of the spacecraft. It was pitching end-over-end, the cabin lights were out, and parts of the shuttle behind the crew compartment — including its wings — were falling off.

"It was a very disorienting motion going on," NASA deputy associate administrator Wayne Hale said in a telephone conference call. "There were a number of alarms going off simultaneously. The crew was trying very hard to regain control. We're talking about a brief time in a crisis situation."

The NASA study team is recommending 30 changes based on Columbia, many of them aimed at the spacesuits, helmets and seatbelts for both the shuttle and the next space capsule NASA is building.

Since the accident, NASA has quietly made astronauts put more priority on getting their protective suits on, Melroy said.

NASA's suits don't automatically pressurize, "a basic problem of suit design and it is one we intend to fix with future spacecraft," Hale said.

Had the astronauts had time to get their gear on and get their suits pressurized, they might have lived longer and been able to take more actions. But they still wouldn't have survived, the report notes.

The report lists events that were each potentially lethal to the crew: Loss of cabin pressure just before or as the cabin broke up; crew members, unconscious or already dead, crashing into objects in the module; exposure to a near vacuum at 100,000 feet; and crashing to the ground.

Killed in the Columbia disaster along with pilot McCool, were commander Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon.

Columbia was the second space shuttle NASA has lost. The hole in its wing was caused by a piece of foam insulation that broke off the fuel tank and slammed into it at launch. The shuttle Challenger blew up shortly after liftoff on 1986, also claiming seven lives. Investigators in both accidents pointed to a NASA culture of ignoring problems that later turned fatal.

Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon and husband of Laurel Clark, praised NASA's leadership for the report "even though it says, in some ways, you guys didn't do a great job."

"I guess the thing I'm surprised about, if anything, is that (the report) actually got out," said Clark, who was a member of the team that wrote it. "There were so many forces" that didn't want to produce the report because it would again put the astronauts' families in the media spotlight.

Some of the recommendations already are being applied to the next-generation spaceship being designed to take astronauts to the moon and Mars, said Clark, who now works for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Kirstie McCool Chadwick, sister of William McCool, said a copy of the report arrived at her Florida home this morning but she had not read it.

"We've moved on," Chadwick said. "I'll read it. But it's private. It's our business ... Our family has moved on from the accident and we don't want to reopen wounds."

NASA held the report till after Christmas at the request of the families.

John Logsdon, who was a member of the original Columbia accident investigation board, questioned the need for the report, saying, "Those people are dead. Knowing in specifics how they died should be a private matter."

But for friends of the astronauts working on the investigation, confirming that the crew didn't suffer much "is a very small blessing," Melroy said.

Share this:

* To:
Your Name:
Your Email Address:
Personal Message [optional]: