: 5, 195 It flew for the first time in April 1981, : III–24 and was used to conduct in-orbit research, : III–188 and deploy commercial, : III–66 military, : III–68 and scientific payloads. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Space Shuttle was a partially-reusable spacecraft operated by the U.S. Except for one final mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, subsequent shuttle missions were flown only to the ISS to allow the crew to use it as a haven if damage to the orbiter prevented safe reentry. NASA made several technical and organizational changes to subsequent missions, including adding a thorough on-orbit inspection to determine how well the shuttle's thermal protection system (TPS) had endured the ascent, and keeping a designated rescue mission ready in case irreparable damage was found. Construction of the International Space Station (ISS) was put on hold the station relied entirely on the Russian Roscosmos State Space Corporation for resupply for 29 months until Shuttle flights resumed with STS-114 and for crew rotation for 41 months until STS-121. Īfter the disaster, Space Shuttle flight operations were suspended for more than two years, as they had been after the Challenger disaster. When Columbia reentered the atmosphere of Earth, the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to penetrate the heat shield and destroy the internal wing structure, which caused the orbiter to become unstable and break apart. Before reentry, NASA managers had limited the investigation, reasoning that the crew could not have fixed the problem if it had been confirmed. Similar foam shedding had occurred during previous Space Shuttle launches, causing damage that ranged from minor to nearly catastrophic, : 121 but some engineers suspected that the damage to Columbia was more serious. The disaster was the last of two fatal accidents in the Space Shuttle program, after the 1986 breakup of Challenger soon after liftoff.ĭuring the STS-107 launch, a piece of the insulative foam broke off from the Space Shuttle external tank and struck the thermal protection system tiles on the orbiter's left wing. The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was a fatal incident in the United States space program that occurred on February 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia ( OV-102) disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.
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