Space Shuttle Columbia breaks apart during reentry
Foam damage from launch dooms the crew sixteen days later, over Texas
Quick facts
- Agency
- NASA
- Mission
- STS-107
- Cause
- Foam strike damaged wing heat shield
- Crew lost
- 7 (incl. Ilan Ramon)
What happened
Space Shuttle Columbia launched on 16 January 2003 for STS-107, a 17-day science mission. During ascent, a piece of foam insulation broke off the external fuel tank and struck the reinforced carbon-carbon panels on the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing, an event caught on launch video but not seen as an immediate threat by mission managers at the time. On 1 February 2003, as Columbia reentered the atmosphere for a scheduled landing at Kennedy Space Center, the damaged wing allowed superheated atmospheric gases to penetrate the wing structure. The orbiter broke apart over Texas, killing all seven crew members: Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut.
Why it matters
The disaster grounded the shuttle fleet for more than two years while NASA developed on-orbit inspection and repair procedures for heat-shield damage and revised how engineers escalated safety concerns during a mission, since investigators found some engineers had in fact raised worries about the foam strike before reentry that were not acted upon in time.
How we know
NASA's own remembrance page for STS-107 documents the launch date, the foam strike, and the crew who died; the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum retrospective on the twentieth anniversary independently corroborates the same crew names and disaster date.
Sources
- NASA. Remembering the Columbia STS-107 Mission · Primary source (author-declared)nasa.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Memories: 20 Years Since the Columbia STS-107 Tragedy · Reputable sourceairandspace.si.edu · The domain "airandspace.si.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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