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NASA remembers space tragedies |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Sunday, 27 January 2008
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 This time of year is a rough one for NASA - in the space of the next week three anniversaries of deadly space program accidents will be remembered. Starting today, the 27th, with the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. The 28th of January marks 1986's Challenger disaster, and on February 1 the anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia will pass. In total, NASA has lost seventeen astronauts in spaceflight, a legacy of which they are not proud. All were accidents, caused by problems the agency did not know it had.
 On January 27th, 1967, astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into the crew capsule atop the Apollo 1 launch vehicle. They were performing a routine ground test of the rocket's systems, which included sealing and pressurizing the capsule with pure-oxygen. A stripped electrical wire in the capsule sparked, instantly igniting the highly flammable gas. Because of the design of the egress door - it opened into the capsule - the high pressure difference caused by the fire made it impossible to open. All three astronauts suffocated as the fire consumed the breathable air. NASA did not believe the test to be particularly dangerous, and the incident shocked the nation and set back the ambitious moon program by 21 months. The emergency hatch was redesigned to open outwards, the crew modules were re-wired and flammable materials were replaced with flame retardent ones. The Apollo program went on to land on the moon six times, marking one of mankind's greatest technical achievements.
 Nineteen years passed to the launch of STS-51-L: the space shuttle Challenger. The space shuttle program was a wild success, up to the cold morning of January 28, 1986, the shuttles Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis, and Discovery had successfully completed twenty four launches. That all changed 73 seconds after lift-off when an O-ring seal on the right external solid-fuel booster rocket failed. The rocket exploded, destroying the shuttle in the process. Astronauts Francis "Dick" Scobee, Rob McNair, Mike Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, and Greg Jarvis, as well as teacher Christa McAuliffe died in the incident. While some engineers had feared that the rubber O-rings might become brittle in cold temperatures like those Florida experienced that morning, the concerns were not widespread in NASA. In the wake of Challenger, the O-rings were redesigned to function better in extreme temperatures, and new safety inspections were instituted prior to launch.
 The space shuttle Columbia was NASA's first space shuttle and had been in operation since 1981. In January 2003, mission STS-107 launched with a crew of seven on a 16-day science mission. The shuttle began its firey descent back to Earth's surface the morning of February 1st. During reentry the friction between the space shuttle - which orbits at 17,500 mph - and the molecules in our atmosphere superheat the air and shuttle's heat-resistant skin to nearly 3000 F. Unfortunately during launch, a piece of rock-hard insulating foam fell off the shuttle's external fuel tank and struck the left wing, puching a hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon tiling. During reentry, the superheated gasses entered the hole and melted the light-weight aluminum framework inside. The wing collapsed and now out-of-balance the shuttle rolled. The extreme forces imparted on the shuttle by its speed and the friction with the atmosphere ripped the craft apart, spread debris from western Texas to Louisiana and Arkansas. Astronauts Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, and Laurel Clark all died in the accident.
NASA managers were aware of the risk that foam shed from the fuel tank could pose to the shuttle, but routine launch footage reviews did not reveal any major problems. A saftey review board found that NASA did have the ability to send the astronauts out to inspect the wing if damage was believed to have occurred, and that for this flight NASA would have also had the ability to launch a rescue mission. The loss of Columbia grounded the shuttle fleet for two years while NASA struggled to improve the safety of the external fuel tank. Since flights have resumed NASA has instituted new safety procedures, including inspections of the shuttle's heat shield and having another shuttle ready for a quick launch should the need to rescue a crew from a damaged shuttle arise. NASA has been directed to complete the International Space Station and retire the shuttle fleet by 2010.
A makeshift memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Despite the constant risk of loss of life, astronauts from around the world still continue to brave the cold recesses of oute space, and for that we should be thankful. The space program has brought us countless technological advances and instills a sense of national pride in the homes of its astronauts. The science missions performed better our lives every day, and we owe much to the few that have sacrificed their lives for the exploration of the final frontier.
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"I canna' change the laws of physics."
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