20 years on, here's how the Columbia shuttle disaster changed space travel
olks around NASA don’t much care for this time of year. It was 56 years ago last week—January 27, 1967—that astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee lost their lives in a launch pad fire inside their Apollo 1 spacecraft as they were running a dress rehearsal for countdown. It was 37 years ago—on January 28, 1986—that the shuttle Challenger exploded during launch due to a faulty seal that caused one of the solid rocket boosters to ignite the external fuel tank.
America would have to find a similar kind of grim inspiration just four days later, when, on February 1—20 years ago today—Columbia met an end similar to Challenger’s, breaking apart during reentry, when hot plasma tore through the spacecraft from a breach in the leading edge of the left wing. Husband and his crew of six were killed, as the shuttle, on its way to a landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, left a debris trail that stretched from eastern Texas to Louisiana.
But NASA has done other things too when faced with tragedy. It has searched for the cause of the problem and fixed it. In the case of the Apollo 1 fire, that meant redesigning the spacecraft from top to bottom to avoid the kind of errant spark that set off the blaze, as well as replacing the cockpit’s pure-oxygen atmosphere—which burns like gasoline—with an oxygen-nitrogen mix when the spacecraft was at high internal pressure on the ground.
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