2024-04-13 14:47:20
(CNN) — Perhaps more than any other moment in NASA history, the shuttle Columbia disaster reshaped the U.S. space agency’s approach to innovation, forever altering the way it balances risk with the call to explore beyond Land.
Tragedy killed seven astronauts when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on its return to Earth on February 1, 2003, due to damage to the vehicle during launch. More than 20 years later, lessons learned continue to shape the space industry and NASA’s approach to working with private sector partners like SpaceX.
Changes at NASA were necessary, according to a formal investigation into the Columbia disaster published six months after the accident. A culture of complacency and misplaced confidence in the space shuttle’s experimental design spelled disaster, the report noted.
Management ignored concerns from staff engineers about the vehicles’ safety, according to previous reports and a new CNN docuseries, “Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight”.
The disaster led directly to the decision to end NASA’s broader space shuttle program, forcing the U.S. space agency to rely on Russia for space travel, one of countless ways Columbia altered history. .
Cultural changes: ‘Safety days’, review meetings and round tables
The Columbia accident was the second fatal accident for the shuttle program, after the space shuttle Challenger exploded during launch in January 1986.
Following the Columbia disaster, NASA grounded its remaining fleet of three shuttles as the space agency attempted to analyze what had gone wrong.
“We spent more than a year trying to foster the priority of safety within NASA’s culture and, most importantly, trying to ensure that people who had dissenting opinions or questions were heard,” Wayne Hale, then deputy director of the space shuttle program. “It was all in the name of trying to encourage people to speak out,” he said.
Some changes were simple: An audio conferencing system was replaced with video, Hale said. And in the shuttle mission management team’s meeting room, a round table replaced the rectangular table.
“The sociologist told us that having a long, straight table with the father figure at the head might discourage people from talking,” Hale said.
NASA also had “safety days” — time set aside for engineers to stop working and simply “contemplate how to improve our organization’s safety approach,” Hale added.
Changing perspectives
The tragedy affected the entire NASA organization, leaving a legacy that the rest of the astronaut corps had to deal with.
“It obviously affected us emotionally,” said Garrett Reisman, a space engineer from California who in 2003 was a member of NASA’s astronaut corps waiting to make his first foray into space.
“I remember being called into the office and volunteering to work with the families,” Reisman added.
For two years, Reisman said his entire job at NASA was accompanying the family of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who had died on the Columbia mission. For example, she accompanied Ramón’s children to see his counselor to help them choose classes. He and other astronauts helped find a house for Ramón’s wife. Reisman still visits family in Israel once a year. “It helped me understand exactly what the consequences are, not just for you (the astronaut), but for all the people you love,” Reisman said, adding: “That’s “It stayed with me.”
Reisman flew on two shuttle missions after the program resumed flight in 2005, when NASA implemented numerous interim safety measures, including a mandate that a backup shuttle always be ready to rescue crew members in orbit. if your vehicle was damaged during launch.
Despite lingering anxieties, the changes provided a new sense of security, Reisman said.
“We had all these inspection and repair techniques,” he said. “I felt that when I was flying on Endeavor, Atlantis and Discovery (the three remaining shuttles), it was much safer than what the Columbia crew, and certainly Challenger, had assumed.”
NASA, forced to depend on Russia
The space shuttle Atlantis completed the program’s final flight in July 2011, leaving NASA without the means to deliver its astronauts to the International Space Station.
The end of the program forced the space agency to turn to Russia, which, as tensions eased in the post-Cold War era, was a major U.S. partner on the space station and had a reliable vehicle called Soyuz to transport his cosmonauts to the orbiting outpost.
The agreement kept NASA astronauts in space. But as relations between the United States and Russia strained again in the mid-2010s, sharing those trips to space became increasingly politically unpopular.
Cultural clashes in the business world
At the end of the shuttle program, a contingent of NASA engineers already had ideas about the way forward.
Instead of keeping the design and development of the next astronaut-worthy spacecraft in-house, NASA could turn to the burgeoning private space industry to handle the task.
Business firms had a little more room to innovate in the post-Columbia era, Hale and Reisman acknowledged.
“I think one of the big challenges was finding the right path between the enormous bureaucracy and paperwork requirements that NASA had, which in some cases were downright exaggerated, and figuring out how to adapt to the culture of a commercial company. ”Hale said.
In 2014, NASA selected SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, and its long-time partner, Boeing, to take on the task. The prospect of moving faster and opening up a new future for the astronaut corps excited Reisman, who left NASA in 2011 to work for SpaceX on its Crew Dragon vehicle.
Cautious after the Columbia tragedy, NASA did not always see eye to eye with its commercial partners. The result was a culture clash that developed behind the scenes.
“I have an organizational chart showing the different NASA review boards that all the engineers working on programs had to go to to approve any major design decisions,” Reisman said. “What happened was that after Columbia, dissenting voices were heard so loudly that all those voices effectively became a veto.”
Long, painful meetings characterized relations between SpaceX and NASA, according to records from the time compiled by the space agency.
But SpaceX finally brought its Crew Dragon to the launch pad, and its inaugural crewed mission in 2020 returned astronaut launches to U.S. soil for the first time in a decade.
Boeing is still working on the first crewed mission of its Starliner spacecraft.
Redefining rocket design
The lessons learned from Columbia, and from the Challenger explosion before it, have left an indelible mark on the design of modern American spacecraft.
“Probably the most important example is that simply placing the crew on top of the rocket instead of on the side of it eliminates the danger of any debris coming out of the vehicle and hitting the spacecraft,” Reisman said.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon spacecraft atop lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 5, 2022. The spacecraft carried the four-person Crew-5 mission team to the International Space Station and docked on Oct. 6. October. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
“A lot of those things were built into the requirements that NASA gave us,” he said, referring to instructions given to SpaceX and Boeing.
Crew Dragon, Starliner and NASA’s own Orion capsule, designed to return humans to the Moon later this decade, launch on top of rockets rather than being attached to the side.
In this new rocket era with commercial companies largely leading the way, Hale said the challenge is to ensure the space industry avoids falling into the same complacency that led to the Columbia disaster.
“My only concern now as a retiree is, after all these years, how well are those lessons still communicated?” Hale said, adding “after 20 years, are people starting to forget?”
“Vigilance must be maintained,” he added.
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