15 years ago today the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off on what was to become its last mission, STS-107. This flight carried a crew of 7 not to the International Space Station – Columbia was far too heavy for the orbital inclination the Space Station orbits at – but a simple Earth Orbit mission for just over 2 weeks carrying a SPACEHAB module and a multitude of experiments to be conducted while on orbit.
The mission was a pretty typical one, as far as any casual observation would show – I didn’t even know at the time that the Shuttle had launched, that’s how out of the loop even I was in space at the time, as it had become beyond mundane and thanks to me (somehow) still not having regular internet access I couldn’t pay attention to specialist news as I can now.
That of course would change on February 1st, 2003, when the Orbiter would disintegrate on re-entry, killing its crew and grounding the Space Shuttle for over 2 years. It would also be the beginning of the end, setting in motion the retirement of the program in 2011.
As is well known now, Columbia had been damaged during launch by a large chunk of foam off of the External Fuel Tank. While not posing an issue during the launch or on orbit, this hole was in just the right place and was just large enough to allow hot gasses generated by the atmospheric re-entry process to damage the internal structure of the left wing of the Orbiter, causing it to disintegrate over Texas.
We’re not going to talk about any of that here, though – instead, I’m going to simply show the launch of STS-107, the final flight of Columbia. My thoughts on the Disaster will come on February 1st.
This was before we had cameras mounted on the launch vehicles – those actually were a response to the Columbia disaster – so all footage is from the ground. It’s bittersweet to watch the launch now, as even given the relatively low quality video, it’s still an amazingly beautiful launch – the roll program being the last really good view most of us would ever get of Columbia…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-107
For those who want to see more of the full launch, there’s also this slightly lower quality video.