The CNN Original Series “Space Shuttle Columbia: the last flight‘ reveals the events that ultimately led to disaster. The four-part documentary concludes Sunday at 9:00 PM ET/PT.
Perhaps more than any other moment in NASA history, the Columbia shuttle disaster reshaped the U.S. space agency’s approach to innovation, changing how it balanced risk with the call to go beyond Earth to explore forever changed.
The tragedy saw the deaths of seven astronauts when the Columbia shuttle disintegrated upon its return to Earth on February 1, 2003, due to damage sustained by the vehicle during launch. More than two decades later, the 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 said.
Concerns about staff engineers’ vehicle safety were also ignored by management, according to previous reporting 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 rides to space — one of countless ways Columbia has changed history.
Cultural changes: ‘Safety days’, review boards and roundtables
Columbia marked the second fatality for the shuttle program after the space shuttle Challenger exploded during launch in January 1986.
After the Columbia disaster, NASA grounded the remaining fleet of three shuttles while the space agency tried to analyze what went wrong.
“We spent the next year trying to encourage the (NASA) culture to put safety first and, most importantly, ensure that those with differing opinions or questions were heard,” said Wayne Hale, then deputy space shuttle manager. program, told CNN. “It was all in the name of trying to encourage people to say something.”
Some of the changes were simple: An audio conferencing system was replaced with video, Hale said. And in the shuttle mission management team meeting room, a round table replaced the rectangular table.
“The sociologist told us that if you had a straight, long table with the father figure at the head … it might discourage people from speaking up,” Hale said.
NASA also had “safety days”: time set aside for engineers to stop work and simply “think about how we can better improve our organization’s approach to safety,” Hale added.
Perspectives shift
The tragedy affected the entire NASA organization and left a legacy that the remaining astronaut corps had to contend with.
“It definitely affected us emotionally,” said Garrett Reisman, a spacecraft engineer from California who in 2003 was a member of the NASA astronaut corps awaiting its first foray into space.
“I remember being called into the office and volunteering to work with families,” Reisman added.
For two years, he said his entire job at NASA was to check on the family of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut killed on the Columbia mission. He took Ramon’s children to their study advisor to help them choose their classes. He and other astronauts helped find a home for Ramon’s wife. Reisman still visits the 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. “That stayed with me.”
Reisman flew on two shuttle missions after the program resumed flight in 2005 when NASA introduced numerous safety issues, including a mandate that a backup shuttle always be ready to rescue crew members in orbit if their vehicle is damaged during launch hit.
Despite any lingering concerns, the changes provided a renewed sense of security, Reisman said.
“We had all these inspection and repair techniques,” he said. “When I flew Endeavor, Atlantis and Discovery (the three remaining shuttles), I felt it was much safer than what the crew of Columbia – and certainly Challenger – had assumed.”
NASA was forced to rely on Russia
The space shuttle Atlantis completed the program’s final flight in July 2011, leaving NASA without the means to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station.
The end of the program forced the space agency to turn to Russia, which — as tensions subsided in the post-Cold War era — was a key U.S. partner on the space station and had a reliable vehicle called Soyuz to transport its cosmonauts to the outpost in orbit around Earth.
The arrangement kept NASA astronauts space-bound. But as U.S.-Russia relations strained again in the mid-2010s, sharing those rides to space became increasingly politically unpopular.
Culture clashes in the commercial world
By the end of the shuttle program, a contingent of engineers within NASA already had ideas for the future.
Instead of keeping the design and development of the next astronaut-worthy spacecraft in-house, NASA could turn to the fast-growing private space industry to take over the job.
Commercial companies had a little more leeway to innovate in the post-Columbia era, Hale and Reisman acknowledged.
“I think one of the big challenges was navigating the really enormous bureaucracy and paperwork requirements that NASA had – which in some cases were frankly excessive – and figuring out how to accommodate the culture of a commercial (business),” Hale said.
In 2014, NASA selected Elon Musk-led SpaceX and its longtime partner Boeing to take on the task.
The prospect of going faster and creating a new future for the astronaut corps excited Reisman, who left NASA in 2011 to work for SpaceX on its Crew Dragon vehicle.
After the Columbia tragedy, NASA was wary and did not always agree with its commercial partners. The result was a culture clash that took place behind the scenes.
“I have an organizational chart that shows all the different (NASA) review boards that all the engineers working on NASA programs had to go to to approve a major design decision,” Reisman said. “What happened was that post-Columbia they listened to dissenting voices so much that all those dissenting voices essentially became a veto.”
Long, painful encounters characterized the relationships between SpaceX and NASA, according to era data compiled by the space agency.
But eventually, SpaceX got its Crew Dragon to the launch pad, and its inaugural crewed mission in 2020 brought astronaut launches back to American 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 the Challenger explosion before it – have left an indelible mark on the design of modern American spacecraft.
“Probably the biggest example is that by putting the crew on top of the rocket instead of on the side of the rocket, you eliminate the danger of debris coming out of the vehicle and hitting the spacecraft,” Reisman said.
“A lot of those things were baked into the requirements that NASA gave us,” he said, referring to the 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 – will all be launched atop rockets rather than being strapped to the side of them.
In this new era of rocketry, with commercial companies largely leading the way, Hale says the challenge is to ensure that the space industry doesn’t fall into the same complacency that led to the Columbia disaster.
“My only concern now, as a former retiree, is – all these years later – how well are those lessons still communicated?” Hale said. Do people start to forget after twenty years?
“Vigilance,” he added, “must be maintained.”
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