Scott Hubbard remembers exactly where he was on the day of one of the deadliest tragedies in the history of space travel.
Before he stepped out of bed on the morning of 1 February 2003, a radio broadcast brought news that NASA’s Columbia space shuttle was “overdue” on its return to Earth.
“I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that something had gone wrong,” he recalls.
The spacecraft, which had launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida just over two weeks prior, with seven astronauts aboard, was scheduled to land that morning.
But the landing never came.
Columbia, which flew its maiden voyage back in April 1981, disintegrated over Texas 16 minutes before its planned Florida touchdown, killing its entire crew. They were commander Rick Husband; pilot William McCool; the mission specialists Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark, David Brown and Kalpana Chawla; and payload specialist Ilan Ramon, who was the first Israeli astronaut.
Image: L/R: The Columbia crew – David Brown, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, William McCool, Ilan Ramon. Pic: NASA
It marked the beginning of the end for America’s space shuttle programme, which had already endured the loss of seven astronauts in the Challenger disaster of 1986.
For Hubbard, a veteran of the US space agency who served as its first Mars programme director, Columbia changed his view of rocket launches forever.
“When that low-frequency rumble, that pressure wave hits you, you have a feeling of awe about the power that is being used to lift out of the gravity well of the Earth. But having had the Columbia experience, when I see a launch that has people on board, there’s that extra sense of anxiety: ‘Have I done everything possible to ensure mission success?'”
Advertisement
Image: The crew pictured aboard Columbia during its final mission. Pic: NASA
The call that changed everything
Before the loss of the crew was even confirmed, Hubbard received a call from the NASA administrator’s office asking him to represent the agency in an investigation into what happened.
The administrator at the time was Sean O’Keefe, who was with the families of the astronauts when it became clear something was wrong.
“The mood went from excitement and anticipation to despair, once it became evident that the shuttle wasn’t coming home,” he tells Sky News.
“Normally, you can set your watch as to when the shuttle will come through the atmosphere. Just like a launch day, we had a countdown clock, with these big numbers that would progressively roll downwards.
“It got to within about two minutes of 00 – usually before you see the shuttle, you hear two sonic booms as the shuttle passes the sound barrier, which tells you it’s about to land. Neither sonic boom showed up.”
The breakup of Columbia had already occurred, its wreckage raining down on Texas while the crew’s loved ones waited unawares at the Kennedy Space Center.
Not long later, the official investigation was launched.
Scott Hubbard was picked as the only NASA representative on the investigative board to work with Air Force generals, Navy admirals, and former US astronauts to paint a detailed picture of why Columbia ended in tragedy.
“I knew, if we were facing loss of the crew, that this would be having the same impact on the agency that the Challenger accident had years before,” he says.
“So I went into this with a determination to do whatever I could.”
Image: NASA’s mission control centre at the moment it lost contact with Columbia. Pic: NASA
‘The most difficult duty’
The Columbia investigation was expected to last 30 days. It ended up taking six months.
Beginning with seven-day work weeks from a base outside Johnson Space Center in Houston, Hubbard labels it the “most difficult duty” of his 20 years at NASA.
“The first part was the very sad search and recovery operation for the remains of the crew, so the families could have some closure,” he says. Remains for all seven astronauts were found.
Some 25,000 people were involved in efforts to collect pieces of the wreckage, O’Keefe recalls, which was strewn across a 200-mile swathe of land from Dallas to the Louisiana border.
Image: Tributes left outside NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston
Hubbard’s background in science and engineering saw him assigned to focus on the technical cause of the accident.
“Initially, it was circumstantial evidence,” recalls Hubbard.
“There was only one good, high-resolution image of this piece of foam falling off of the main tank and hitting the shuttle somewhere on its left wing, and then a spray of debris coming out.”
That incident had occurred not during re-entry, but after the launch on 16 January – 82 seconds into the flight.
Mission control notified the commander and pilot, who were assured that – because it had happened on previous missions too – there was no reason for alarm when it came to re-entry.
Image: Still from a video of the launch showing the moment of foam impact on the wing. Pic: NASA
Proving the cause of the tragedy
But when Columbia re-entered the atmosphere, the damage to the wing let in “superheated gases” that led to the destruction of the wing and subsequent disintegration of the entire shuttle.
“Foam falling off had been happening since the very first flight of the shuttle, 30 years before,” says Hubbard.
“But while it was originally labelled an in-flight anomaly, which is the most serious of problems, it eventually became considered a turnaround issue, just a maintenance thing, and was demoted in its seriousness.
“We think this casual approach, to what was a serious issue, was one of the organisational causes of the accident.”
Image: G. Scott Hubbard during a news briefing on the investigation into the disaster
Due to a “sense of denial”among those who were interviewed during the investigation, Hubbard says he pushed for a test that would look to recreate the so-called anomaly, settling on a research facility in Texas used to simulate the impact of a bird striking parts of an aeroplane.
Over the course of months, it was configured to the specifications of what happened to Columbia.
The test was carried out on live TV on 7 July 2003 – and the result was beyond doubt.
“It caused two emotions in me simultaneously,” Hubbard recalls.
“One was ‘yes, we proved it’, and the other was, ‘oh my God, this is how these people died’.
“And that was… quite a moment.”
The legacy of Columbia
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s full report – which O’Keefe received 10 days before its publication in August 2003 – made 29 recommendations to improve the safety of future space shuttle flights, all of which were adopted by NASA.
They included that foam falling from the shuttle’s external tank during launch, as had been accepted as par for the course among NASA engineers, should no longer be allowed to happen.
The agency has not lost astronauts during spaceflight since.
“It was a hard-hitting report,” says O’Keefe. “Nothing was light about it. It was very critical, however, that’s what we needed to hear.”
Image: Sean O’Keefe accepts a copy of the report from Admiral Harold Gehman
NASA commemorates the victims of Columbia, as well as its other fallen astronauts, every January, with flowers laid and tributes read during a memorial service at Kennedy Space Center.
The site at Cape Canaveral has been a hub of excitement since November, when the launch of the Artemis mission kicked off NASA’s bid to return people to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
Space is also increasingly the playground of private enterprise, with the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin setting themselves grand targets to go further than humans have before. A worthy venture, O’Keefe says, but – for all the wonder so many feel upon witnessing a launch – never one that should see people lose sight of the risk.
“The nature of it just scared me every single time,” he admits. “Everybody who talked about shuttle launches that are ‘routine’ – there is no such thing. Every one of them is an opportunity for disaster, and that’s the nature of it.
“But over the course of human history, we have done things that are inherently dangerous because our curiosity gets the better of us.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
44:40
Why are we still racing to space?
For Hubbard, who became chairman of SpaceX’s safety panel in 2012, with Elon Musk among those receiving his advice, the lessons learned from Columbia are only growing in importance.
“Space is a hard thing to do, launching humans into space is difficult, and we have been fortunate that thus far there have been relatively few disasters,” he tells Sky News. (NASA has lost 15 astronauts during spaceflight: seven in Columbia and Challenger, and one, Michael Adams, in a sub-orbital flight in 1967.)
Hubbard says the experience of Columbia “profoundly changed” his view of human exploration of space, but our collective ambition to go further, faster, is only going one way.
“Any rocket you send up there, you can’t say with any certainty it’s going to be just fine,” says O’Keefe. “But the alternative is: ‘let’s not go?’ And the answer is, you can’t relent to that.”
At least 51 people have died after heavy rain caused flash flooding, with water bursting from the banks of the Guadalupe River in Texas.
The overflowing water began sweeping into Kerr County and other areas around 4am local time on Friday, killing at least 43 people in the county.
This includes at least 15 children and 28 adults, with five children and 12 adults pending identification, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said at a news conference.
In nearby Kendall County, one person has died. At least four people were killed in Travis County, while at least two people died in Burnet County. Another person has died in the city of San Angelo in Tom Green County.
Image: People comfort each other in Kerrville, Texas. Pic: Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via AP
Image: Large piles of debris in Kerrville, Texas, following the flooding. Pic: Reuters//Marco Bello
An unknown number of people remain missing, including 27 girls from Camp Mystic in Kerr County, a Christian summer camp along the Guadalupe River.
Rescuers have already saved hundreds of people and would work around the clock to find those still unaccounted for, Texas governor Greg Abbott said.
But as rescue teams are searching for the missing, Texas officials are facing scrutiny over their preparations and why residents and summer camps for children that are dotted along the river were not alerted sooner or told to evacuate.
More on Texas
Related Topics:
AccuWeather said the private forecasting company and the National Weather Service (NWS) sent warnings about potential flash flooding hours before the devastation, urging people to move to higher ground and evacuate flood-prone areas.
Image: Debris on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Hunt. Pic: AP Photo/Julio Cortez
Image: An overturned vehicle is caught in debris along the Guadalupe River. Pic: AP
The NWS later issued flash flood emergencies – a rare alert notifying of imminent danger.
“These warnings should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety,” AccuWeather said in a statement that called Texas Hill County one of the most flash-flood-prone areas of the US because of its terrain and many water crossings.
But one NWS forecast earlier in the week had called for up to six inches of rain, said Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management.”It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw,” he said.
Officials said they had not expected such an intense downpour of rain, equivalent to months’ worth in a few short hours, insisting that no one saw the flood potential coming.
One river near Camp Mystic rose 22ft in two hours, according to Bob Fogarty, meteorologist with the NWS’s Austin/San Antonio office. The gauge failed after recording a level of 29.5ft.
Image: A wall is missing on a building at Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas. Pic: AP/Julio Cortez
Image: Bedding items are seen outside sleeping quarters at Camp Mystic. Pic: AP/Julio Cortez
Image: A Sheriff’s deputy pauses while searching for the missing in Hunt, Texas.Pic: AP/Julio Cortez
“People, businesses, and governments should take action based on Flash Flood Warnings that are issued, regardless of the rainfall amounts that have occurred or are forecast,” Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, said in a statement.
“We know we get rain. We know the river rises,” said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official. “But nobody saw this coming.”
Judge Kelly said the county considered a flood warning system along the Guadalupe River that would have functioned like a tornado warning siren about six or seven years ago, before he was elected, but that the idea never got off the ground because “the public reeled at the cost”.
Image: A drone view of Comfort, Texas. Pic: Reuters
Image: Officials comb through the banks of the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas. Pic: AP/Julio Cortez
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was asked during a news conference on Saturday whether the flash flood warnings came through quickly enough: “We know that everyone wants more warning time, and that is why we are working to upgrade the technologies that have been neglected for far too long.”
Presidential cuts to climate and weather organisations have also been criticised in the wake of the floods after Donald Trump‘s administration ordered 800 job cuts at the science and climate organisation NOAA, the parent organisation of the NWS, which predicts and warns about extreme weather like the Texas floods.
A 30% cut to its budget is also in the pipeline, subject to approval by Congress.
Professor Costa Samaras, who worked on energy policy at the White House under President Joe Biden, said NOAA had been in the middle of developing new flood maps for neighbourhoods and that cuts to NOAA were “devastating”.
“Accurate weather forecasts matter. FEMA and NOAA matter. Because little girls’ lives matter,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a national security and intelligence analyst at Sky’s US partner organisation NBC News.
Musk had previously said we would form and fund a new political party to unseat lawmakers who supported the bill.
From bromance to bust-up
The Tesla boss backed Trump’s election campaign with more than a quarter of a billion dollars, later rewarded with a high profile role running the newly created department of government efficiency (DOGE).
Image: Donald Trump gave Musk a warm send-off in the Oval Office in May. Pic: Reuters
In May Musk left the role, still on good terms with Trump but criticising key parts of his legislative agenda.
After that, the attacks ramped up, with Musk slamming the sweeping tax and spending bill as a “disgusting abomination” and Trump hitting back in a barbed tit-for-tat.
Trump earlier this week threatened to cut off the billion-dollar federal subsidies that flow to Musk’s companies, and said he would even consider deporting him.
Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ has passed and he’s due to sign it into law on Independence Day. Mark Stone and David Blevins discuss how the bill will supercharge his presidency, despite its critics.
They also chat Gaza and Ukraine, as Donald Trump meets with freed Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander and talks to Vladimir Putin.
If you’ve got a question you’d like the Trump100 team to answer, you can email it to trump100@sky.uk.