NASA Columbia disaster: The investigation into one of history’s worst space tragedies – and its lasting legacy
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.
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?'”
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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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.”
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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.”
Stock markets around the world fell on Thursday after Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs – with some economists now fearing a recession.
The US president announced tariffs for almost every country – including 10% rates on imports from the UK – on Wednesday evening, sending financial markets reeling.
While the UK’s FTSE 100 closed down 1.55% and the continent’s STOXX Europe 600 index was down 2.67% as of 5.30pm, it was American traders who were hit the most.
Trump tariffs latest: US stock markets tumble
All three of the US’s major markets opened to sharp losses on Thursday morning.
The S&P 500 is set for its worst day of trading since the COVID-19 pandemic. File pic: AP
By 8.30pm UK time (3.30pm EST), The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 3.7%, the S&P 500 opened with a drop of 4.4%, and the Nasdaq composite was down 5.6%.
Compared to their values when Donald Trump was inaugurated, the three markets were down around 5.6%, 8.7% and 14.4%, respectively, according to LSEG.
Worst one-day losses since COVID
As Wall Street trading ended at 9pm in the UK, two indexes had suffered their worst one-day losses since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The S&P 500 fell 4.85%, the Nasdaq dropped 6%, and the Dow Jones fell 4%.
It marks Nasdaq’s biggest daily percentage drop since March 2020 at the start of COVID, and the largest drop for the Dow Jones since June 2020.
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The latest numbers on tariffs
‘Trust in President Trump’
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN earlier in the day that Mr Trump was “doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term”.
“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump,” she told the broadcaster, adding: “This is indeed a national emergency… and it’s about time we have a president who actually does something about it.”
Later, the US president told reporters as he left the White House that “I think it’s going very well,” adding: “The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom.”
He later said on Air Force One that the UK is “happy” with its tariff – the lowest possible levy of 10% – and added he would be open to negotiations if other countries “offer something phenomenal”.
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How is the world reacting to Trump’s tariffs?
Economist warns of ‘spiral of doom’
The turbulence in the markets from Mr Trump’s tariffs “just left everybody in shock”, Garrett Melson, portfolio strategist at Natixis Investment Managers Solutions in Boston, told Reuters.
He added that the economy could go into recession as a result, saying that “a lot of the pain, will probably most acutely be felt in the US and that certainly would weigh on broader global growth as well”.
Meanwhile, chief investment officer at St James’s Place Justin Onuekwusi said that international retaliation is likely, even as “it’s clear countries will think about how to retaliate in a politically astute way”.
He warned: “Significant retaliation could lead to a tariff ‘spiral of doom’ that could be the growth shock that drags us into recession.”
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Tariffs about something more than economics: power
It comes as the UK government published a long list of US products that could be subject to reciprocal tariffs – including golf clubs and golf balls.
Running to more than 400 pages, the list is part of a four-week-long consultation with British businesses and suggests whiskey, jeans, livestock, and chemical components.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on Thursday that the US president had launched a “new era” for global trade and that the UK will respond with “cool and calm heads”.
It also comes as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a 25% tariff on all American-imported vehicles that are not compliant with the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal.
He added: “The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services, is over. This is a tragedy.”
Tanking stock markets, collapsing world orders, devastating trade wars; economists with their hair ablaze are scrambling to keep up.
But as we try to make sense of Donald Trumps’s tariff tsunami, economic theory only goes so far. In the end this surely is about something more primal.
Power.
Understanding that may be crucial to how the world responds.
Yes, economics helps explain the impact. The world’s economy has after all shifted on its axis, the way it’s been run for decades turned on its head.
Instead of driving world trade, America is creating a trade war. We will all feel the impact.
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PM will ‘fight’ for deal with US
Donald Trump says he is settling scores, righting wrongs. America has been raped, looted and pillaged by the world trading system.
But don’t be distracted by the hyperbole – and if you think this is about economics alone, you may be missing the point.
Above all, tariffs give Donald Trump power. They strike fear into allies and enemies, from governments to corporations.
This is a president who runs his presidency like a medieval emperor or mafia don.
It is one reason why since his election we have seen what one statesman called a conga line of sycophants make their way to the White House, from world leaders to titans of industry.
The conga line will grow longer as they now redouble their efforts hoping to special treatment from Trump’s tariffs. Sir Keir Starmer among them.
President Trump’s using similar tactics at home, deploying presidential power to extract concessions and deter dissent in corporate America, academia and the US media. Those who offer favours are spared punishment.
His critics say he seeks a form power for the executive or presidential branch of government that the founding fathers deliberately sought to prevent.
Whether or not that is true, the same playbook of divide and rule through intimidation can now be applied internationally. Thanks to tariffs
Each country will seek exceptions but on Trump’s terms. Those who retaliate may meet escalation.
This is the unforgiving calculus for governments including our own plotting their next moves.
The temptation will be to give Trump whatever he wants to spare their economies, but there is a jeopardy that compounds the longer this goes on.
Read more:
Do Trump’s numbers on tariffs really add up?
Trump hits island home only to penguins with 10% tariffs
Could America’s traditional allies turn to China? Pic: AP
Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian prime minister who coined the conga line comparison, put it this way: “Pretty much all the international leaders I have seen that have sucked up to Trump have been run over. The reality is if you suck up to bullies, whether it’s global affairs or in the playground, you just get more bullying.”
Trading partners may be able to mitigate the impact of these tariffs through negotiation, but that may only encourage this unorthodox president to demand ever more?
Ultimately the world will need a more reliable superpower than that.
In the hands of such a president, America cannot be counted on.
When it comes to security, stability and prosperity, allies will need to fend for themselves.
And they will need new friends. If Washington can’t be relied on, Beijing beckons.
America First will, more and more, mean America on its own.
Actors, directors and celebrity friends have paid tribute to Val Kilmer, after he died aged 65.
The California-born star of Top Gun, Batman and Heat died of pneumonia on Tuesday night in Los Angeles, his daughter Mercedes told the Associated Press.
She said Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered.
Tributes flooded in after reports broke of the actor’s death, with No Country For Old Men star Josh Brolin among the first to share their memories.
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Watch: Val Kilmer in his most iconic roles
He wrote on Instagram: “See ya, pal. I’m going to miss you. You were a smart, challenging, brave, uber-creative firecracker. There’s not a lot left of those.
“I hope to see you up there in the heavens when I eventually get there. Until then, amazing memories, lovely thoughts.”
Kyle Maclachlan, who co-starred with Kilmer in the 1991 biopic The Doors, wrote on social media: “You’ll always be my Jim. See you on the other side my friend.”
Michael Mann, who directed Kilmer in 1995’s Heat, also paid tribute in a statement, saying: “I always marvelled at the range, the brilliant variability within the powerful current of Val’s possessing and expressing character.
“After so many years of Val battling disease and maintaining his spirit, this is tremendously sad news.”
Heat co-star Danny Trejo also called Kilmer “a great actor, a wonderful person, and a dear friend of mine” on Instagram.
Cher, who once dated the actor, said on X that “U Were Funny, crazy, pain in the ass, GREAT FRIEND… BRILLIANT as Mark Twain, BRAVE here during ur sickness”.
Lifelong friend and director of Twixt, Francis Ford Coppola said: “Val Kilmer was the most talented actor when in his High School, and that talent only grew greater throughout his life.
“He was a wonderful person to work with and a joy to know – I will always remember him.”
The Top Gun account on X also said it was remembering Kilmer, who starred as Iceman in both the 1986 original and 2022 sequel, and “whose indelible cinematic mark spanned genres and generations”.
Nicolas Cage added that “I always liked Val and am sad to hear of his passing”.
“I thought he was a genius actor,” he said. “I enjoyed working with him on Bad Lieutenant and I admired his commitment and sense of humor.
“He should have won the Oscar for The Doors.”
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