Day: February 1, 2016

This week marked a sombre period in the annals of NASA’s history. In a period of just 7 days – albeit spread across 50 years – America lost 17 astronauts in just three space flight related tragedies. Every year, the US space agency marks this loss of life – the results of the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia accidents – with a special Day of Remembrance on the 27th January. This year’s event was particularly poignant in that 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

It was on January 27th, 1967, that NASA suffered the first of these tragedies when, during a pre-launch rehearsal of what was intended to be the first manned flight of the Apollo Command and Service modules, a fire broke out inside the Command Module as the vehicle sat on the pad of Cape Kennedy Air Force Station Launch Complex 34. A combination of a pure oxygen atmosphere at a high internal PSI, and highly flammable materials used in the vehicle’s interior construction resulted in the deaths of Command Pilot Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White II, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee in just 16 seconds.

Nineteen years later, on January 28th, 1986, NASA suffered its largest loss of life in a space mission up until that point in time. It occurred when Space Launch System mission 51L, the 25th flight in the space shuttle programme and the 10th flight of the shuttle orbiter vehicle Challenger – regarded as the veteran of the fleet, having flown more orbital missions than the other three orbiter vehicles at that time – exploded 73 seconds after launch, resulting in the loss of all seven crew.

Tragedy struck the space shuttle programme again on February 1st, 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia broke-up following re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere at the end of mission STS-107, killing all seven crew. On board were Commander Rick Husband, Pilot William McCool, Payload Commander Michael Anderson, Mission Specialists Laurel Blair Salton Clark, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, and Payload Specialist  Ilan Ramon, a colonel in the Israeli Air Force and the first Israeli astronaut.

There have of course been other lives lost within the fraternity of astronauts and cosmonauts over the decades. However, these three tragedies perhaps stand larger than others because NASA has always undertaken its missions in the full glare of the public and media spotlight. Apollo 1, for example, was the headline mission for America meeting President Kennedy’s requirement for “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” before the end of the decade. Similarly, STS-51L, the Challenger mission, had been specifically engineered to be in the public eye, featuring as it did the first teacher in space, Sharon Christa McAuliffe.

McAuliffe had been selected from more than 11,000 applicants to participate in NASA’s Teacher in Space Project, initiated by US Present Ronald Reagan and intended by NASA to rejuvenate public interest in the space programme, which has been declining steadily since the first space shuttle flight in 1981. The gamble paid off and McAuliffe, became a media sensation, attracting world-wide public interest in STS-51L; so much so that it has been estimated that around 17% of Americans watched Challenger’s lift-off live on television as a direct result of McAuliffe’s presence on the mission, and that around 85% heard about the disaster within an hour of it occurring (and if that doesn’t sound unusual, remember 1986 was well before the Internet and media revolution what has placed information and news at our fingertips wherever we are).

It could be argued – particularly with regards to Challenger, and also with Apollo 1, that the disaster could have been avoided. Warnings about the precise type of failure which caused the loss of Challenger date back as far as 1971, which tests carried out in 1977 revealing the risk of what because known as an O-ring failure being inherent in the design of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters.

Things are less clear in the case of the Columbia tragedy; while it has been suggested that a rescue mission might have been mounted using the shuttle orbiter Atlantis, which was being prepared for a mission due to lift-off at the start of March, 2003. However, in order to get the vehicle flight ready for a launch ahead of the February 15th deadline (the point at which lithium hydroxide, a critical part of the systems used to remove carbon dioxide from the air in a space vehicle, would run out aboard Columbia), was itself fraught with risks.

But whether they could be avoided or not, these three disasters remind us that the cost of becoming a space faring civilisation – something which could be vital to our survival – is not without risk. Which is why I’ll close this part of Space Sunday with the words of Francis R. Scobee, the Commander of STS-51L, written shortly before his death aboard the Challenger:

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