Space Shuttle Columbia disaster
Space Shuttle Columbia breaks apart during STS-107 reentry, killing its seven-person crew
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗Sixteen minutes from its runway, Columbia's final radio transmission cut off in mid-communication. The damage that killed the crew was sixteen days old.
Deorbit burn at 8:15:30
On 1 February 2003, commander Rick Husband and pilot William McCool fired Columbia's deorbit burn at 8:15:30 a.m. EST for a planned landing at Kennedy Space Center.
The orbiter reached its atmospheric entry interface over the Pacific at 8:44:09 a.m. Abnormal indications then developed in the left wing.
The final crew communication and telemetry ended at approximately 8:59:32 a.m., and ground video shows Columbia disintegrating at about 9:00:18 a.m. over Texas, roughly 16 minutes before its scheduled Florida touchdown.
Seven aboard STS-107
All seven crew members were killed: Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon, the Israeli Space Agency's payload specialist and the first Israeli astronaut.
Columbia was on its 28th flight and the Shuttle program's 113th mission.
NASA and other organizations began searching for the crew and debris along the breakup path across Texas and Louisiana that day; the fleet was grounded, and NASA announced the independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board the following day.
The breach opened on launch day
A piece of external-tank bipod-ramp foam had struck reinforced carbon-carbon panel 8 on Columbia's left-wing leading edge 81.7 seconds after the 16 January launch, with the vehicle at about 65,820 feet and Mach 2.46.
During reentry, superheated gas entered through that breach, melted and weakened internal aluminum structure, and led to loss of control, wing failure and breakup. This was not an explosion at a single instant: telemetry records a developing sequence of left-wing anomalies.
The investigation did not stop at the foam. It concluded that Shuttle-program management practices and organizational failures were causal as well.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →
What the sources leave uncertain
- NASA summaries variously round the loss to approximately 15 or 16 minutes before landing. The detailed chronology fixes the final telemetry and observed breakup more precisely; the date itself is not disputed.