They were then moved into an archive located on the 16th floor of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), the same facility where Columbia had been prepared for its 28 launches.įrom the day it was founded, the Columbia Research and Preservation Office was established to conserve the debris and support loans of the material to government, academic and scientific organizations to further the research on how to build safer components for future spacecraft and further knowledge about the effects of re-entry.īut it was only in the last couple of years that the program has grown to fulfill another mission - to teach and inspire. Some 84,500 pieces of Columbia were located, identified and ultimately delivered to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where they were first used in a reconstruction of the vehicle to help investigators determine the cause of the disaster. The debris was later moved into the preservation office. After recovering the astronauts' remains, attention turned to the melted and mangled fragments of the orbiter that were strewn over miles of forest- and swamp-covered land.ĭebris from the fallen space shuttle Columbia as seen in May 2003 during a reconstruction effort as part of the accident investigation. To learn what happened, NASA joined with other federal agencies, as well as state, county and local authorities, for what became the largest ground search in United States history. The tragedy claimed the seven lives of the STS-107 crew, including commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, mission specialists David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and Michael Anderson and Israeli payload specialist Ilan Ramon. The resulting loss of control led to Columbia's disintegration over the state of Texas. On Columbia's return, hot plasma entered through the hole and tore the wing apart. A strike from a piece of insulating foam that fell off the shuttle's external fuel tank left a hole in the orbiter's left wing leading edge that went unaddressed during the flight. 1, 2003, Columbia broke apart during its re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after sustaining damage during its launch. Fifteen years after the space shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven were lost returning home from a 16-day mission, pieces of the winged orbiter are still being found and the debris is now being used by NASA to educate and inspire a new generation of space workers.
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