They were launched on 24 November 2002 on STS 113 (Endeavour) and were scheduled to return in mid-March 2003 on Shuttle Atlantis.Ī Russian Progress vehicle (9P) de-docked from the ISS as planned on 1 February, and a Soyuz flight with an unmanned Progress vehicle (10P) has been successfully launched on 2 February at 12:59 GMT, as planned, for a nominal refuel and logistics flight. There are currently three crew on-board the ISS (Commander Kenneth Bowersox, NASA, and flight engineers Nikolai Budarin, RSA, and Donald Pettit, NASA). Meanwhile the Shuttle fleet is grounded and, amongst other things, the flight of ESA astronaut Christer Fugelsang, planned for July 2003 on-board Space Shuttle Atlantis, is under review.
All data is being safeguarded and, together with the retrieved debris, will be analysed to determine the cause of the accident. A statement has also been made by the Shuttle Programme Manager, Mr Ron Dittemore, addressing the possibility of damage being caused to the wing of Columbia during launch, but is not yet known if this has any bearing on the situation. The NASA Administrator, Mr Sean O’Keefe, has established an Interagency Mishap Investigation Board, which will provide an independent review of the events and activities that led up to the tragic loss of the seven astronauts on Space Shuttle Columbia. Debris is being found over a large area of East Texas and Louisiana, and is being collected. Video films show the spacecraft following a constant track and apparently slowly disintegrating. It was at an altitude of 63 km, about 1400 km from the landing site at KSC. At this time, the Orbiter was flying over Texas, about 15 minutes from landing and at about 18 times the speed of sound. At about 14:00 GMT, communications with the Space Shuttle were lost. The re-entry of Columbia on 1 February 2003 was not nominal. The whole re-entry phase can either be flown automatically or under crew control. During this phase, between altitudes of 81 and 49 km, a communications blackout occurs, when radio signals cannot penetrate the layer of ionised gas particles surrounding the spacecraft. The Orbiter is put into its correct orientation and reaction control system jets are fired to start the descent.Ībout 5 minutes later, at an altitude of about 120 km, entry into the upper atmospheric begins with an automatic sequence monitored by an on-board control system. At that point the Orbiter is at an altitude of about 170 km and is travelling at about 28000 km/h. In a nominal Shuttle re-entry scenario, the re-entry phase starts about one hour before touch down and at some 8000 km from the landing site at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. This was not a mission to the International Space Station Mission, it was an autonomous Space Shuttle mission with no docking to the ISS and no crew exchange. The mission was conducted at an altitude of 274 km and an inclination of 39o. Space Shuttle Columbia was launched on 16 January 2003 carrying a Spacehab module for a 16-day scientific mission (STS 107). The Director General, Antonio Rodotà, and the Director of Human Spaceflight Joerg Feustel-Buechl, have expressed ESA’s condolences to the NASA Administrator and other senior NASA officials and, through them, to the families of the astronauts.
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