Space is Hard

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle orbiter Columbia tore itself apart as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere; all seven crew members aboard were thrown out of the vehicle at very high speed. There was no chance they could survive.

The physical cause of Columbia’s disintegration was superheated air entering a hole in the orbiter’s left wing. That blast of scorching air melted the wing’s aluminum structure, causing the wing to fail and sending Columbia violently out of control. The breach in the wing had occurred 16 days earlier, as Columbia launched. A suitcase-sized piece of insulating foam came off of the external fuel tank and impacted the wing’s leading edge. Although the insulating material had the density of only a Styrofoam container, it hit the wing at a velocity of 525 miles per hour, resulting in enough force to rupture the wing’s reinforced carbon-carbon thermal protection material.

This proximate cause of the Columbia accident was determined by the 13-member Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB). I was a member of that board. Our August 2003 report, available at

Instead of surveying the Red Planet, the Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated in the Martian atmosphere because NASA subcontractor Lockheed Martin programmed its thrusters in imperial units instead of the metric units NASA was using. Credit: NASA.

The disintegration of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, on a 2015 mission to resupply the International Space Station, tarnished a company with an otherwise perfect record. Credit: NASA.

Failures that plagued the first Russian space station program, Salyut, racked up the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Credit: Don S. Montgomery, USN (Ret.).

South Korea’s first rocket, the Naro, failed to reach orbit twice, in 2009 and 2010, before completing its first successful mission in 2013. Credit: Deuterium 001.