Assembly of OV-102, NASA's first spaceworthy Space Shuttle Orbiter, commenced in March 1975. The 111-ton reusable winged spaceship first reached low-Earth orbit during STS-1 (12-14 April 1981), the Space Shuttle Program's first mission. Named for the female personification of the United States of America, the first American sailing ship to circle the globe, and the Apollo 11 Command and Service Module spacecraft, the Orbiter Columbia completed 27 successful flights over the next 22 years.

NASA's oldest Orbiter was also its heaviest. Unlike its sisters Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavor, Columbia had difficulty reaching the 51.6° orbital inclination of the Russian Mir station and the International Space Station (ISS) with a useful payload in its 15-by-60-foot payload bay. This performance constraint meant that, in the Shuttle-Mir/ISS era, NASA relegated to Columbia its few remaining low-inclination, non-space station missions, such as Hubble Space Telescope servicing.

Extended-Duration Orbiter modifications would permit Columbia to remain in orbit for more than two weeks to serve as a science research platform. Such missions would, however, become increasingly rare - or end entirely - as research expanded on board ISS.

In an April 1996 paper presented at the 33rd Space Congress in Cocoa Beach, Florida, Carey McCleskey of the Vehicle Engineering Directorate at NASA's Kennedy Space Center proposed using the oldest Orbiter's excess mission capacity "to ignite a billion dollar, sustained enterprise on the Moon." Specifically, he advocated using Columbia as a joint NASA/private sector Earth-orbital launch platform for rocket stages bearing small lunar landers. Columbia would remain in space for only a few hours during each of its lunar lander deployment missions.

The first Space Shuttle launch: Columbia lifts off at the start of STS-1 on 12 April 1981. NASA

The landers would deliver to the moon teleoperated "micro-robots" akin to Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner minirover. These would serve as proxy lunar explorers for paying visitors at "space theme parks" on Earth.

Confident that his proposal would help to build public support for U.S. astronauts to return to the moon, McCleskey wrote that

use of Columbia only makes sense for the start-up and initial take-off phases of the enterprise. The Shuttle system. . .will reach a limit which will drive the nation toward advanced space delivery systems. The use of the Shuttle for starting a lunar enterprise, therefore, is not the answer for space delivery, but rather our next opportunity.

Columbia lifted off at the start of STS-107, its 28th mission, on 16 January 2003. Eighty-two seconds after launch, a piece of foam insulation about 20 inches long broke free from its External Tank and struck its left wing. Engineers examining high-resolution video images of the impact warned of possible wing damage, but Shuttle management elected to disregard their warnings.

The oldest Orbiter's seven-person crew conducted wide-ranging science research for 16 days - long enough for the moon to wax from nearly full to full, then wane to last quarter and new. The crew beamed to Earth a breathtaking image of the last quarter moon taken on 26 January (image at top of post).

On 1 February 2003, the day of the new moon, Columbia fired its twin Orbital Maneuvering System engines to slow itself and reenter Earth's atmosphere. Temperatures on the Orbiter's belly tiles, nose cap, and wing leading edge panels began to climb as Columbia reentered at an altitude of 400,000 feet. About 40 minutes after the deorbit burn the wing leading edge temperature neared its peak value of about 3000° Fahrenheit.

As Columbia crossed the California coast in predawn darkness en route to its planned landing in Florida, hot plasma began to penetrate its internal structure through a breach in its left wing leading edge. Flight controllers in Mission Control in Houston puzzled over the cause of sensor failures in the Orbiter's left wing. The failures progressed aftward from the leading edge.

For observers on the ground in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, many of whom had observed pre-dawn Shuttle reentries before, Columbia was a fast-moving, brilliant point of light leaving behind a luminous, sky-spanning ionization trail. Veteran observers along Columbia's reentry path noted more than 20 unusual flashes around the Orbiter and peculiar bright streaks in the trail.

As Columbia crossed from New Mexico into Texas, it began to shed pieces. Meanwhile, thrusters fired automatically to compensate for increased drag on the left wing. Columbia did not give up without a fight.

Radio contact with Columbia was lost about 10 minutes after hot plasma first entered the left wing. Less than a minute later, the gutted wing folded over the fuselage. The oldest Orbiter tumbled and disintegrated at an altitude of 203,000 feet just west of Dallas, Texas, killing its crew and raining wreckage over parts of eastern Texas and western Louisiana.

Had Columbia not been destroyed, NASA would have launched it to the ISS for the first (and probably only) time in November 2003. The STS-118 mission would have seen NASA's oldest Orbiter stand in for its younger sister Discovery, which was scheduled for periodic maintenance. As it turned out, Endeavour, the Orbiter built to replace Challenger following its loss in January 1986, carried out STS-118 in August 2007. Columbia did not visit Mir during the Shuttle-Mir Program; its destruction meant that it was the only Orbiter operational during Shuttle-Mir and ISS that did not visit a space station.

The STS-107 accident triggered far-reaching changes in the U.S. space program that even now have yet to play out fully. Most obvious of these was President George W. Bush's January 2004 call to end the Space Shuttle Program when ISS was completed, which at the time was scheduled for 2010. The 135th and last flight of the Shuttle, designated STS-135, concluded on 21 July 2011, with the landing of Atlantis in Florida. On 16 August 2011, Space Shuttle Program Manager John Shannon announced that the Shuttle Program would end officially on 31 August 2011.

Reference

"Using the Space Shuttle Columbia to Begin Bringing the Moon to America," Carey M. McCleskey; paper presented at the 33rd Space Congress in Cocoa Beach, Florida, April 23-26, 1996.

Related Beyond Apollo Posts

Space Station Columbia (1991)

Columbia, Discovery, and Atlantis

Ten Years After Columbia: A List of Shuttle-Station Posts