Columbia

Five years ago today, space shuttle Columbia was lost during re-entry. All seven people on board were killed. Subsequent investigation showed some of the shuttle's protective heat shield tiles were damaged during launch, so when the crew tried to come home, the tiles failed, and Columbia became a fireball. The investigation also called NASA to task for its attitude towards safety measures-- a finding depressingly similar to one reached by investigators of the Challenger disaster seventeen years before. We should note, however, that those seventeen years saw dozens of shuttle missions, some of them among the most ambitious spaceflights ever attempted, and they were all accomplished safely.

The loss of Challenger led to the examination of manned spaceflight policy that led to President Bush's Moon-Mars proposal, the Vision for Space Exploration. That program, currently being pursued, calls for the retirement of the shuttles by 2010, and the development of a new spacecraft that will take humans back to the Moon, establish a lunar base, and go on to Mars. The essential shift the Bush plan makes in human spaceflight policy is to say that if the United States is going to risk human lives by pursuing human spaceflight, the people going out should be doing something worthy of the cost some of them might pay, not just endlessly orbiting Earth.

If that turns out to be the program NASA follows, the crew of Columbia will have an important legacy.