Columbia – NASA’s first space shuttle to fly into space. Columbia was named after the Boston-based sailing ship Columbia, commanded by Robert Gray, the first American vessel to circumnavigate the globe at the end of the 18th century. The name also commemorates Columbia, the Apollo 11 command module.
Columbia was the first shuttle to undergo a planned inspection and modernization program. In 1991, Columbia was transported to its „birthplace” – the Rockwell assembly hall in Palmdale, California. About fifty improvements were made to the vehicle, including the addition of carbon brakes, improved nose-wheel steering, the removal of instruments used during the orbiter’s testing phase, and an improved thermal protection system. The orbiter returned to Florida in February 1992.
In 1994, Columbia was transported to Palmdale for its first major overhaul, known as the Orbiter Maintenance Down Period (OMDP). Such a thorough overhaul usually lasts a year or longer, after which the fully operational vehicle is ready for use.
Columbia underwent its second OMDP in 1999, during which engineers made over a hundred modifications to the orbiter. The most significant change was the introduction of the Multi-functional Electronic Display System (MEDS) – a „glass cockpit”. MEDS replaced traditional gauges and knobs with small, computerized screens. The new system improved the crew’s interaction with the orbiter during flight and also reduced maintenance costs by eliminating obsolete, complex electromechanical systems.
Columbia was NASA’s heaviest shuttle and, for that reason, could not be equipped with hardware for participating in the construction of the International Space Station and the effective execution of missions in high-inclination orbits. Work under OMDP-2 was therefore carried out with a view to the future use of the orbiter for missions with lower orbiter mass requirements, e.g., servicing the Hubble telescope or launching heavy payloads into orbit. The first cosmonauts (astronauts) on board the space shuttle Columbia were commander John W. Young and pilot Robert L. Crippen. They took off on the historic first space shuttle mission (STS-1) on April 12, 1981, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, opening the era of reusable vehicles.
The space shuttle Columbia performed 28 flights, spent 300.74 days in space, completed 4,808 orbits, and flew a total of 201,497,772 km (including its last mission). 160 astronauts were on board Columbia.
On February 1, 2003, during its return from space, the shuttle was destroyed as a result of damage to the thermal protection on the leading edge of the left wing. The damage to the shield occurred during the ascent after launch, caused by a fragment of foam insulating the shuttle’s external tank, which broke off from the tank and hit the orbiter’s wing, causing a hole about 25 cm in diameter, through which hot gases could enter during the flight through the thermosphere. During re-entry into the atmosphere in the final minutes of the mission, the damage turned out to be fatally serious – the entire crew of 7 astronauts died in the disaster, including the first Israeli in orbit, Col. Ilan Ramon. This caused the suspension of further NASA space shuttle flights until the launch of the shuttle Discovery on July 26, 2005, in the STS-114 mission.
