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‘Lock the Doors’: Remembering Columbia’s Final Return to Earth

In the second half of January 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia flew her 28th and final mission into orbit. For 16 days, her seven-strong crew supported more than 80 scientific experiments in the Spaceh…

On 31 January, the day before Columbia was due to land, engineer Kevin McCluney offered a hypothetical description to his colleagues at the Johnson Space Center’s (JSC) flight control team of the kind of data “signature” they could expect to receive in the event that the worst should happen. Let’s suppose, said McCluney, that a large hole had been punched through one of the shuttle’s RCC panels, enabling super-heated plasma to enter the airframe. “Let’s surmise,” he told them, “what sort of signature we’d see if a limited stream of plasma did get into the wheel well [of Columbia’s main landing gear], roughly from entry interface until about 200,000 feet (60 km); in other words, a 10–15-minute window.” Little could McCluney possibly have guessed that his “signature” would almost exactly mirror the dreadful events which befell Columbia on the morning of Saturday, 1 February 2003.