Space shuttle Columbia went from being the pride of NASA to a mothballed "hangar queen" before returning to regular flights.

Saturday's explosion came near the end of its 28th mission and after more than 86 million miles of flight.

The oldest of the four-shuttle fleet, Columbia first flew in 1981.

Veteran astronaut John Young, an Orlando native from College Park, flew that first mission as its commander.

Through the years, the 100-ton shuttle also racked up records for most delayed launches and for a host of problems in which the smallest technical glitch could take the spacecraft off-line for months of safety inspections.

NASA workers often referred to Columbia as "102 ," its serial number. They also called it "The Penguin," for the amount of time it spent grounded.

In 1979, before its first launch, Columbia lost hundreds of its heat-protection tiles during a piggyback ride on a Boeing 747 jet from California to Florida. A press account described the shuttle as looking like an "ugly duckling whose feathers had molted in flight" when it arrived at Kennedy Space Center.

The current mission had been delayed more than a year after minuscule cracks were discovered in July 2002 in the fuel lines of Columbia's and the rest of the fleet's rocket engines.

The spacecraft flew six missions, from its first flight in April 1981 until January 1984, before it was sent back to Rockwell Industries in California for a two-year overhaul.

It flew its seventh mission in January 1986. Two weeks later, it was grounded for three years after the explosion of the shuttle Challenger.

For a while, Columbia became a parts donor for sister ships Discovery and Atlantis, and new parts were diverted to the other shuttles.

Henry Pierson Curtis can be reached at 407-420-5257
or hcurtis@orlandosentinel.com.

Developing the
Space Shuttle

NASA
Space Shuttle Site
STS-107

STS-107
Launch
of Space Shuttle
Columbia for Spacehab

Designing and Building Spaceships   By Jerry Blackburn

How do you design and build spaceships that will take men and women into space? It is not a simple task but it has a fairly simple recipe. First you start by finding a place where people have visions and the opportunities to realize them (hope for a future). Next, you find the youngest and freshest minds of this land and while they are still young and begin to fill their heads with things like science fiction and adventure. Add dreams of discovery, exploration, challenge and a future with technologies that will make life better and the base stock is ready. You must then add lots of "time" to give these young minds a chance to experiment; Dad's garage is a wonderful place to do this (lot's of strange things to take apart). Marinate this mixture for several years with some good old-fashioned experience in the work place and work ethic values. Then when the master chef says it is time to begin, his vision articulates the collective vision and becomes the driving force to reach a successful goal.
This metaphorical description is similar to what happened with our Apollo program. The success of taking men to the moon and returning them safely could not have been possible without an environment of "can do" thinking. The vision of JFK catalyzed a national desire to continue to discover, explore and create a better world. And finally, it was the very special "team" of men and women who came together to learn how to do it. We had no cookbook or set of instructions, we had to create them, we had to discover them, and we had to write them. This very process fueled our enthusiasm and resolve to meet the goal.
Spaceships are very complex machines. They are the life support environments for the astronauts as they travel and live in space and the mechanical extension of man's senses beyond earth's environment. Our ability to design these machines was based a lot on what we had learned from the past machines we had built and what nature taught us. Our terrestrial experience with aircraft taught us much about where we would start from but much of what we did not know we had to learn from experiment and testing. The engineering process is a lot of problem solving and creative thinking. We became masters at identifying the problems and solving them these skills were then shared in other areas of society. This was what we called "technology transfer". Much of the microelectronics, computers, materials, communications and medical tools we use to do came from learning how to build spaceships. The Apollo and Space Shuttle programs have been the most successful national programs in the history of mankind for they have served not just nation but an entire world.
In this great country one of our real "Hidden Assets" is that all of the resources we need to achieve any of our goals or dreams are already here. The secret ingredient to success is our "resolve" and "leadership".

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