![]() ![]() Those seven launches would support an exciting building spree as NASA and its partners raced toward a 2004 completion date for the first phase of the station. In March, the first of seven critical shuttle launches to the ISS would get under way. Before the Columbia tragedy, 2003 was to be a make-or-break year for the troubled space station. That’s where the terrible timing comes in: ISS. And we were made to consider, at the margins of the first day’s unfolding drama, the plight of the International Space Station. Within hours we were reading seven suddenly heartbreaking biographies that gave fresh insight into the competence, coolness and clarity of purpose that seem to be in the DNA of all astronauts, whether they arrive from the pilot side or the science side. We received a crash course in the complexity of the space program and of the shuttle system in particular - the tiles, the heat, the speed, the data, the dollars (and, critics said, even in the early hours, the folly). Americans woke to another televised lesson in the dangers of an adventure that, surely, we had not really forgotten is perilous. When the Space ShuttleĬolumbia disintegrated 200,000 feet above Texas on the morning of February 1, seventeen years after Challenger, several things happened. ![]() ![]() It was a terrible accident, at a terrible time. The ISS seen from the shuttle endeavour in June 2002, 7 months before construction is halted. ![]()
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