Space Shuttle: The Human Time Bomb
On February 1, 2003, as the space shuttle Columbia completed its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, the space shuttle began to disintegrate and tear apart. All seven crew members were killed. The tragedy of the sinking of STS-107 immediately brought back painful memories of the Challenger explosion in 1986. How could something like this happen again? The Space Shuttle: The Human Time Bomb presents an exploratory investigation to try to find the real culprit behind the disaster.
NASA’s official explanation included a broken piece of foam piping and a heat shield too damaged to withstand the heat of burning atmospheric gases. But this is not an uncommon accident. The film attempts to move beyond this explanation, revealing the fundamental design flaws, cost-cutting measures, and overlooked warning signs that inevitably doomed the flight from the start.
According to the film’s findings, the shuttle’s design flaws were numerous, including its proximity to hot explosive devices and the lack of an ejection system. Many of these shortcomings added to the shuttle’s inefficiency and potential for disaster. Since the early days of the space program, several ambitious plans to address some of these shortcomings have been drawn up, but ultimately canceled due to prohibitive costs.
The film features several interviews with key individuals who have intimate knowledge of the Space Shuttle’s design, function, and operating procedures. They shared what went wrong during the space shuttle’s re-entry and the moment-by-moment situations a crew member might experience in their final seconds of life. The archived new clips have been edited alongside a series of harrowing amateur video clips that capture the disintegration of the space shuttle’s fireball as it plummets from the sky.
Are these just risks we take when we go into space exploration? What do we as a society consider acceptable in terms of responsibility for this disaster? The Space Shuttle: The Human Time Bomb provides an admirable and exhaustive analysis of the disaster. In the process, it examines broader questions about the risks and rewards of space travel and proposes a remedy to limit those risks in the future.
