Comm Check…: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia by Michael Cabbage
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is a solid re-telling of the story of the final flight of the space shuttle Columbia and the investigation afterward. The book came out in 2004, roughly a year after the accident.
It’s been more than 12 years since the Columbia disaster and I was motivated to re-read this book to see if it had held up very well. After all it’s been four or five years since the space shuttles were retired. The book holds up very well – the authors painstakingly recreate the pressure within NASA to launch Columbia on time, despite the evidence of foam strikes on earlier missions. We meet the crew and also the engineers and managers who were involved in the analysis of the foam strike on Columbia’s left wing. A thorough discussion of how the foam strike caused the destruction of the orbiter during reentry is provided. And finally, the accident investigation is discussed and the final report is examined. Sadly, many of the institutional causes of the accident are very similar to the problems that led to the loss of the Challenger in 1986.
If you are interested in the history of manned space exploration, I think you will enjoy this book.