Twenty-five years ago, the space shuttle Columbia launched the Chandra X-ray Observatory and almost ended in disaster. As then air traffic controller John Shannon observed, "Oh, we don't need another one of those."
Archive: Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster | NBC Nightly News
Space Shuttle Columbia was launched from Kennedy Space Center's LC-39B on the morning of July 23, 1999. Two previous launch attempts, on July 20 and 22, were aborted due to a faulty sensor and bad weather.
The launch was the third time appreciated in more ways than one.
Unknown to the shuttle crew and flight controllers, Columbia contained several flaws—as do all vehicles—some of which were about to make their presence felt during the launch phase of the mission. A piece of wiring in the payload bay had rubbed against a burred screw head, a single gold-plated pin was slightly loose in a deactivated Liquid Oxygen (LOX) post in the right engine main injector, and the center main engine had a slight bias in pressure readings on its B- channel that would only appear when the engine reached full throttle.
