Twenty years have passed since the Columbia space shuttle broke apart over Texas, yet traces of the astronauts live on at home and at NASA.
that had allowed the disaster to occur — one that accepted when systems didn’t act quite right and discouraged lower-level employees from speaking up.
This would prove catastrophic 16 days later. But without cameras to see the wing — and a general acceptance that foam often fell off during launches and nothing bad happened — NASA’s top decision makers didn’t recognize the severity of the damage. “It was just like watching your kid score a goal playing soccer,” said his father Barry McCool, a professor emeritus at Texas Tech University, “making that final basketball shot that wins the game. It was really exciting.”
“There was a lot of wailing,” Jon Clark said. “The most somber cry you could ever imagine. It was really horrible.”Months of investigation would reveal what happened, technically and culturally. “I came to work at NASA in the days when the organization was run by what I would call the members of the Greatest Generation who did not suffer fools gladly,” Hale said. “And if you didn't do your job in the way that they thought it should be done, they would tell you in no uncertain terms about it. That was demotivating to the workforce.”
NASA friends and colleagues met Jon, who was a NASA flight surgeon, at the airport. They took him to drink away the feelings — as was done in the Navy, where he’d met his wife at dive school.
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