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Space shuttle Columbia lifts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in January 2003 in Florida. Columbia broke up upon reentry to Earth, and the seven-person crew was lost on February 1, 2003. reshaped the US space agency’s approach to innovation, forever altering how it balanced risk with the call to explore beyond Earth.
“We spent the next year-plus … trying to encourage the culture to put safety first and, most importantly, to ensure that people that had dissenting opinions or questions were heard,” Wayne Hale, then deputy manager of the space shuttle program, told CNN. “It was all in the name of trying to encourage people to speak up.”
NASA also had “safety days” — time set aside for engineers to stop work and just “contemplate how to improve our organization’s approach to safety better,” Hale added.The tragedy touched the entire NASA organization, leaving a legacy with which the remaining astronaut corps had to contend. The program’s end forced the space agency to turn to Russia, which — as tensions eased in the post-Cold War era — was a primary US partner on the space station and had a reliable vehicle called Soyuz to ferry its cosmonauts to the orbiting outpost.
Wary after the Columbia tragedy, NASA didn’t always see eye to eye with its commercial partners. The result was a
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