Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas during re-entry, sixteen minutes before it was due to land, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The cause traced back to a piece of insulation foam, barely bigger than a briefcase, that had struck the wing during launch sixteen days earlier and gone unnoticed as a serious risk. Debris rained down across a stretch of Texas and Louisiana for weeks as search teams combed fields and forests for pieces of the shuttle. It grounded the entire shuttle program for more than two years and permanently changed how NASA assessed damage risk on every mission after.
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