Space Shuttle thermal protection system
On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle "Columbia" was destroyed on reentry due to a failure of the TPS. The investigation team found and reported that the probable cause of the accident was that during launch, a piece of foam debris punctured an RCC panel on the left wing's leading edge and allowed hot gases from the reentry to enter the wing and disintegrate the wing from within, leading to eventual loss of control and breakup of the shuttle.
Columbia (supercomputer)
It was slowly phased out as its successors at NAS, the petascale Pleiades supercomputer and the Endeavour shared-memory system, expanded to meet with NASA's growing high-end computing needs. At the time of its decommissioning in March 2013, Columbia was made up of four nodes over 40 SGI Altix 4700 racks, containing Intel Itanium 2 Montecito and Montvale processors to make up a total of 4,608 cores with a theoretical peak of 30 teraflops and total memory of 9 terabytes.