Kennedy Space Center
On February 1, 2003, "Columbia" and her crew of seven were lost during re-entry over Texas during the STS-107 mission (the 113th shuttle flight); a vehicle breakup triggered by damage sustained during launch from Pad 39A on January 16, when a piece of foam insulation from the orbiter's external fuel tank struck the orbiter's left wing. During reentry, the damage created a hole allowing hot gases to melt the wing structure. Like the "Challenger" disaster, the resulting investigation and modifications interrupted shuttle flight operations at KSC for more than two years until the STS-114 launch on July 26, 2005.
Space Shuttle Columbia disaster
"Columbia"s flight data recorder was found near Hemphill, Texas, on March 19, 2003. Unlike commercial jet aircraft, the space shuttles did not have flight data recorders intended for after-crash analysis. Instead, the vehicle data were transmitted in real time to the ground via telemetry. Since "Columbia" was the first shuttle, it had a special flight data OEX (Orbiter EXperiments) recorder, designed to help engineers better understand vehicle performance during the first test flights. After the initial Shuttle test-flights were completed, the recorder was never removed from "Columbia", and it was still functioning on the crashed flight. It recorded many hundreds of parameters, and contained very extensive logs of structural and other data, which allowed the CAIB to reconstruct many of the events during the process leading to breakup. Investigators could often use the loss of signals from sensors on the wing to track how the damage progressed. This was correlated with forensic debris analysis conducted at Lehigh University and other tests to obtain a final conclusion about the probable course of events.