posted 01-06-2023 10:31 AM               

Space Cover 683: Space Shuttle STS-107

Space Shuttle Columbia STS-107 launched from Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 16, 2003 with seven astronauts aboard. The crew consisted of Commander Rick Husband USAF, Pilot William McCool USN, Mission Specialist 1 David Brown USN, Mission Specialist 2 Kalpana Chawla,Mission Specialist 3 Michael Anderson USAF, Mission Specialist 4 Laurel Clark, and Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon IAF who was the first astronaut from Israel.

STS-107 carries the SPACEHAB research module, the Freestar experiment, and the Extended duration Orbiter palet. During the missions nearly 16 days in orbit, the crew conducted a multitude of international experiments.

On February 1, 2003, tragedy struck when an in-flight break up occurred during reentry into the atmosphere which resulted in the deaths of all seven crew members and disintegrated Columbia. Immediately after the disaster, NASA convened the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to determine the cause of the disintegration. The source of the failure was determined to have been caused by a piece of foam that broke off during launch and damaged the thermal protection system (reinforced carbon-carbon panels and thermal protection tiles) on the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing. During re-entry the damaged wing slowly overheated and came apart, eventually leading to loss of control and disintegration of the vehicle. The cockpit window frame is now exhibited in a memorial inside the Space Shuttle Atlantis Pavilion at the Kennedy Space Center.

The mission patch is uniquely shaped in the Space Shuttle orbiter's outline.

The central element of the patch is the microgravity symbol, µg, flowing into the rays of the astronaut symbol. The mission inclination is portrayed by the 39-degree angle of the astronaut symbol to the Earth's horizon. The sunrise is representative of the numerous experiments that are the dawn of a new era for continued microgravity research on the International Space Station and beyond. The breadth of science and the exploration of space is illustrated by the Earth and stars. The constellation Columba (the dove) was chosen to symbolize peace on Earth and the Space Shuttle Columbia. The seven stars also represent the mission crew members and honor the original astronauts who paved the way to make research in space possible. Six stars have five points, the seventh has six points like a Star of David, symbolizing the Israeli Space Agency's contributions to the mission.

The three covers depicted are a few of the covers I designed for the mission.

posted 01-08-2023 05:36 PM               

Its cachet shows well the crew patch that Chris has described.

posted 01-13-2023 03:45 PM               

All of the mission emblem covers are official NASA issues produced by SpaceCoast Cover Service (SCCS). Included on some are rubber stamp cachet impressions, also by SCCS, along with a commercial crew photo-launch card. In this montage presentation, there are no other depicted commercial or space dealer cachet covers. Also, after much thought in cachet-preparing Feb. 1st covers for the mission end, I thought it would be best not to produce cachets of Columbia's destruction even though my firm had access to such a cachet depiction from Houston. The same also applied to Challenger's ill-fated launch in Jan. 1986. Though nothing against shuttle cachets of those destructions, it was history in the making, for which I do understand.

It was thirty-seven years ago on Feb. 1 when I was "on station" in viewing the Columbia spaceship landing at Kennedy Space Center. With me were a few NASA officials and space center DNPS workers, all looking skyward in trying to see Columbia in coming back home after a long 16-day extended duration orbiter "pure science research" mission.

Our position or "station" at KSC would allow us to see Columbia directly overhead less than a minute before touchdown on the Shuttle Landing Facility (south end approach on Runway 33) very close to us. After waiting more than a minute past Columbia's 9:16 am arrival time, I said to our group that something had gone terribly wrong. "What do you mean, Ken," someone had said to me.

The planned STS-107 touchdown of Columbia was never to be that Saturday morning in Florida. Columbia (OV-102), NASA's oldest space shuttle orbiter in the fleet on her 28th spaceflight, had started to disintegrate about 16 minutes earlier over northeast Texas while traveling 18 times the speed of sound about 40 miles above the ground.

Part of my work schedule on that tragic morning was to process and cancel as quickly as possible a couple of hundred special STS-107 mission cachet envelope covers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center post office. They had already been postmarked on launch day more than two weeks earlier and one of my tasks was to apply landing day cancels at the bottom of those exact same covers in creating the first STS-107 combo-launch/landing covers from mission start to finish.

Even though Columbia didn't land at Kennedy, I headed over to the KSCPO as was the original plan in getting the cachet envelopes postmarked Feb. 1. As a special request after landing, they were to be handed over to a special employee for VIP distribution before 10:30 am that same morning. They were completed as requested, and from there, I rushed over to the KSC News Center in covering what was possible of why STS-107 didn't land.

Needless to say, it was a horrible, tragic, and sad day that had brought back memories of covering Space Shuttle Challenger on Mission 51-L seventeen years earlier. We all felt so heartbroken for the crew families and NASA community of STS-107.