"...The Columbia is lost; there are no survivors"

With these words, George W Bush, ended the presidential response about that was happened few moments before.

Just few days after the anniversary of Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, it's time to remember a second one: 1st of February 2003 the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during the re-entry in the atmosphere. As the Challenger disaster, even in this one all the crew of 7 astronauts died.

The disaster of Columbia was caused by a foam insultation broken from the external tank that impacted with left wing, stucking with it. This impact caused a failure in the heat shield allowing the hot gases of the atmosphere to penetrate into it and destroyed the internal structure of the wing. Due to this, the spacecraft became unstable and broke apart after few seconds, causing the instant dead of entire crew, that could not do anything to prevent or fix the problem, even they knew it.

The crew members were:

Rick Husband

Willie McCool

Kalpana Chawla (the first-ever Indian female astronaut)

Michael Anderson

Laurel Clark

David Brown 

Ilan Ramon (the first ever Israeli astronaut) 

In their memory, it was estabilished to name 7 asteroids (numbers from 51823 to 51829) discovered in 2001 from Mont Palomar Observatory.

In this video, published by Nasa, you can see the re-entry operation until 11 minutes before the disaster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIHLoik2ObA