And now ladies and gentleman... here's an unexpected appendix to that TL, something that struck me like a lightning bolt yesterday evening (more on this later)
AFTERMATH
Life went on, and so did NASA business - unfortunately.
History repeated itself.
In 1988 after a 30 months hiatus the shuttle had returned to space, even after the Challenger disaster. Before STS-107 NASA had a plan to fly the shuttles to 2020 and beyond. And of course this time the crew had survived.
The majority of NASA engineers were amazed at Columbia endurance; not only had the ship had kept its crew alive until the rescue mission, but Columbia itself had returned to Earth without a pilot !
NASA philosophy was that, provided the foam strikes could be limited, there was no reason the shuttles couldn't be flown to 2020 as per before the incident.
Meanwhile a new controversy erupted.
From 2005 onwards the Hubble space telescope urgently needed a repair mission; but, just like Columbia it was stuck on the wrong orbit, far from the ISS safe heaven.
NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe tried everything he could: a robotic mission was beyond the state-of-art, and he didn't wanted to risk a shuttle crew.
In april 2005 he was fired and replaced by another administrator, Mike Griffin. Griffin pushed hard for a fly alone shuttle mission to repair the telescope, but he ran into a brickwall.
That brickwall was the STS-107 crew itself. In an unprecedented move, they collectively pronounced AGAINST the mission. "You have no idea what we endured, the emotional stress, the devastating aftermath we are still stucked in everyday. As much as Hubble need repairs; as much as my fellows are professionals, I can't accept they end like we nearly ended - either dead, or with serious psychological burden. Everyday life is so hard for us, you have no idea."
The astronauts were, at heart, professionals, and so many of them were surprised; there was a lot of miscomprehension, and NASA ended with a deeply divided astronaut corps.
Griffin was stuck in a corner; and Hubble seemed to be lost. That is, until Boeing proposed an astounding idea.
Hubble would be tugged to the ISS by a solar-electric propulsion tug, a technology that would prove useful for many others missions, unmanned and even manned.
Facing no other solution, and stuck between the astronauts and scientists respective revolts, Griffin picked up Boeing solution. Truth is Griffin badly needed focus; a tentative return to the Moon plan, dubbed
Constellation, had been considered but rejected by President Bush late 2003.
Bush had been happy enough with the crew rescue, and considered NASA a liability. Nothing changed.
So Hubble was slowly tugged to the ISS orbit, a move that took a complete year.
But ISS had not been build for Hubble servicing; it was a (dirty) place full of contamination. Although a servicing mission managed to save the telescope in 2009, it was definitively not satisfying.
Hubble couldn't manoeuver away from the ISS since it had no propulsive system of its own.
Ideally, a shuttle would have flown from ISS to faraway Hubble, allowing servicing to happen in a cleaner environment. But the last three shuttles were just too busy with ISS buildup - and of course the 2020 overhaul cut the fleet further.
In order to try and improve Hubble failing ISS servicing missions in 2008 NASA ultimately decided to re-introduce the long mothballed MMU backpacks. A much uprated variant was build with a huge amount of propellant - together with a new, very long endurance space suit, enough to perform 10 hours long EVAs.
The SEP tug remained in orbit; later it would rescue stranded satellites, unlocking the long-discussed business of satellite servicing !
Meanwhile the harrowing business of ISS buildup started again from July 2005.
Yet Griffin faced another crisis. After further near misses, in 2007 Congress forced the agency into the COTS program to complement (and later replace) the aging Shuttle fleet.
SpaceX won the first contract, but after Kistler went belly up, the second contract remained in limbo. Orbital Sciences looked like a possible winner, but a series of events happened that changed manned spaceflight forever.
Buoyed by Columbia (and Hubble) rescue, Jeff Bezos come with an audacious scheme.
Late 2003 the new National Air & Space Museum opened its doors in Dulles. With the battered Columbia as the masterpiece of the new space hall, the museum didn't knew what to do with the old Enterprise OV-101.
Jeff Bezos come with a daring proposal. Wasn't Entreprise a true shuttle ? He proposed to turn it into a dual Hubble / commercial space platform. Back in 1996 a proposal had been made to turn Columbia into a private, commercial shuttle for all kind of interesting missions.
Bezos spent four years refining the project, and he ultimately managed to earn the second COTS contract.
The refurbished Enterprise was rebranded "Explorer".
After Columbia the flight rate was cut to four missions a year; number of flights mounted slowly but surely; as of July 2011 the shuttle fleet had flown 135 missions.
Explorer was well on track for a 2017 Hubble SM-6 servicing mission; according to NASA numbering system it would be STS-155 or so, but soon slippages led to a renaming of the mission.
Meanwhile another country was facing politics weight on its manned space effort.
China was in trouble. Slowly but surely, riots and discontent were piling up in the provinces, until 2015 - when a series of car bombs in Beijing killed part of the corrupted nomenklatura and crippled the party elite. The crackdown that followed met stiff resistance, with hundreds of deads. More worryingly, corrupted police and PLAs officials proved unable, or unwilling, to restore order. As the world held his breath and China prepared for a civil war, the unexpected happened. A gang of moderates sized control of the state and immediately started relieving some pressure on the population. They introduced some limited transparency (glasnost !) everywhere, up to the space program. It was in this context that NASA, with US government approval, hold a hand. They proposed to add Tiangong 3 to the ISS. The Chinese government politely refused for a number of reasons, and instead proposed a compromise.
Tiangong 3 would go on the ISS orbit, a couple of hundred of kilometers away, and lower so that collision could never happen. That way, Shenzhou ships could paid visits to the ISS (and so could ISS Soyuz, Shuttles, JAXA, ESA and COTS ships), and or be used as lifeboats if the need was ever felt (it was !)
As of 2017 the 51.6° ISS orbit had become the centerpiece of internationa cooperation; it boasted the ISS, but also Hubble and Tiangong 3.
And then, in 2018 as the STS-157 crew (under a NASA contract) was servicing Hubble not too far away from ISS and Tiangong the worse happened... you guess ??!!!
THE REST IS HISTORY