NASA DAY OF REMEMBRANCE, Jan 26, 2023, KSC, 10:00 am ET and elsewhere at other times

NASA will observe its 2o23 Day of Remembrance on January 26, 2023.  Details are in a NASA press release.

Among other events, Kennedy Space Center and the Astronauts Memorial Foundation will host a ceremony at the Space Mirror Memorial at 10:00 am ET that will livestream on KSC’s YouTube channel and Facebook page.

The annual Day of Remembrance, held on the last Thursday of January, honors astronauts who died in the line of duty including the crews of Apollo 1 (January 27, 1967), Space Shuttle Challenger (January 28, 1986) and Space Shuttle Columbia (February 1, 2003).

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Columbia STS-107 tragedy that took the lives of seven astronauts: NASA’s Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark, David Brown, and Kalpana Chawla, and Ilan Ramon of the Israeli Air Force.

Israel holds an annual Ilan Ramon conference and it will take place January 31-February 1. NASA personnel will be there as well.

The STS-107 crew died during reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere after a 16-day science mission. Columbia was torn apart by aerodynamic forces after superheated gases (plasma) entered the left wing through a hole caused when a piece of foam liberated from the External Tank hit it during launch. Unaware of the danger, the crew carried out their mission and was coming in for landing in Florida when the plasma entered and deformed the wing, destroying the shuttle. Debris fell over many states, especially Texas.

A seminar held in 2013 on the 10th anniversary of the Columbia tragedy discussed what was learned, unlearned, forgotten and wrongly learned from the 1986 space shuttle Challenger tragedy, what happened witih Columbia, and how “the work is never done” to remain vigilant.