Welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service. Today we're taking you back to the 1st of February 2003 and to a disastrous accident in the USA space program.

In 2019, Ian McNair spoke to Admiral Hal Gaiman about the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia.

On the 1st of February 2003, Columbia returning to Earth after a 16 day mission disintegrated whilst entering the atmosphere, killing everyone on board.

My fellow Americans, this day has brought terrible news. At 9 o'clock this morning, mission control in Houston lost contact with our space shuttle Columbia.

A short time later, debris was seen falling from the skies above Texas.

This was a tremendous shock to the people that Johnson Space Center in Houston who knew these astronauts personally. The Columbia crew had been in training for over two years.

Within hours an inquiry was launched. A retired naval officer Admiral Hal Gaiman was picked to lead the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

We worked six days a week. At the beginning there was a hope that we could find out what bolt broke or whatever we could get it fixed.

It was the only way to get back and forth the International Space Station at the time and there were people up there. So there was some hope that we could get this thing settled in a few weeks.

Nah, that wasn't going to happen.

The Board's findings would ultimately spell the end for the space shuttle program.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon and disdicate and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

It's one small step for man. One giant lead for man.

In the 1960s the US was willing to throw money at NASA in order to win the space race against the USSR.

But once they'd made their moon landings, problems closer to home meant that space exploration was no longer a priority.

The shuttle is an engineering marvel to fix a political problem.

After the Apollo program wound down, the end of the Vietnam War, inflation was raging in the United States. NASA proposed its next program and it was outrageously expensive.

And the Nixon administration turned it down for several years.

NASA eventually got the go ahead for a fleet of reusable shuttles, which could carry scientific equipment into space.

It also required that it be financially neutral, and that required the Department of Defense, but also commercial satellite people, to pay NASA to launch satellites.

Columbia was the first shuttle.

Columbia's maiden voyage was on the 12th of April 1981, and for five years the space shuttle program looked to be a success.

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