The External Tank

Throughout its career, the Space Shuttle was remorselessly attacked from many angles: from politicians eager to slash NASA’s budget to anti-nuclear protesters keen to prevent the launch of plutonium-powered missions like the Galileo and Ulysses probes and from poor weather conditions to dropped tools and deadly technical maladies. That is not to forget, of course, two appalling tragedies in January 1986 and February 2003 which claimed not only Challenger and Columbia and the lives of their astronauts, together with several other missions which came within a hair’s breadth of disaster. But of all the lethal incidents which bedeviled the fleet over those three decades, none was stranger than that which hit Discovery in the summer of 1995. In fact, when STS-70 mission specialist Don Thomas walked out of a training simulation to be told that a woodpecker had just scrubbed his flight, he was certain it was a prank.