When Columbia re-entered the atmosphere and exploded, killing the seven astronauts on board it was a horrible tragedy. It exploded do to a large piece of foam falling from the shuttle's external tank and fatally damaging the wing of the spacecraft. The hole on the left wing allowed gases from the atmosphere to pour into the shuttle as it began to re-enter the the Earth's atmosphere,eventually leading to loss of the spacecraft. While investigating for two years following the accident, space flights were suspended. It seems that funding increased for NASA, in hopes of finding out what happened and trying to find ways to prevent something like this ever happening again. At NASA, they began to take many more precautions following the disaster of
