After another launch scrub for weather, Space Shuttle mission STS-93 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida twenty years ago in 1999 to begin an eventful ascent into low Earth orbit. Shuttle Columbia, with NASA’s first female spaceflight commander Eileen Collins leading a crew of five, successfully reached orbit and went on to deploy the Chandra X-Ray Observatory hours later, but two incidents occurred one on top of the other around liftoff to make for one of the busier launches in Shuttle history.
An electrical short reduced critical elements of the ascending vehicle to zero-fault tolerance before the Shuttle cleared the launch tower, and a fuel leak had started even before liftoff that caused Columbia to run out of fuel early. Although the incidents weren’t directly related, a lucky coincidence of one of the failures meant that instead of running out of fuel significantly early the Shuttle’s main engines shut down only a fraction of a second before they needed to.