Late January exerts a chilly grip on the hearts of those who launch fellow Americans into space. As NASA readies Atlantis for a Feb. 7 launch to the International Space Station, it observes a week packed with painful memories of three spaceflight tragedies: Apollo 1, Challenger and the fifth anniversary of the loss of Columbia.

The space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003. During launch 16 days earlier, a briefcase-size, 1.5-pound chunk of insulating foam had torn loose and damaged a heat-shield panel on the left wing. Upon re-entry, superheated plasma penetrated the breach and burned through the wing structure. Forty miles up at 12,000 mph, Columbia tumbled out of control and disintegrated. Seven astronauts--my friends--died that day.

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At terrible cost, Columbia drove home to NASA important lessons on protecting human life during spaceflight. Now, as it enters a new era of manned space travel, the agency is applying those principles to the design of Orion--the shuttle's replacement that will carry astronauts to the space station, the moon, and beyond.

1. A Way Out

The shuttle's 1970s design gave astronauts only a slim hope of escaping a launch or landing disaster: Their only chance was to get the orbiter into a glide and then bail out with parachutes. The Orion spacecraft will launch with a powerful escape motor that can rocket its crew away from a disintegrating booster. A conical crew cabin structure will protect the heat shield beneath it from a debris strike like the one that doomed Columbia.

2. Keeping Trouble at Arm's Length

The shuttle's designers had mounted the orbiter and its fragile silicon-tile heat shield to the side of its 550,000-gallon external fuel tank, which was in turn flanked by twin rocket boosters, each packed with 1.1 million pounds of solid rocket propellant. If anything went wrong, the crew cabin was at the epicenter of a high-explosive blockbuster. The new Orion spacecraft is positioned high atop its Ares I booster, ready to be blasted clear of an emergency by a fast-acting launch escape motor with half-a-million pounds of thrust.

3. Cargo and Astronauts Don't Mix

The piloted shuttle was built to be a cargo-hauler. But a supply shipment to the space station or the moon shouldn't put astronauts at risk. In the future, cargo will fly on a large, throwaway booster optimized for efficiency. The smaller Ares rocket, using proven rocket systems, is being designed to launch Orion and its crew into orbit 10 times more safely than the shuttle.

4. Speak Up for Safety

Breakdowns in human communication kept NASA from dealing with the technical flaws that claimed both Challenger (in 1986) and Columbia. Had managers acted on warnings from subordinate engineers concerned about Columbia's heat shield, they might have discovered the fatal damage in time to rescue the crew. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin hasn't forgotten, saying this week: "A healthy organization allows information to move up, down and sideways, and pushes decisions, and trust in those decisions, down to the place where they can best be made."

5. Time for New Technology

Columbia's loss forced the realization that the aging, fragile shuttle had to be replaced. Now that the process has begun, the president and Congress have failed to deliver promised funding, and NASA is wrestling with capsule-weight and booster-vibration problems; Orion's piloted debut has slipped back to early 2015. But its safety-oriented design shows the agency is trying to put Columbia's costly lessons into practice, lowering risks for future astronauts.

Four-time Shuttle astronaut Thomas D. Jones is the author of Sky Walking: An Astronaut's Memoir and a member of PM's Editorial Board of Advisors.

This NASA photo, dated March 11, 2003, shows a hangar at Kennedy Space Center used by the Columbia Reconstruction Project Team to identify debris and reconstruct the orbiter.

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