David Klaus, a retired University of Colorado Boulder professor, was a 23-year-old launch control engineer at NASA when the Challenger spacecraft exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986.
When his career eventually led him to become a professor at CU Boulder, he got to know the members of the Columbia space shuttle crew because he had a CU experiment onboard. The Columbia spacecraft disintegrated upon re-entry into the atmosphere in 2003. Both missions had CU Boulder alumni on board.
“It made me much more aware and in tune with risk analysis,” Klaus said. “You realize there are risks in everything you do, and with Challenger (and Columbia), of course, that was the ultimate outcome, the loss of life. There’s always a risk, but quantifying it and trying to mitigate the risk, identifying it, all those areas led to what I did ultimately professionally in my professor career.”…