The principal of my tiny school in Japan was presenting to a student to suggest he make a speech on the Space Shuttle's reentry aspects.
He included newspaper articles on the Columbia space disaster.
From Daily Yomiura newspaper 2003, a Japanese space expert called Nabuo Nakatomi speculated that incorrect angle of reentry caused the Columbia shuttle reentry disaster. Was there any truth that incorrect reentry angle was a contributing factor?
tl;dr Trajectory issues were considered in the failure investigation but were determined to be non-contributing.
While the physical cause of the Columbia accident (damage to the thermal protection system from an impacting chunk of foam shed from the External Tank) is well known, other causes were considered and eliminated during the investigation.
The methodology used was construction of a "fault tree", described here in Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) Report Volume 1, Chapter 4:
The NASA Accident Investigation Team investigated the accident using “fault trees,” a common organizational tool in systems engineering. Fault trees are graphical representations of every conceivable sequence of events that could cause a system to fail. The fault treeʼs uppermost level illustrates the events that could have directly caused the loss of Columbia by aerodynamic breakup during re-entry. Subsequent levels comprise all individual elements or factors that could cause the failure described immediately above it. In this way, all potential chains of causation that lead ultimately to the loss of Columbia can be diagrammed, and the behavior of every subsystem that was not a precipitating cause can be eliminated from consideration. Figure 4.1-1 depicts the fault tree structure for the Columbia accident investigation.
CAIB Appendix D03 lists all the possible causes from the fault tree that were eliminated as potentially contributing to the failure. "Incorrect trajectory" was considered and eliminated: four trajectory-related entries are listed in the fault tree by "Fault Tree Element" name and description (apologies for all caps - direct quote).
Note that a white background in the following images means the cause was eliminated.
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