Copyright © 2018 by Michael D. Leinbach and Jonathan H. Ward
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Leinbach, Michael D., author. | Ward, Jonathan H., author.
Title: Bringing Columbia home : the final mission of a lost space shuttle and her crew / Michael D. Leinbach, former launch director, John F. Kennedy Space Center, NASA, and Jonathan H. Ward ; foreword by astronaut Robert Crippen ; epilogue by astronaut Eileen Collins.
Description: First edition. | New York : Arcade Publishing, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017046190 (print) | LCCN 2017050797 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628728521 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628728514 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Columbia (Spacecraft)–Accidents. | Space Shuttles–Accidents–United States. | Space vehicles–Recovery. | Space vehicle accidents–United States. | Astronauts–Accidents–United States.
Classification: LCC TL867 (ebook) | LCC TL867 .L45 2017 (print) | DDC 363.12/4–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046190
Jacket design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Front cover photograph: AP
Printed in the United States of America
To Columbia’s final crew
Rick, Willie, Laurel, Mike, KC, Dave, and Ilan
To Buzz Mier and Charles Krenek
who gave their lives in the search for Columbia
And to the 25,000 heroes
who brought Columbia and her crew home one last time
CONTENTS
Foreword by Robert Crippen
Part I:
Parallel Confusion
Chapter 1:
Silence and Shock
Chapter 2:
Good Things Come to People Who Wait
Chapter 3:
The Foam Strike
Chapter 4:
Landing Day
Part II:
Courage, Compassion, and Commitment
Chapter 5:
Recovery Day 1
Chapter 6:
Assessing the Situation
Chapter 7:
Searching for the Crew
Part III:
Picking Up the Pieces
Chapter 8:
Columbia Is Going Home in a Coffin
Chapter 9:
Walkers, Divers, and Spotters
Chapter 10:
Their Mission Became Our Mission
Chapter 11:
Reconstructing Columbia
Part IV:
A Bittersweet Victory
Chapter 12:
Healing and Closure
Chapter 13:
Preserving and Learning from Columbia
Chapter 14:
The Beginning of the End
Chapter 15:
Celebrating 25,000 Heroes
Epilogue by Eileen Collins
Authors’ Notes and Acknowledgments
Interviewees
Acronyms and Technical Terms
Notes
Index
About the Authors
Photos
FOREWORD
The story of the recovery of the space shuttle Columbia deserves to be better known and celebrated.
On February 1, 2003, I was at home enjoying my retirement, when I received a phone call from my daughter Susan, who worked on the Space Shuttle Program at Johnson Space Center. She said, “Dad, they’ve lost contact with Columbia.”
Her words felt like a heavy punch in my gut. Columbia was on reentry coming home from her STS-107 mission. Susan and I both knew that if they had lost contact during reentry, then the vehicle was lost. Only three days earlier, we had marked the seventeenth anniversary of the loss of Challenger.
The Space Shuttle Program consumed a major portion of my life. I worked on the shuttle during its development, and I was fortunate enough to be selected to fly with John Young on Columbia during its maiden flight. That first flight was more successful than any of us involved with the program could have hoped for. This was the first time astronauts launched on a vehicle that had not first been tested in an unmanned flight. It was the first crewed vehicle to use solid rocket boosters, and it was the first spacecraft to return to a landing on a runway. John and I were very proud of Columbia’s performance on that initial test flight.
I flew three more times after my first mission, and I had been preparing to command the initial shuttle flight out of Vandenberg Air Force Base when the Challenger was lost. I became deeply involved with the accident investigation and eventually moved into Shuttle Program management. That move was prompted by my desire to get shuttles flying again, safely. We implemented many changes to the program, including to the hardware, software, and management. I believed those changes and careful oversight would ensure that we wouldn’t lose another vehicle.
Then we lost Columbia. Not only was it a vehicle that I was very fond of, but I also knew that the program would probably not survive losing a second shuttle and crew. The subsequent investigation found the physical cause of the accident, and also showed that NASA had forgotten some of the lessons learned from the Challenger loss. Safety and management practices had eroded over time. My concern over the cancellation of the program proved valid. NASA decided to return the shuttles to flight only to complete the International Space Station, but then the orbiters would be retired. An era in human spaceflight had come to an end.
Columbia, being the first shuttle built, weighed more than her sister ships. After building Columbia, NASA determined that an orbiter’s aft structure did not have to be as beefy. Consequently, Columbia didn’t get some of the more sexy assignments due to her lower performance capability compared to the other orbiters. Still, she flew all her missions exceptionally well. She was a proud old bird. I know she did her best to bring her last crew home safely, just as she had done twenty-seven times before. However, her mortal wound was just too great.
I was not the only one who felt close to Columbia. All the women and men on the ground who prepared and flew her missions felt that same connection. She wasn’t just an inanimate machine to them. Their shock at her loss was as deep as mine, or deeper. I knew how the people felt from my years at Johnson Space Center as an astronaut and then my time as director of Kennedy Space Center. Columbia’s loss was intensely personal to everyone involved.
Those dedicated workers now had a compelling desire to determine the cause of the accident and to return the other vehicles to flight status. That involved finding the remains of the crew and as much of the vehicle debris as possible. Debris retrieval is essential in any accident investigation. We needed the wreckage to determine what had happened to Columbia.
My experience with Challenger told me this was going to be a long and tough task. Challenger’s
debris was in a relatively tight cluster but was submerged because the accident occurred on ascent, just off the Florida coast. Since Columbia’s accident occurred on reentry, her debris was spread over a large area in East Texas and Louisiana.
The NASA team, mostly from Kennedy and Johnson, set about the task of finding Columbia with the same diligence that they had for Challenger. Their job was a tough one, physically and emotionally. This book, Bringing Columbia Home, demonstrates the dedication of the women and men who undertook this extremely trying job at a time when their hearts were full of sorrow. With the help of many people and agencies, they recovered the crew remains and a remarkable portion of the debris. NASA took that debris home to Kennedy, where it provided the physical evidence we were hoping to find. That hardware debris, along with the telemetry data from the vehicle during reentry, conclusively proved the cause of the accident. That enabled the NASA team to correct the problem and return the shuttle to flight.
Even with the loss of two vehicles and fourteen wonderful people, I am still proud of the Shuttle Program’s legacy. It was a space vehicle like no other, with the capability to lift very large payloads into space along with crews. The ability to put crews and payloads together proved extremely valuable. People have questioned the combining of the two, but I think that helped make the machine the magnificent vehicle it was. Early on, it carried out some very important Department of Defense missions that played a significant role in the Cold War. The shuttle allowed us to revolutionize our knowledge of our solar system with missions like Magellan, Galileo, and Ulysses. It also drove us to rewrite the books on our knowledge of the universe with the great observatory missions such as Hubble, Compton, and Chandra. Especially with the repair missions to the Hubble Space Telescope, the shuttle demonstrated the benefits of combining crew and payload on the same vehicle. Lofting humans and payloads together on missions also allowed us to construct the greatest engineering marvel of all time, the International Space Station.
It will be a long time from now, if ever, that we see another vehicle with such an astounding capability.
And there will never be another bird like Columbia.
Capt. Robert L. Crippen, USN, Retired
Pilot, STS-1
Commander, STS-7, STS-41C, STS-41G
PART I
PARALLEL CONFUSION
We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry.
—Email from Mission Control to Columbia’s crew, January 23, 2003
Chapter 1
SILENCE AND SHOCK
Kennedy Space Center
February 1, 2003
Mike Leinbach, Launch Director
Twin sonic booms in rapid succession—one from the space shuttle’s nose and one from its vertical tail—were always the fanfare announcing the arrival of the majestic winged spacecraft. Three minutes and fifteen seconds before landing, as the shuttle glided toward Kennedy Space Center (KSC), the loud and unmistakable double concussion would be heard up and down Florida’s Space Coast. These booms would be our cue to start scanning the skies for our returning spacecraft, descending toward us at high speed in the distance.
Columbia and her crew of seven astronauts were coming home from sixteen days in orbit. After six million miles circling the Earth, they had reentered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, crossed the California coast, and then flown over the Desert Southwest and Texas en route to Florida. These last few miles would be her victory lap in front of her astronaut crew members’ families and the KSC personnel who tended her on the ground.
As KSC’s launch director, I was one of the officials who would welcome Columbia home when she landed at 9:16 this cool morning. At 9:12, we listened and waited for the thunderous sonic booms, which would sound like the percussion of an artillery volley. But today the heavens were strangely silent.
Over the loudspeaker feed from Mission Control, we heard repeated calls to the crew: “Columbia, Houston. Comm check.” Long moments of silence punctuated each call. “Columbia, Houston. UHF comm check.”
I was confused and alarmed. I looked up at the clouds and turned to Wayne Hale, NASA’s former ascent and entry flight director, and asked him, “What do you think?”
He thought for a moment and responded with a single word: “Beacons.”
That one word hit me hard. The astronauts’ orange launch and entry suits were equipped with radio beacons in case the crew needed to bail out during a landing approach. Hale clearly knew the crew was in trouble. He was already thinking about how to find them.
My God.
The landing countdown clock positioned between the runway and us ticked down to zero. Then it began counting up. It always did this after shuttle landings, but we had never really paid attention to it because there had always been a vehicle on the runway and that clock had become irrelevant.
The shuttle is never late. It simply cannot be.
Columbia wasn’t here. She could not have landed elsewhere along the route. She was somewhere between orbit and KSC, but we didn’t know where.
I tried to sort out my thoughts. Something was horribly wrong. An indescribably empty feeling swept over me. My position as launch director was one of knowledge and control. Now I had neither.
Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral have seen more than their share of disasters. A launch catastrophe is unmistakable—tremendous noise, a horrendous fireball, and smoking debris falling into the ocean. My mind flashed back to the frigid morning of January 28, 1986. I had been standing outside and seen Challenger lift off from pad 39B, only to disappear into a violent conflagration shortly afterward. I remember expecting—hoping—that Challenger would emerge from the fireball, fly around, and land behind me at the Shuttle Landing Facility. But we never saw Challenger again. I recalled leaving the site with a few friends as debris and smoke trails continued to rain down into the Atlantic, just off the coast. It was a terrible thing to witness.
This situation was completely different. Our emergency plans assumed that a landing problem would happen within sight of the runway, where a failed landing attempt would be immediately obvious to everyone. Today, there was nothing to see, nothing to hear. We had no idea what to do.
Columbia simply wasn’t here.
We all knew something awful must have happened to Columbia, but our senses could tell us nothing. The audio feed from Mission Control had gone eerily silent.
The breeze picked up. Low rippling clouds masked the sun. The quiet was broken only by a few cell phones that began ringing in the bleachers where spectators and the crew’s families were waiting. The astronauts in the ground support crew huddled briefly by the convoy command vehicle. Then they moved with quick determination toward the family viewing stand.
I glanced over at Sean O’Keefe, NASA’s administrator. He appeared to be in shock. O’Keefe’s associate administrator, former astronaut Bill Readdy, stood at his side. Readdy looked me in the eye and asked, “Contingency?” Unable to speak, I simply nodded.
Readdy carried a notebook containing NASA’s agency-wide contingency plan for spaceflight emergencies. Ever the pragmatist, O’Keefe had ordered this plan updated within hours of becoming administrator in late 2001. Now, barely one year later, the plan had to be activated. The procedures designated Readdy to make the official call. He told O’Keefe that he was declaring a spaceflight contingency.
Gathering my thoughts and trying to keep my emotions in check, I told the officials to meet me in my office back at the Launch Control Center (LCC), about two and a half miles to the south. We could confer there in private and get more information about the situation.
KSC security personnel and astronaut escorts quickly led the crew’s families away from viewing stands to a bus that would take them to the privacy of the crew quarters. The other spectators—many of whom were friends of the crew or members of the crew’s extended families—were also ushered to waiting buses.
There was no announcement of w
hat had happened, but everyone knew that it must be something dreadful. Few words were spoken. People wept and hugged one another as their initial emptiness slowly filled with grief.
In the utterly inadequate jargon of astronauts and space workers, this was going to be a bad day.
As I hustled back to my vehicle, I had no idea how this horrible day would unfold—or how inspiring its aftermath would ultimately be.
Chapter 2
GOOD THINGS COME TO PEOPLE WHO WAIT
I began my twenty-seven years with NASA in 1984 as a structural engineer. With an undergraduate degree in architectural design and a master’s in structural engineering—both from the University of Virginia—I was living my childhood dream! I couldn’t believe I was working at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, designing portions of the launchpad platforms, emergency escape systems, and the like. I moved into an operations role shortly after the Challenger accident, becoming a NASA test director and a member of the shuttle launch team. I moved up fairly quickly and eventually was leading the launch countdown.
After a two-year stint as deputy director of the International Space Station Program Office at KSC, I became the eighth launch director of the Space Shuttle Program in August 2000. I was now responsible for all shuttle launch operations, including giving the final “Go”—or often “No-go”—for launch.
Through it all, I never lost touch with friends made along the way, nor did they stop reaching out to me. I like to think I was just a regular KSC guy who got a big job.
Some of my predecessors had a sort of old-school management style that entailed demanding action and acting aloof toward junior personnel. However, my openness, combined with coming up through the ranks as I did, earned me the moniker “the people’s launch director.” I was no overbearing type—but I was also no pushover. People always knew where they stood with me and what I expected of them. I publicly recognized superior performance, and also did some course correcting when necessary. It was a combination that worked well for the team and me. Together, we accomplished amazing things.
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