And what a thrill it was to work with the space shuttle! It was a masterpiece of American technological prowess—the pinnacle of NASA’s manned spacecraft evolution. Each of the winged vehicles of the “Space Transportation System,” which we called the “orbiter” or just simply “the shuttle,” took off like a rocket from KSC and landed like a glider. Crews of up to seven astronauts1 could work in a spacious shirtsleeves environment for missions lasting as long as sixteen days, while the temperature in the vacuum of space just outside their windows ranged from 250°F in direct sunlight to minus 250°F in the shade. They could also venture outside through an air lock to perform space walks. The shuttle’s cargo bay carried payloads as large as a school bus.
Each orbiter—the size of a small commercial airliner—was lofted into Earth orbit bolted to an enormous external fuel tank and a pair of the most powerful solid propellant rocket boosters ever developed. The two solid rocket boosters turned 2.2 million pounds of fuel into energy—and speed—in the course of 127 seconds. The foam-covered fuel tank held about 1.6 million pounds of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which the shuttle’s three main engines gulped dry in the space of eight and one half minutes, by which time the shuttle was in orbit and traveling 17,500 mph. Everything in the system except for the external tank could be reused.
NASA’s shuttle fleet—Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour—flew 135 space missions between 1981 and 2011, carrying a total of 833 crew members.2 Space shuttles took 3.5 million pounds of cargo into orbit during the Program. This included scores of different payloads—satellites, laboratories, planetary probes, NASA’s Great Observatories (such as the Hubble Space Telescope), experiments, and space station modules.
There had never been such an amazing flying machine.
It was also far from perfect.
In 1997, NASA announced plans for a sixteen-day research mission, STS-107.3 The new Spacehab double module, about the size of a school bus, would fly in the payload bay of Columbia, the flagship of the shuttle fleet. Spacehab was an orbital laboratory boasting a wide array of science and medical experiments, studying subjects as diverse from how various systems in the human body respond to weightlessness to how to grow protein crystals for cancer therapies. Spacehab was pressurized and connected to the shuttle’s cockpit by a tunnel, allowing the astronauts to operate the research equipment in a shirtsleeves environment. NASA announced the mission’s crew in July 2000.
United States Air Force Colonel Rick Husband was the mission commander and the man at the shuttle’s controls. He had served previously as pilot—the second-in-command, who does not actually fly the shuttle—on STS-96. He was one of very few astronauts to be given command of a mission after only one previous spaceflight. A deeply religious man, Husband was renowned for his sense of humor, ability to build cohesive teams, and beautiful singing voice.
Commander William “Willie” McCool, the mission’s pilot, was a US Navy test pilot and was on his first shuttle mission. His colleague Laurel Clark described him as a “ten-year-old trapped in the body of an eight-year-old” because of his boyish looks and youthful exuberance.4
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Anderson, USAF, served as payload commander for STS-107. He was a veteran of one previous shuttle mission and was the ninth African American to fly in space.
Kalpana “KC” Chawla, PhD, an aerospace engineer, was the first Indian-born woman in space. Flying on her second space mission, she was STS-107’s flight engineer.
Captain Dave Brown, MD, a naval aviator and naval flight surgeon, was a mission specialist on his first spaceflight. Brown was the only unmarried member of the crew.
Commander Laurel Clark, MD was, like Brown, a naval flight surgeon and a mission specialist on her first spaceflight.
Colonel Ilan Ramon, a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, was the specialist operating an experiment to observe dust storms in the Mediterranean and Israel. He was Israel’s first astronaut, and this was his first space mission.
Between their selection and their flight, the crew spent more than 4,800 hours training for the mission and an additional 3,500 hours training to run the medical and scientific experiments in the Spacehab module. The many mission delays—thirteen in all, due to priority changes and hardware issues—enabled the crew to bond closely with one another. They spent nine nights camping in Wyoming as part of an outdoor leadership course in 2001. Brown carried a video camera everywhere to record the crew’s preparations and commemorate their friendship.
A mission’s commander sets the tone for how the crew interacts with the support teams on the ground. Some commanders were type A personalities—all business. Husband, on the other hand, was one of the warmest and most caring commanders imaginable. He, and by extension his crew, made everyone he worked with on the ground support teams feel like part of a family.
Robert Hanley, from Houston’s Johnson Space Center (JSC), served as the interface between the astronaut crew and the teams at Kennedy who were preparing Columbia for her mission. Hanley got to know the STS-107 crew and their families intimately during the two years leading up to the mission. He said, “Hands down, 107 was the best crew I ever had. They were just awesome individuals. Rick set the stage that ‘Hey, we’re gonna be a warm, happy, fun crew,’ and they were.”
Ann Micklos, the lead airframe engineer for Columbia at KSC, was responsible for structural issues and the thermal protection system on the orbiter. Apart from her official role working with the shuttle, she had a unique relationship with the crew—she and Dave Brown had been dating since before his assignment to STS-107. Their connection further strengthened the personal relationship between the ground crews and Columbia. Ann said, “It wasn’t just personal for me. It was personal for everyone who was working on that vehicle—they all knew me and knew I was dating Dave.”
In June 2002—just prior to Columbia’s originally scheduled July launch date—Ann received a birthday package from Dave while visiting family in Connecticut. Inside was an empty watch box. Fearing that the watch had been stolen, she looked more carefully and found a note taped to the lid, which read, HELP! I’M BEING HELD HOSTAGE ABOARD THE SPACE SHUTTLE! Ann was ecstatic to hear that Dave would be flying with her watch on the mission.
A few months later, Ann and Dave ended their romantic relationship, but they remained very close friends. She participated as Dave’s “stand-in spouse” at all of the traditional prelaunch activities attended by the crew’s spouses and families.
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Columbia, like her sister shuttles, lived at Kennedy Space Center when she was not in orbit. An orbiter might fly three times in a year, for an annual total of five to six weeks in orbit. The rest of the time, our ground teams at Kennedy took care of it.
Our people knew the actual flight hardware better than anyone—the whine of every cabin fan, the condition of every tile on the orbiter’s belly, the twists and turns of the fuel piping in the engine compartment—and hundreds of people at KSC lived with the orbiter every day for much of their careers. The orbiter only left our care during the ten to fourteen days it was in flight.
As a reusable vehicle, the shuttle had to be inspected, repaired, and maintained after each flight. Its complex systems meant that this was no easy task. No matter how well a shuttle performed on its mission and how good it looked after a flight, preparing it for its next mission was never as simple as giving it a quick once-over. Our workers spent tens of thousands of man-hours checking and maintaining every system, replacing damaged thermal insulation tiles, reconfiguring the crew compartment and payload bay for the requirements of the next mission, changing the tires, and performing myriad other tasks to ensure the shuttle continued to meet its incredibly stringent reliability and safety requirements.
All this meant that the hands-on workers at Kennedy—primarily the engineers and technicians of our main contractors United Space Alliance (USA) and Boeing—were intimately familiar with each nut and bolt, wiring harness, coolant pipe, and e
very single one of the hundreds of thousands of parts on board the orbiter.
Columbia was a little different from her sister orbiters. As the first shuttle constructed for spaceflight, her structure and internal plumbing were unique. She had a different tile pattern and air lock, and she carried instrumentation that the other orbiters lacked. She was eight thousand pounds heavier than her sister ships. The differences were subtle, but they were significant enough that technicians who serviced the other three orbiters sometimes became frustrated if they were called over to work on Columbia. She developed a reputation at Kennedy for being the beloved black sheep of the fleet.
Rather than apologizing for her, the dedicated Columbia processing teams rallied around “their” ship and became even more close-knit as a consequence. They loved Columbia and her quirks. Many people specifically requested to work on Columbia because of her status as the flagship of the fleet.
Quality inspector Pat Adkins said: “You can’t actually put into words exactly how you feel about a spacecraft. You use it, you learn it—you know where all its little idiosyncrasies and scars are. You know its weak spots, its strong points. They were all different. If you talk about a mission and don’t talk about the spacecraft like an eighth member of the crew, it’s like trying to tell the story of Star Trek without the Enterprise.”
We all knew how he felt. Columbia was just as “alive” to us as the people who flew her.
Astronauts typically spent most of their time in Houston training for their upcoming mission. Unlike the Apollo and earlier missions, where each space capsule only flew once, shuttle crews did not have a spacecraft that was uniquely “theirs.” They could not work with their assigned vehicle until it returned from its latest mission. There were also no training simulators at KSC. The commander and pilot occasionally came to town to practice landing approaches in the Shuttle Training Aircraft at the KSC runway, but most of the crew usually did not visit Kennedy until their mission drew near.
STS-107 was an exception in that the facility where the Spacehab module was being prepared for the mission was located outside the southernmost security gate on the air force side of the property occupied by NASA and the air force. Marty McLellan, Spacehab’s vice president of operations, set aside a desk for Rick Husband decorated with a HOME SWEET HOME plaque, because the crew was in town so frequently to train with the equipment.
While the astronauts were training, the shuttle was being prepared in an Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF)—one of three hangars adjacent to KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).5 The shuttles spent more time in the OPF than anywhere else. In those special hangars, some teams worked in the aft end of the vehicle to replace the engines and service the propulsion systems. Other teams worked to reconfigure the cargo bay and the crew compartment for the requirements of the mission.
Part of preparing for a mission included a “crew equipment interface test”—more of a weekend-long activity than an actual “test.” The usual processing activities in the OPF were shut down and distractions were minimized, so the astronauts could spend time with the payload and the orbiter to get a feel for the configuration of their vehicle. Practicing in the simulators and the mock-ups at Houston was no substitute for the crew putting their hands on the actual flight hardware and seeing where everything was going to be stowed in the ship.
Pat Adkins remembered Columbia’s crew arriving with happy confidence on June 8, 2002. He said, “They were all smiles, especially Willie McCool. His was the biggest! As they passed by me, I looked them in the eyes and promised, ‘We’ll give you a good ride!’”6
The crew inspected the orbiter and checked out everything with which they would be working in orbit. The astronauts noted which cables were routed to which equipment items and looked behind panels and under the mid-deck floor. The crew requested that Velcro strips or stickers be put where they wanted them in the cabin. These strips would anchor cue cards, timers, and other items once the shuttle and her crew were weightless. It was the first time that many of the KSC ground support team worked directly with the astronauts for the mission. At the end of the activity, the astronauts and the ground workers posed for a picture together. It was an especially exciting moment for our processing team. Afterward, the astronauts and several of the KSC workers gathered at a local restaurant for food, drinks, and fellowship.
STS-107 was scheduled to fly in July 2002, but cracks discovered in the flowliners of Atlantis’s fuel system caused the whole fleet to stand down for inspections during the summer. Once the shuttles were cleared to fly, Atlantis took off with STS-112 in October 2002, and Endeavour rolled out to the launchpad later that month for STS-113. Then—finally!—it was time to roll Columbia over to the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building and into the 525-foot-tall High Bay 1 for “stacking.” Columbia was hoisted to a vertical orientation and mated to its external tank and solid rocket boosters on Wednesday, November 20, 2002.
Columbia rolled out to launchpad 39A on Monday, December 9. She had not even left on her mission, but engineers were already discussing plans for how to refit her with a new air lock once she returned. They needed her to fly one support mission to the International Space Station (ISS) if NASA was going to meet the Congressionally committed assembly schedule.7
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Once Columbia was at the launchpad, the flight crew returned for a training session the week of December 16, which culminated in the terminal count demonstration test (TCDT). I greeted the crew with my traditional, “Welcome to TCDT Week!” at the Shuttle Landing Facility runway after they flew in from Houston in their T-38 jets. This was often the first time I had the opportunity to meet the rookie astronauts on a crew. I wanted the astronauts to feel comfortable with me—the man responsible for their safety on launch day.
TCDT week was full of activities to help the astronauts practice for a launch and to familiarize them with the systems that would save their lives if anything went wrong. The crew donned the orange pressure suits they would wear for launch and landing. They practiced emergency evacuation from the shuttle, running across the swing arm on the launch tower to the slidewire baskets that would take them to the perimeter of the launchpad. There, they would enter an underground concrete bunker and await instructions from the control room. Positioned adjacent to the bunker was an M-113 armored personnel carrier for their use to escape the launchpad area. While they did not ride the slidewire baskets, each astronaut practiced driving the M-113.
The actual TCDT was a dry run of the final phases of countdown—without propellants in the tanks—with the crew aboard the shuttle and my launch team and me in the Firing Room at the Launch Control Center. The TCDT stopped at T minus five seconds in the countdown.
The crew then emerged from the vehicle, confident and ready to fly the mission. They posed on the launch tower’s highest access arm for a traditional photo with their shuttle in the background. Robert Hanley was at the pad, monitoring activities during the TCDT. He asked the KSC photographer to take a picture of him with the crew. That photo became one of Hanley’s most cherished keepsakes.
Traditions are an important morale builder in a program as long-lived as the shuttle. One TCDT-week tradition was for the Astronaut Office to host a dinner for the flight crew and some invited guests at the astronaut beach house, located on the shore a few miles south of the launchpad. It was an opportunity for the crew and about a dozen NASA and contractor managers from KSC to get to know one another and unwind a bit. Through the managers, the astronauts could pass along their thanks to all of the team members involved in checking out, preparing, and launching the shuttle.
NASA provided the food, which was always the same—barbecued smoked sausage and beef brisket, fried chicken, coleslaw, baked beans, potato salad with hard-boiled eggs, and bread and butter. A bowl of sliced jalapeño peppers was available for people who wanted to spice up their food. Dessert consisted of brownies. The crew personally provided the adult beverages; NASA couldn’t purchase those with government funds.
I found myself eating with Ilan Ramon. Seeing that he was mostly just picking at his food, I asked, “Are you all right? It doesn’t seem like you’re enjoying your meal.”
Ramon replied, “No, no, it’s very good. It’s not kosher … but it’s very good!”
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Weather in the Houston area was stormy on Sunday, January 12, 2003, as Columbia’s crew prepared to fly from Houston to KSC. Rick Husband decided it would be safer and more comfortable for the crew to ride together in NASA’s Gulfstream G2 trainer airplane rather than flying out in four of their two-seat T-38 jets. Astronaut Jerry Ross flew out to KSC with Columbia’s crew. I met them at the Shuttle Landing Facility runway with my traditional greeting, “Welcome to Launch Week!”
One of my responsibilities was to give the crew a complete security briefing and review security procedures with them. The crew needed to feel absolutely confident about how we would keep them safe on launch day.
The space shuttle was a high-value and highly symbolic national asset, carefully protected by NASA and the US military. Sixteen months after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States was at war in Afghanistan, and we had an Israeli astronaut on the mission. STS-107 garnered the most stringent security ever implemented for a space shuttle launch.
Security at Kennedy was primarily aimed at protecting the public from NASA’s rockets, rather than the other way around. We established a three-mile “box” in the waters off KSC—an exclusion zone to keep aircraft and boats out of the launch path in case of an explosion early in a rocket’s flight. But now we also had to consider the very real possibility that the shuttle could be attacked.
Bringing Columbia Home Page 2
