Bringing Columbia Home

by Michael D. Leinbach

  Columbia’s projected reentry path over the United States. Contact was lost with the ship just after it passed south of Dallas.

  8:30 a.m. EST

  Landing day at Kennedy Space Center was invariably a happy occasion, and the mood was much less tense than for launch. While both launches and landings were cause for celebration, crew families understandably held their breath and prayed during a shuttle’s ascent to orbit. It was impossible to forget the Challenger accident, so launches were always accompanied by unspoken fears that the families might never see their loved ones again. In contrast, landing day meant eager anticipation for the approach of the shuttle, followed by jubilation, pride, and relief when the orbiter’s wheels came to a stop on the runway.

  Other than one blown tire and one touchdown just short of the runway—fortunately, at the dry lake bed at Edwards—there had never been a problem with the previous 111 shuttle landings. Rick Husband and Willie McCool—two of the world’s best pilots—had practiced the landing approach more than one thousand times in simulators and the Shuttle Training Aircraft. No one worried about their making anything less than a perfect landing.

  The entourage of VIPs, crew families, and other support personnel began arriving at the SLF’s midfield park site to await Columbia’s arrival. NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe sported a red STS-107 polo shirt. Former shuttle astronaut Bill Readdy, who was O’Keefe’s associate administrator, accompanied him at the runway, as did KSC Center Director Roy Bridges (also a former astronaut) and Paul Pastorek, NASA’s chief counsel.

  Our landing and recovery team had been working since five o’clock to prepare the service vehicles that would meet Columbia. The “go for de-orbit burn” call was their signal to deploy the convoy to the runway. Once the shuttle landed, the team would “safe” the orbiter by checking for the presence of hazardous propellant fumes. Then they would power down the systems and help the wobblier astronauts into the crew transport vehicle, which was similar to the mobile lounges at some airports.

  My launch director role at the runway was largely ceremonial. I would have the honor of welcoming the crew home after they exited the vehicle. The crew members typically spent twenty minutes walking around to inspect the orbiter—its tiles still radiating warmth from reentry—and to thank the KSC workers. The astronauts would say a few words to the press and then board the Astrovan to meet up with their families at the crew quarters. The VIPs and I would congratulate one another on the conclusion of a successful mission. Then we would conduct the traditional postlanding news conference at Kennedy’s press site.

  The recovery convoy was deployed as usual, with half the vehicles at one end of the SLF and half at the other end. The shuttle could alter its approach direction any time during the final ten minutes depending on the wind direction, so teams waited at both ends of the runway until the orbiter landed and came to a full stop. This morning’s light breeze from the west-northwest meant that Columbia would most likely make her final approach from the south-southeast.

  Astronaut Jerry Ross stood by the convoy command vehicle. With him was astronaut Pam Melroy, the pilot of October 2002’s STS-112 mission. Just back from a trip to England, Melroy was about to take on the role of “Cape Crusader,” an astronaut supporting the crew of the next shuttle mission at KSC. She was at the runway as part of her familiarization training, to remind her of the steps involved in unstrapping the crew and taking over the cockpit from them.

  At 54°F, the morning was cool for Florida but not uncomfortable. I scanned the sky and asked the KSC weather officer, John Madura, if the slowly building clouds were a concern. “They’ll be all right,” Madura said. “They’ll come through some clouds, but they’ll see the runway.”

  8:54 a.m. EST

  During a shuttle mission, NASA always kept a landing and recovery team on standby at Edwards in case the orbiter needed to land there. Robert Hanley was in California with the standby team. Since the shuttle was now headed toward KSC, Hanley was off the hook for the rest of the day. He could watch the proceedings on TV at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, which was on the grounds at Edwards. He would clean up some paperwork and then catch a commercial flight home to Houston.

  Hanley knew that the shuttle’s reentry path would take it over Edwards. The ship’s blazing plasma trail would be a spectacular sight in the predawn sky over the high desert. Hanley and a companion pulled their car off the road en route to Dryden. He phoned his mother, who was monitoring Columbia’s reentry on TV. She gave him updates as the ship’s track approached the California coast. At 8:54 EST, she told him, “It’s coming up! It’s coming up!”

  Streaking across the predawn sky at 15,500 mph and at an altitude of 230,000 feet, Columbia was a fast-moving, breathtakingly bright “star” followed by a beautiful glowing pink and magenta trail of ionized oxygen. Transiting the sky in only a minute, the shuttle blazed off to the southeast over Nevada and Utah.

  Hanley got back in his car and raced on toward Dryden. He had twenty minutes to get to his work trailer so that he could watch the NASA-TV feed of Columbia’s landing in Florida.

  He did not know that he was among the last of the NASA family to see Columbia in flight.

  9:00 a.m. EST

  At almost precisely the same time Hanley watched Columbia fly over California, flight controllers in Houston began receiving unusual telemetry readings from the orbiter. Temperature readings from four sensors in Columbia’s left wing began to rise. Then the sensors went dead within a few seconds of one another at 8:53. At 8:58, as Columbia crossed the New Mexico-Texas line, the tire pressure readings in Columbia’s left landing gear started to look unusual. Then those sensors also dropped off-line.

  Ed Mango was monitoring the flight controllers’ conversations from Kennedy’s Firing Room. He thought it odd that these unrelated sensors would all start failing at about the same time. He became uneasy. Something was not right. The sensors implied unexpected heat inside the wing. However, the status displays showed that the shuttle appeared to be flying its programmed S-turns normally.

  Columbia was above Dallas at 8:59:32 when Commander Rick Husband’s communication to Mission Control was cut off mid-word. Mission Control also stopped receiving telemetry from Columbia at that instant.

  Occasional communications dropouts were not unusual during reentry, because the ionized plasma sheath that was building around the shuttle sometimes disrupted radio signals. However, this blackout lasted much longer than expected. After a few minutes, Mission Control’s astronaut communicator, Charles Hobaugh, attempted to raise Columbia several times. His repeated calls of “Columbia, Houston, comm check” went unanswered. Long periods of silence ticked by between his calls.

  Mango knew something was seriously wrong when Hobaugh switched to the backup UHF radio system to try to raise the crew. The tracking radar in Florida was also not picking up Columbia. The ship should have appeared over Kennedy’s radar horizon by now.

  The first thought that crossed Mango’s mind was: Ballistic entry. Maybe it’s going to try to land at an airport in Louisiana.

  9:05 a.m. EST

  While we stood beside the runway at Kennedy, residents of East Texas were waking up to a chilly February morning. The sun had not yet burned off the fog enshrouding the dense pine forests of the hilly countryside. Temperatures hovered just above freezing.

  Most citizens of that part of the state were unaware that Columbia would be passing overhead on its way to Florida that morning. Many did not even know that NASA had a space shuttle in flight. It simply wasn’t something that concerned them.

  That suddenly changed, just after eight o’clock local time.

  FBI special agent Terry Lane lay half-asleep in bed at his home in Douglas, thirteen miles west of Nacogdoches. He thought he was dreaming about an unusual noise. He quickly realized that he was awake. The noise was real. A rumbling sound grew constantly louder and continued for several minutes. By the time he got out of bed and opened his front door, the noi
se had subsided.

  Farther east, in Sabine County, near the Louisiana border, timber sale forester Greg Cohrs of the US Forest Service was also startled from his sleep. He heard a tremendous boom followed by a rumble that lasted for minutes. His wife Sandra put on her housecoat and opened the back door. She heard popping and crackling noises in the air above. Cohrs tried to imagine what could produce such a constant rumbling and banging. It was not a naturally occurring sound—certainly not thunder. His mind turned to worries about terrorism. Had Houston or New Orleans been destroyed by a nuclear explosion?

  “Brother Fred” Raney, minister at First Baptist Church and captain of the volunteer fire department in the small town of Hemphill, heard such an intense blast that he thought the cross-county gas pipeline passing through Sabine County had ruptured. Hemphill’s funeral directors—John “Squeaky” Starr and his son Byron—also believed they heard a pipeline explosion. The constant rattling and booming had a rhythmic quality that sounded almost mechanical.

  Elementary school teacher Sunny Whittington was in the barn at Hemphill’s youth arena. Her children both had animals entered in the county livestock show, and it was time for the first weigh-in. The open-sided structure began shuddering violently, punctuated by a tremendous noise that sounded to her like “a sonic boom multiplied by a thousand times.” People ran out of the arena. Whittington saw dozens of smoke trails, some spiraling and some going straight across the sky. She asked her husband, “Tommy, what’s happening?” He speculated that perhaps a plane was crashing or that two planes had collided.

  House windows vibrated so intensely that people feared the glass would shatter. Knickknacks fell from shelves and dressers. The nonstop booms lasted several minutes, shaking US Forest Service law officer Doug Hamilton’s brick house to its foundations. Absolutely convinced that it was Judgment Day, he opened his front door and prepared to meet Jesus.

  In addition to the booms, some residents heard sounds like helicopter blades, as large pieces of metal spun through the air and crashed into the ground. Fishermen on foggy Toledo Bend Reservoir heard things splashing into the water all around them. One large object—estimated by some to be the size of a small car—hit the water at tremendous speed, creating a wave that nearly swamped several boats.

  Sabine County sheriff Tom Maddox was at his Hemphill office returning phone calls after being out of town the previous week. It was his son’s birthday, and he planned to spend the day with his family. He finished his final call and phoned his wife to say he was on his way home. Suddenly, the building shuddered so violently that he thought the jail’s roof had collapsed. As the noise subsided, all five of his phone lines lit up. One citizen reported that a plane had crashed in the north end of the county. Another reported a plane crash in the southern end of the county. The next caller said that the gas pipeline running through the county had exploded. A fourth caller said there was a train derailment in the western part of the county, between Pineland and Bronson. Maddox couldn’t believe that these disasters were occurring simultaneously all over the county. What was going on?

  Hemphill’s Pat Smith had just settled down with a cup of coffee and turned on her TV. She saw on the news that Columbia would be passing overhead on its way to Florida. She said to her dog, “We might see that!” As she sipped her coffee, she heard an explosion followed by constant rattling. She ran outside. Her dog was running around in circles, barking up at the sky. She saw smoke trails going in every direction. She went back inside after a few minutes and heard on the news that NASA had lost contact with Columbia. She felt a lump in her throat when she realized what she had just witnessed.

  Columbia had come apart in a “catastrophic event” 181,000 feet above Corsicana and Palestine, southeast of Dallas, traveling more than 11,000 mph. As the vehicle broke up, lighter pieces decelerated quickly and floated to earth. Denser objects like the shuttle’s main engines continued along a ballistic path at supersonic speed until they impacted the ground farther east.

  Each one of the tens of thousands of pieces of debris produced its own sonic boom as it passed overhead.

  Wreckage of the broken shuttle—and the remains of her crew—rained down over Texas and Louisiana for the next half hour along a path that was two hundred fifty miles long.3

  9:16 a.m. EST

  Jerry Ross stood next to the crew transfer vehicle on the Kennedy Space Center runway. The flight doctors, nurses, suit technicians, astronauts, security, orbiter technicians, and Flight Crew Directorate managers on his team were responsible for helping the crew out of Columbia and removing some of the critical equipment from the vehicle soon after it had come to a stop. KSC security specialist Linda Rhode stood next to Ross on the runway. She traditionally challenged herself to try to spot an approaching shuttle in the distance before Ross saw it. The shuttle should just be becoming visible by now, still more than seventy thousand feet high and flying supersonically. Rhode and Ross scanned the skies and waited to hear the shuttle’s characteristic double sonic booms. These announced the shuttle’s arrival in the area, preceding the landing by about three minutes.

  There were no booms at KSC this morning. People searched the skies for Columbia.

  Columbia should have been lining up to land on Runway 33 at 9:12. At that moment in Houston’s Mission Control, Mission Operations representative Phil Engelauf received a cell phone call from someone who had seen video on TV of Columbia’s plasma trail breaking into multiple streaks in the sky above Dallas. The breakup had apparently happened less than a minute after NASA lost communications with Columbia at about nine o’clock.

  Engelauf and astronaut Ellen Ochoa walked over to Flight Director LeRoy Cain and spoke to him quietly. Cain collected his emotions. He said a silent prayer, took a deep breath, and instructed the ground control officer in Mission Control: “Lock the doors.” He commanded the flight controllers to preserve all their notes and the data on their computers. They were told not to make any outgoing calls.

  At Kennedy’s runway, someone signaled Ross to step into the convoy command vehicle, where Bob Cabana had just received a call from Houston. After he heard the news, Ross stepped out of the van and said a prayer. He called the astronaut escorts for the crew’s families at the midfield viewing stands and told them, “We’ve most likely lost the vehicle and the crew.” He told the escorts to get the families onto their bus and away from the press as quickly as possible and take them to the crew quarters.

  Ross called his associates Lauren Lunde and Judy Hooper at the crew quarters and instructed them to get the facility ready for the families immediately. Ross then gathered the rest of his team in the waiting Astrovan. They drove the eight miles south to the crew quarters as fast as the vehicle could go.

  People standing at the runway could scarcely process their thoughts. They knew something was dreadfully wrong, but no one had any idea what had happened. The audio feed from Mission Control was the only source of live information, and it was silent.

  The landing clock counted down to zero and then began counting up.

  KSC director Roy Bridges suddenly felt his stomach drop, “like the Earth had just opened into a big void, and now you’re falling into it.”

  Administrator O’Keefe appeared to be in shock. A roller coaster of emotions swept over him. He swung from elation at the prospect of greeting the crew to the very depths of despair as he looked at the crew families and realized the horror they were experiencing. He knew Columbia’s loss meant that NASA’s aggressive launch schedule to complete the International Space Station was now rendered meaningless. He also realized that at that precise moment, the lives of the crew’s families in the bleachers would enter an alternative future that he could not even begin to comprehend.

  All he could manage to say aloud was, “This changes everything.”

  Standing next to O’Keefe, Bill Readdy was carrying a notebook that contained NASA’s “Agency Contingency Action Plan for Space Flight Operations.” Opening the notebook and reading the
procedures from the start, Readdy told O’Keefe that he was declaring a spaceflight contingency. He officially activated NASA’s Recovery Control Center at KSC.

  Bridges urged O’Keefe, “Sir, we really need to go to an area where we can get our thoughts together on what to do next.”

  I was standing nearby. Still stunned, I told the VIPs to meet me in my office back at the Launch Control Center.

  Ed Mango listened over the comm loop as LeRoy Cain instructed his mission controllers to lock the doors in Houston’s Flight Control Room, the first step in impounding all the data. Mango activated a similar procedure in KSC’s Firing Room. He instructed everyone to gather and record the data on their consoles, keep their logbooks at their desks, and not call anyone outside the room.

  Staff in the Firing Room simply could not comprehend that the vehicle was gone. Feelings of shock and utter helplessness followed disbelief.

  On the way back to my vehicle at the midfield park site, I phoned Mango and asked, “What do you know?”

  He replied, “I don’t think it’s going to make it to the ground. I don’t know what happened. They had some interesting data from the left wing that seemed to be getting worse, and then they lost comm.”

  I said, “The administrator will be there in ten minutes. He wants you to brief him on what you know.”

  I then tried to phone my wife Charlotte at home. She didn’t answer. She was outside the house, hoping to hear the sonic booms and catch a glimpse from our yard of Columbia high overhead.

  I left her a message: “Columbia’s not coming home. We don’t know where it is. It’s not here. I’ll call you later.”