Greg Breznik, the NASA coordinator at the site, looked at the box and phoned Dave Whittle at Lufkin. He told Whittle the location and the number on the side of the box. Whittle said, “I want it on my desk!”
A few seconds later, Breznik told everyone, “Step away from the box! It’s the OEX recorder!” With that confirmation, Cohrs and Lane returned to San Augustine to tell the Florida search crews the good news about what they had found that day.35
Upon hearing the news from Cohrs, Willoughby’s crew agreed among themselves not to reveal the name of the person who found it. They wanted to remember the important moment as an accomplishment shared by the entire crew.36 They found the box within an area that had previously been searched by the special team searching for a classified communications box on February 7. Cohrs did not realize this until he reviewed his notes several months later.37
NASA immediately drove the box to the Lufkin search headquarters. KSC’s Jeff Angermeier was among the people there to witness the box’s initial inspection. Many of the other avionics boxes from Columbia were burned, melted, or smashed almost beyond recognition. In contrast, the OEX recorder was almost pristine, except for the missing front panel and the torn connector holes in the back. There was virtually no evidence of heat damage. The amazing condition of such a critical item was another of the miraculous events surrounding the Columbia accident.
That evening, seven thousand miles away, Operation Iraqi Freedom began with the “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad. MSNBC’s war coverage was briefly interrupted by news that NASA had recovered “Columbia’s black box” in the Hemphill area.
NASA shipped the OEX recorder to Imation Corporation on March 21 to inspect and clean the recorded tape inside the unit. Imation found that the tape had broken between the supply and take-up reels. However, the length of tape on the take-up reel implied that the recorder had started up as planned about fifteen minutes before Columbia began reentering the atmosphere. The tape was too damaged for any data to be retrieved at the point where the tape broke, which might have happened in the violence of the shuttle’s disintegration. With luck, however, the recorded data might be complete up to the moment where the shuttle came apart and lost electrical power.
Imation shipped the box to KSC on March 25, where the tape was duplicated. The box and copies of the tape then went to JSC for analysis by the data team.38
The last few seconds of telemetry received in Mission Control on February 1 indicated Columbia’s crew likely knew their ship was in trouble in the final half minute before it broke apart. The data showed that Columbia’s steering thrusters were firing to compensate for drag on the left wing, the ship was rolling, and the triply-redundant hydraulic system was losing pressure. All of those conditions would have set off alarms inside the cockpit. If the OEX recorder’s tape was readable, it would enable Houston’s data team to determine the condition of hundreds of the orbiter’s other systems throughout reentry, perhaps up until the moment the ship finally came apart.
The OEX recorder would not be able to tell NASA the story of what was happening to the parts of Columbia lacking instrumentation, though, such as the condition of the thermal protection system’s tiles and wing leading edge panels. And Kennedy’s debris team was still missing much of the physical evidence of what happened to the ship.
Coincident with the recovery of the OEX recorder, search operations reached the halfway mark on March 19, with 257,000 acres searched to date. More than 43,000 pounds of shuttle material had been recovered, representing 20 percent of the shuttle’s weight.39 By March 24, more than 10,270 firefighters and their support staff had worked the search operation.40
Solid progress was being made. And yet, the painstaking search of the debris field needed to continue for at least another month, until every square foot of the search corridor had been covered.
Chapter 10
THEIR MISSION BECAME OUR MISSION
The wildland fire crews proved to be remarkably efficient at recovering Columbia’s debris, working diligently and with great discipline. What may have started as a means for the crews to earn much-needed money in the off-season quickly turned into a profoundly meaningful experience. Working alongside the fire crews was also a life-changing experience for the NASA personnel, as they met men and women whose backgrounds were unlike any they had ever known.
Astronaut John Herrington was thrilled to work with the Native Americans who staffed many of the fire crews, particularly those from the Western United States. As an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation and the first Native American to fly in space, he felt a deep connection with these men and women.
Their attitude toward their search-and-recovery assignments fascinated him, particularly how each man or woman handled the pieces of debris they found during the searches. “These really rough, hard-core, no-nonsense, work-hard people would treat every piece they found with such reverence,” he said. “It wasn’t an inanimate object to them. Each item was very alive, very real. They understand that everything around us is a living, breathing being that we cooperate with. It made me appreciate my heritage, what these people sacrifice, and how special this experience was to them.”
The crews from the various Tribes and Nations usually tended to keep to themselves. Under normal circumstances, they would primarily interact with their own people. Larger incidents occasionally brought crews from various Native groups together to fight a fire, and sometimes competitiveness and even old rivalries dating back centuries could rise to the surface. On the Columbia recovery, everyone—Blackfoot, Sioux, Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Apache, and others—generally put aside their differences and worked together.
One of the first incident commanders the Forest Service brought in was a man named George Custer, who administered the Nacogdoches camp. Understandably, many of the Native Americans wanted to have their picture taken with him.
The workers from KSC received an invaluable education in cultural diversity when they wandered around the tent cities of the various camps each evening. Many of the fire crews decorated their tents with tribal symbols or other items from home. Searchers drew pictures of Columbia and her crew or wrote poems telling the story of the crew’s sacrifice and how it touched them. Each one of these “badges” illustrated profound reflections about the significance of the tragedy and its connection to a deeper spiritual meaning.
Tribal groups frequently sang songs in their Native languages at night. A hush would fall over the camp while a group chanted their song in their Native tongue. It was a side of America that most NASA workers had never experienced, and it heightened the utter uniqueness of the situation. The wails of the singing and the muffled drums in the darkness often caused KSC workers to reflect on just how far away they were from home.
NASA knew the importance of showing its appreciation to the searchers and helping them see the connection of their roles to the bigger mission. Mishap Investigation Team Chairman Dave Whittle said, “Those fire fighters were out there in horrible conditions—in water, with snakes, being chased by bulls, marching through rain, sleeping in tents in very cold weather. We wanted to make sure that people knew the importance of what they were doing.”
Fortunately, NASA had the experience and the resources to make that happen.
NASA’s Space Flight Awareness program dates back to the days of America’s first manned space missions. It aims to help everyone who works on even the most menial or minuscule part of the program understand that their job is directly linked to the success of the space program and the lives of the men and women who will be flying into space. This kind of public outreach is second nature to NASA and is deeply engrained into the agency’s culture.
At Associate Administrator Bill Readdy’s direction, NASA deployed Space Flight Awareness representatives to Lufkin and to each of the collection centers to help coordinate community relations activities. Wednesday and Saturday evenings featured presentations from an astronaut—sometimes even a comedy show—at the camps.
The astronauts were delighted to meet the searchers, and they gladly signed autographs late into the night.1 Other NASA personnel carried photos, pins, decals, and patches everywhere and handed them out freely. It was a wonderful way to reach out to the people who were sacrificing so much to be part of the recovery.
The collection centers also began showing the fire crews some of the items recovered during the searches and explaining how each piece was significant.2 “You’re going to make the difference in us figuring out what happened and get us back flying again,” Nacogdoches collection center manager Stephanie Stilson told the searchers at her camp.
The education went both ways. Mike Ciannilli met a father and son on one of the crews. After they talked for a few minutes, he thanked them for their help. The father said, “My son is making more of a sacrifice than me. He just got married. This was supposed to be his honeymoon.” When the son heard about the accident, he told his new bride he felt compelled to help his country. She agreed it was important for him to do so, even at the expense of canceling their honeymoon.
“They weren’t bragging about it,” Ciannilli said. “That’s just the kind of people you met.”
Gerry Schumann befriended a young Native American man who sought him out to talk about NASA and the space program every evening. The young man broke his leg about one week into his deployment. The crew’s rules required he be sent immediately back home, and he was heartbroken about having to leave early. Schumann looked for a way to assuage the man’s grief—some token to thank him and encourage him. Schumann gave the young man his hat, which was adorned by pins collected in swaps with various search teams, and told him, “Here—you earned this.” The young man was intensely moved by the gift. No one had ever done such a thing for him. When Schumann arrived home from his assignment in May, a package was waiting for him—a decorative Native shirt made by the young man’s mother.
The communities also showed their appreciation to the NASA family by treating them like royalty. Jerry Ross served as Grand Marshal at the April 19 Annual Lufkin Downtown Hoedown parade, in which NASA’s Mike Ciannilli and United Space Alliance chief engineer John Cipoletti walked with the cattle. Ross also opened a rodeo in Palestine and helped plant a grove of Columbia memorial trees in Nacogdoches.
The City of Nacogdoches asked the Space Flight Awareness representatives assigned to the city’s staging area to serve as masters of ceremonies at the town’s Special Olympics. “I can’t tell you how many people came up to us at the end of the day and expressed their appreciation,” Jim Furr said. “I was just a nobody—but to them I could have been the NASA administrator.”
The City of Nacogdoches also requested that NASA provide them with a Columbia banner to lead in the national colors at the opening ceremonies of a rodeo. Furr said, “When all those beautiful horses came flying in, and all the gorgeous girls in their sparkly cowgirl outfits, and then they dimmed the lights and had a floodlight on the Columbia flag, I just lost it. It was a rough evening for me emotionally.”
Mailbags filled with letters of appreciation, support, and encouragement arrived at the collection centers and at Johnson and Kennedy. They were unanimous in their sentimental messages. We’re sorry for your loss. We’re praying for you. We believe in you. Keep flying.
—
By day, the searches continued at a relentless pace. Helicopter overflights produced excellent results, but flying low enough to spot debris from the air exposed the helicopter crews to extreme danger. Low-and-slow flying put the helicopters well within the “dead man’s curve”—a combination of speed and altitude in which a crash was unavoidable if a chopper’s engine suddenly quit. With enough altitude and airspeed, a quick-thinking helicopter pilot can rapidly descend, using the resulting relative wind to maintain control and “autorotate” to an unpowered landing. If the engine shuts down when the helicopter is too low, there is insufficient time for the pilot to react. Little can be done to keep the rotors turning to maintain control.3
The low light of early mornings and late afternoons, and the hazardous environment of much of the search area, occasionally produced minor incidents and near accidents.4 Mike Ciannilli said, “There were power lines out in the middle of nowhere for no reason—wires hanging between trees, wires between abandoned farm buildings. You never had a clue they were there. You’d find them at the last second, and then suddenly you’re in an emergency situation.”
In late March, one helicopter pilot misjudged the terrain in which he was landing and damaged his helicopter. Ed Mango said, “No one was hurt, but that started us thinking that maybe we shouldn’t be landing to pick up things.”
Luck ran out just a few days later, on the afternoon of March 27.
Pilot Jules “Buzz” Mier was flying his Bell 407 helicopter over the Angelina National Forest, near the town of Broaddus and the Sam Rayburn Reservoir. Mier was a Vietnam veteran with more than one thousand hours of combat flight experience and more than eight thousand hours of overall flight time. He had served as a flight instructor at Fort Rucker, Alabama, while also flying Medevac missions with the Alabama Air National Guard. Most recently, he had been flying tourists around the Grand Canyon.
Sitting up front with Mier was search manager Charles Krenek of the Texas Forest Service. Krenek had twenty-six years of experience as an aviation specialist and a wildland firefighter. A resident of Lufkin, Krenek was well-known and well liked by the forest service community in East Texas.
In the back of the chopper were three members of the search party. Matt Tschacher was with the US Forest Service from South Dakota. The technical experts from KSC were Richard Lange, a space shuttle fuel cell cryogenics support worker with United Space Alliance, and Ronnie Dale, with NASA’s Safety and Process Assurance Branch.
After stopping for lunch and refueling, the crew took off at 3:15 p.m. on their second mission of the day. About an hour into the flight, just barely above the treetops, the helicopter developed a problem. William Dickerson, a local resident, was on a fishing trip in the vicinity with his nephew. They saw the helicopter fly over, and its engine suddenly went silent.5
The helicopter hit nose first into the crown of a large oak tree in swampy Ayish Bayou.6 The cockpit was crushed, killing Mier and Krenek instantly. All of the men in the rear of the helicopter were seriously injured—but they survived.
Dickerson and his nephew found the helicopter’s wreckage. They helped the three survivors out of the swamp and to the side of a nearby road, and then went to call for help.
Doug Hamilton from the US Forest Service and Sheriff Tom Maddox were among the first people on the scene after Dickerson’s phone call. They met the three injured men and learned what had happened. Hamilton and several other men waded back into the woods, through water that was several feet deep in places, to find the partially submerged helicopter. They located the bodies of Mier and Krenek in the wreckage. There was no way to bring them out of the woods and the swamp without assistance.
Marsha Cooper and Felix Holmes heard Hamilton’s call. They brought a bulldozer and several all-terrain vehicles as close as they could to the accident site. By knocking over pine trees with his bulldozer, Holmes built a makeshift path for the four-wheelers to reach the scene.
The accident dealt a devastating blow to the Texas Forest Service, the US Forest Service, and the East Texas community. Residents could scarcely fathom that one of their favorite sons had given his life in the search for Columbia.
Crowds packed Krenek’s funeral service in Lufkin. One attendee estimated nearly one thousand people were on hand, in a church built to hold perhaps four hundred.7 NASA’s astronaut corps was well represented. They understood the magnitude of the sacrifice made by these men and their community for the space program.
Having attended the memorial services for their colleagues on Columbia’s crew just one month earlier, the astronauts could not help but observe how the families of the fallen crewmen and the community reacted to the accident. Dom Gorie noticed Krenek’
s wife Charlotte singing during the service, and he met her afterward. He was moved by the strength of her faith in such a tragic circumstance. Gorie said, “If she could stand up and sing at a service like that after losing her husband, it gave you confidence to do anything. If somebody can endure that and press on, we could certainly press on with whatever task that was put in front of us. It was powerful.”
Gorie also noted that no one appeared to be voicing regrets or blame. No one believed that these men lost their lives doing something insignificant. Rather, the community regarded it as a sacrifice to an important undertaking. It proved that the people of East Texas were doing their utmost to help NASA return to flight, no matter the personal cost.
Now that they had given the lives of one of their own men to the cause, it was more important than ever to ensure that the task was worthwhile—that these two men and the crew of Columbia had not died in vain.
The motto that had been circulating since the early days of the recovery effort now seemed even more poignant. Their mission became our mission took on a much deeper meaning for the citizens of East Texas. They were now inextricably part of the Columbia story—their own blood mixed with the blood of NASA’s astronauts.
Ed Mango, astronauts Jerry Ross, Dom Gorie, and John Herrington, Dave Whittle, and a representative from FEMA attended Buzz Mier’s funeral service several days later in a chapel on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Ross spoke at the service and gave items of appreciation in tribute to Mier’s family members. It was a fitting commemoration for a man who had dedicated his life to serving his country.
The crash caused an immediate stand-down in air operations for an investigation of the accident. The NTSB recovered the helicopter and tested its engine. The problem was traced to a failure of a component in the fuel control unit. Fuel had just stopped flowing into the engine. Contributing to the accident was lack of a suitable place for Mier to make a forced landing.8
Bringing Columbia Home Page 20
