Bringing Columbia Home

by Michael D. Leinbach

  Nearly half of the material that came back from the field was classified as “unknown” when it arrived at the hangar. These forty thousand pieces of Columbia were generally small, nondescript bits of hardware such as bolts, tubing, fittings, scraps of fabric, and wires. More than one dozen people in the hangar examined each unknown item to try to identify which system it might be part of. If the system could not be determined, then quality assurance classified the item by the material from which it was made—metal ceramic, tile, fabric, and so forth.

  In a last attempt to identify the items, the reconstruction hangar held an “unknown party” in which all of the remaining unknown items were passed around for people to examine one final time.10 By the end of the hangar’s operation, only 720 items of the nearly eighty-four thousand pieces of debris remained formally classified as unknown.

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  The long association of KSC’s staff with Columbia made them the most knowledgeable people about the ship. However, they were also the most susceptible to emotional reactions to the sad state of the vehicle. “This was like burying a friend,” said astronaut John Herrington. “It wasn’t just going to a wreck someplace and picking up pieces of an airplane that you don’t have a connection to. These guys had touched every part of it in the processing facility or on the launchpad.”

  Workers reacted emotionally to the recognizable structures of the shuttle that came back from the field. Among the first pieces to arrive were the metal cockpit window frames. Those frames normally held three thick panes of aluminum silicate glass and fused silica. The glass was carefully polished and protected before and after each mission. The windows were tough enough to withstand collisions with small particles in orbit. But now, all that remained of the thick glass was a few small shards stuck in the frames, along with bits of grass and dried mud. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! Why did this first piece have to be something that’s so related to the crew? Why couldn’t it be just a strut or something?’” said Ann Micklos. “You had seen the vehicle as a whole, and now you are viewing the parts in a manner you never dreamed of.”

  The mood on the hangar floor could be very somber at times. Every once in a while, someone would recognize a piece from a system they had previously worked on and then would break into tears. People looked out for one another and took their colleagues outside to regain their composure. “It wasn’t just me, it was everybody,” said Micklos. There was no way to predict when or where it would happen—but at some point, even the most hardened engineer or technician would break down when confronting a piece of wreckage and thinking about what it represented to them personally and to the crew.

  One technician who had spent his entire career working on the shuttle’s fuel cell power system was standing at the hangar entrance when a truck arrived with the broken, burned, and tortured cryogen tanks from his system. “He stood there in the hangar, looking out at the truck, and started to weep,” said Steve Altemus. “He just said, ‘Damn!’ and walked away.”

  The crew module area was particularly tough to work in. Herrington described it as being “gut-wrenching,” to stand among the remnants of seats, control panels, tools, and other items that his astronaut classmates had worked with on their mission. “Seeing the damage they’d suffered—and how little damage other items had incurred—really struck me. It really hit home,” he said.

  Our team leaders constantly monitored and tried to lighten the mood. When a large section of the air lock panel for the crew module arrived early in the reconstruction effort, people were concerned about how astronaut Pam Melroy would react to seeing this piece of the hardware. “I could see them looking at me, scared, thinking, This is gonna be horrible,” Melroy said. “I just looked at them, and I could have kissed them! I said, ‘Look at the size of this piece! You’ve brought me this great piece, and I’m so happy to have it back!’ That set the tone, so that when they brought something in, it wasn’t, ‘Oh shit.’ It was, ‘Look at what we found for you!’”

  No matter how hard people tried to keep the mood from becoming grim, things could change quickly and without warning. Jim Comer recalled examining with astronaut Marsha Ivins a contact lens case belonging to one of the crew. It was immaculate—without a scratch on it. Ivins laughed, “Hey Comer! This is what we need to build the next space shuttle out of!” And then a few minutes later, the two of them found the remnants of a cloth crew patch in which only the stitched border survived. The rest of the patch had burned away. Comer said, “We looked at each other and went, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

  We decreed that the hangar would be closed on Sunday—no exceptions. We knew that the staff would need a day each week to recover and recharge. “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” Altemus said. “You’ve got to keep yourself healthy. That decision had a huge effect on the morale of the team, and we made fewer mistakes as a result.”

  On March 3, 2003, barely one month after the accident, former astronauts Wally Schirra and Jim Lovell came to KSC to encourage workers who were still grieving over the loss of Columbia.

  Both men were well acquainted with the risks inherent in manned spaceflight. Schirra commanded Apollo 7, NASA’s first manned mission after the fire that killed his friends in the three-man crew of Apollo 1. Lovell was commander of Apollo 13, when a deep-space explosion led to a harrowing several days in which the world watched anxiously and hoped that the crew would make it home alive.

  Lovell said, “This is a risky business. Everyone I talk to says this should not stop the program—we should find out the cause.”

  Schirra encouraged KSC’s team with Gus Grissom’s famous line, “Do good work.”

  Lovell added, “We have a great program. Keep charging. Don’t give up.”11

  The two astronauts also toured the reconstruction hangar. They thanked everybody for their devotion to the cause. It was as close to a pep talk as you can have in that kind of situation—almost like having your grandfather come and talk to you. It meant a lot to us.

  Chris Chamberland and the KSC Web Studio produced a short video entitled Sixteen Minutes from Home: A Tribute to the Crew of STS-107. It was so powerful that as soon as I saw it, I wanted every hangar worker on all shifts to get a copy of the DVD. One morning in late February, I asked everyone to stop working and gather around a large TV in the hangar. We all sat on the floor, arms around each other, and watched as the crew did their thing in the video. At the end, I told everyone to pick up a copy of the DVD and then return to work whenever they were ready. We needed a break. The sharing of the grief and watching Rick and his crew enjoying themselves in orbit were really good. It was important to remember our friends in happy times.

  With the passage of time, our staff eventually became somewhat inured to working with the broken pieces of the shuttle. Their depression gradually morphed into scientific and engineering curiosity about how the shuttle had come apart and what the debris was trying to tell them.

  Even the pieces of wreckage that were not directly related to the accident held mysteries for us. Why did one piece of equipment come back heavily damaged, while another that was sitting right next to it was relatively unscathed? Why did all the propellant and other tanks in the ship come back in such good shape? Why were the oxygen feed lines in the engine manifolds more decayed than the hydrogen feed lines?

  Solving these riddles engaged everyone’s intellectual and engineering curiosity and kept us from dwelling too long on the tragedy represented by the debris of our beloved Columbia.

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  One day, a beat-up and torn stuffed dinosaur doll—yellow with purple polka dots—arrived in the crew module reconstruction room. Recovery workers in Texas thought there was a possibility that the crew might have flown the doll on the mission for a friend or family member. Robert Hanley knew what Columbia’s astronauts had taken on the mission. “Some things you absolutely knew could not possibly be crew-related stuff, and they’d go into what we called ‘the East Texas trash box,’” he said. “We knew this dinos
aur didn’t fly, but we decided to keep it in the room as our little mascot—kind of a joke.”

  Pam Melroy cleaned up the room one day when Hanley was out of town, and she threw away the dinosaur. Hanley became upset when he returned and the dinosaur was gone. He scoured the trash boxes in the hangar and eventually located it.

  Melroy felt guilty about inadvertently throwing away the doll, not realizing it meant so much to her team’s morale. When the reconstruction effort was over, and she and her team returned to Houston, she had the doll repaired and dry-cleaned. Her crew module reconstruction team created the Yellow Dinosaur Club, made membership cards, and even crafted a badge for the dinosaur. Melroy flew it in space on the STS-120 mission she commanded in 2007.

  “It sounds silly, but it goes back to what you were clinging onto to make this tragic thing something you could cope with,” Hanley said. “The yellow dinosaur was just one of those things.”

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  One of my roles was to carefully control press access to the hangar. Administrator O’Keefe gave me complete latitude on how to handle it. I wanted first and foremost to ensure that the press would approach the situation with the appropriate seriousness, and that they would not sensationalize the wreckage on the floor. Our workers’ emotions were still raw after the accident, and the crew’s families were still grieving. I did not want premature speculation circulating about the cause of the accident until more debris and more data came in. Finally, I did not want the important work of the engineers and technicians to be disrupted by having “outsiders” constantly looking over their shoulders.

  After a few weeks, I felt it was appropriate to begin showing the outside world the work that was going on in the hangar. The first press visit consisted of my opening the door to the hangar and letting the press take photographs from that spot, but no closer. For the next several press opportunities, I took them a few feet into the hangar to a small area near the nose cap and let them look around from that one vantage point. Finally, by early April, we had a walkway around the hangar roped off, and I permitted the press to walk around. We never allowed them into the crew module area. I also escorted tours of congressmen, senators, governors, and other dignitaries throughout the reconstruction effort.

  The sight of Columbia’s debris on the hangar floor and the smell of the charred materials never lost their emotional impact, especially for first-time visitors. Renée Ross came to the hangar to work with Pam Melroy in the crew module area. As they walked into the hangar on Ross’s first visit, Melroy was making small talk and asking about her trip from Houston. Ross, though, could not hear what Melroy was saying to her. “I just stopped,” Ross recalled. “The sight of the landing gear upside-down in the middle of the room, was just … I don’t know how to explain it. It was breathtaking. I just stood there and looked at it all. I knew the vehicle’s dry weight was 140,000 pounds. And there probably wasn’t 20,000 pounds worth of stuff on that floor.” Melroy kept talking, and then she suddenly realized that she was ten steps ahead of Ross. “She turned around to me and said, ‘I’m sorry. I forgot that you haven’t been here before. I need to step back and give you a few minutes.’”

  No one was more surprised about the contents of the hangar than were the KSC workers who had been out in the field on recovery operations. The people in the East Texas collection centers had been compelled to get the recovered material to Barksdale, and then on to Kennedy, as quickly as possible, but they did not really comprehend what was happening with it after that. “We tried to ask for even one more day to do triage,” Ed Mango said. “But the pressure was to get that stuff out to Barksdale! We couldn’t understand why [the people in the hangar] needed it so fast.”

  Mike Ciannilli said, “We had no clue what was going on back at KSC. The first time I went to the hangar, I was blown out of the water. I was just mesmerized by it.”

  The sparse appearance of the shuttle on the grid gave the false impression that not much of the vehicle had been recovered. Only the items from the ship’s external surfaces were placed on the grid, which were some 2,700 of the 84,000 pieces of debris recovered.

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  Engineers in the hangar began their detailed analyses of the debris to search for clues about the cause of the accident and how the ship came apart. As the NTSB predicted, the debris told a compelling story. Engineers just needed to sift through all the evidence.

  Various parts of the vehicle showed signs of one or more significant abnormal conditions—extreme heat, oxidation, and mechanical stress. Some damage occurred before the ship broke up, and some afterward. The challenge would be to tease out the sequence of events and determine what had caused the ship to break up, as opposed to the damage suffered after the catastrophic event.

  The effects of the great heat of reentry were visible everywhere. Some heat-resistant tiles were badly slumped—their shape distorted by partial melting—indicating they had experienced much higher heat than they were designed to withstand in a normal reentry. Globs of metal were spattered on interior and exterior surfaces. We found soot on pieces of the left wing’s internal structure as well as on the left-hand OMS pod—a bulbous section under the shuttle’s tail covering the maneuvering system engines. One of the “elevon actuators”—which controlled a steering flap on the left wing—was pierced by a sharply defined hole, as though someone had applied a blowtorch to it.12 Aluminum globules were also found inside the crew module, on pieces such as seat belt fragments. Heat damage inside the crew module was almost certainly due to melting after the accident, as the vehicle broke up and the pieces reentered the atmosphere at high speed.

  Oxidation of metallic objects made them appear to have been left rusting in a junkyard for years. Oxidation could also cause the reinforced carbon-carbon panels on the leading edge of the wings to erode and lose their effectiveness.

  Everywhere were signs of the tremendous mechanical stresses to which the orbiter was subjected. After the “catastrophic event” in which the ship first broke up, Columbia was shredded into ever-smaller pieces as it encountered the denser air of the atmosphere at high speed. “Broomstraw fracturing” provided evidence of aluminum being twisted under high heat and stress—creating the appearance of the metal delaminating, which was a phenomenon new to many of the engineers.13 Torsional forces exceeding 20 G had twisted and broken the seat frames in the crew compartment’s mid-deck.

  Engineers and materials scientists went to work using sophisticated equipment to examine the debris that appeared to be directly related to the accident as their top priority. At the same time, people who worked on various subsystems that were not directly related to the accident wanted to see how their components had performed.

  Finally, there was the sensitive issue about discovering how the crew module had reacted to the breakup of the shuttle and what the crew might have experienced before and after the accident. This effort was technically not related to the determining the cause of the Columbia accident. Pam Melroy and her team made persuasive arguments about the value to be gained in studying how the various systems in the crew module either protected the crew or failed to help them during the aftermath of the accident. The crew module team conducted at least three audits during the reconstruction process, touching every piece of material in the crew module room, ensuring that the GPS and other identifying information were entered correctly in the database, and adding descriptive keywords that would facilitate future database searches.14

  Incidentally, a few years after the accident investigation concluded, NASA was finishing up the process of addressing all of the observations and recommendations from the CAIB report. Melroy received permission to initiate a project to study the debris of Columbia’s crew module, which would close out one of the CAIB’s observations. This study would provide detailed guidance for designing crew protection systems on future spacecraft.

  To us in the reconstruction hangar, it often felt like the rest of NASA was focused on pursuing their own pet theories about what caused Columbi
a to disintegrate, rather than letting the debris tell its story through detailed examination.

  Premature announcements to the press proved to be both unprofessional and embarrassing. A news release from the CAIB on March 18 said investigators believed that a carrier panel closeout tile might have fallen off of the shuttle’s left wing in orbit, which would have allowed plasma into the leading edge of the wing.15 Steve Altemus said, “The problem is that the CAIB announced it but never talked to us about it.” After the story broke, NASA management called us to ask what had led to the CAIB’s conclusion. Altemus replied, “I don’t know, because the carrier panel is at my foot right now, so I know it didn’t come off in orbit.”

  Some people said that the foam hitting the wing must have caused the accident. However, mission managers were reluctant to abandon the conclusion they reached during the flight—that Columbia could not have been mortally wounded by the foam strike on ascent. After the accident, they continued to insist that the foam could not possibly have caused fatal damage. Some people were convinced that one of the tires might have ruptured and blown open the wheel-well door. And others believed that Columbia had collided with something in orbit or during her descent.

  The debris refuted many possible failure scenarios. One was that the left landing gear had accidentally deployed, rendering Columbia unstable during reentry. The condition of the left landing gear strut did not support that theory. The chrome on the upper surface of the strut would have melted away had the gear deployed and been exposed to the full force of the reentry environment. That chrome was relatively intact, so the gear could not have deployed. The outboard tires on the left side also showed much more evidence of heat damage than the inboard tires, pointing to a breach in the wing somewhere other than the wheel well.