—
During the course of the spring and summer, large and small acts helped the recovery and reconstruction teams begin their own healing process. For many people, the most difficult thing they faced turned out not to be the grueling days in East Texas or long days on the hangar floor. It would be much harder for them to cope with the challenges they faced in returning to “normal” life, when the enormity of events of the winter and spring began to sink in.
KSC’s staff had to keep their emotions in check during their assignments in the field in order to cope with the intensity of the work situation. Pat Adkins said, “I didn’t have time to dwell on the fate of the ship and crew. I just lost myself in the work at hand, and I consider that a weak balm for it all.”
“It was pretty traumatic,” said René Arriëns. “I couldn’t even describe it to my wife. Only the people who worked with you could have understood it. I know Jerry Ross did. I could see it in his eyes. I saw him once in the command post. I just looked at him, and I knew.”
Many people who were required to rotate out before the recovery operation ended were upset about leaving the work unfinished. Greg Cohrs said, “I felt such a tremendous, intense sense of obligation to complete this mission that I requested—nearly begged—to be able to stay on.”
USA’s Linda Moynihan said, “It was like when a soldier’s time is up and he leaves his buddies there in the war zone. You feel like you left your friends there and your responsibilities behind.”
Brother Fred Raney occasionally counseled NASA workers—people who were so driven to perform meaningful work in service of Columbia and her crew that they could not bear to leave before the task was completed. Raney said, “I talked to one man who was literally in tears because he had used all of his vacation and sick time, and he had to go back to his job in Houston.”
The astronauts who participated in crew remains recovery were required to meet with a counselor at the end of their time in the field.3 Astronaut Dom Gorie said, “We’re often accused, as test pilots and military people, of being over-compartmentalizers. We compartmentalize so well that some people can’t really see the human element behind things like this. And I’ve often been asked, ‘How could you fly the next day, after you lose an F-18 in the Gulf War?’ It’s because you have to compartmentalize. We had to do that. But it’s pretty tough when you get asked to go out and pick up remains [of] your friends, or from the shuttle that was carrying them. And the way to get through that was trying to stay focused on what the endgame was.”
“We all knew Columbia’s crew,” Gerry Schumann said. “We knew them by their first names. We knew their wives, their husbands, and their families. That was the toughest part—recovering remains of a crew that you knew.” Schumann lost himself in his work, pulling seven-day weeks for several months. “It was easier for me to continue working than to take any time off and think about everything,” he said. “One day they made me go buy a fishing pole, and dropped me off at a lake to go fishing. I sat there for about half an hour and said, ‘Okay, I’m ready to go back.’”
Counselors visited the US Forest Service fire crews at their camps to talk to searchers who needed help dealing with the nature of the accident, the intensity of the work, and being so far from home. At one morning’s briefing in the Hemphill area, one of the Forest Service leaders introduced the counselors to the broader leadership team. He then turned to Schumann and said, “Gerry, they’re here to see you.”
Schumann was irate. He refused to speak with them or even acknowledge their presence for the week they were on-site. “The big joke was—when we left Texas, the team gave me a stack of a hundred business cards they’d collected of counselors I could talk to,” Schumann said.
After the camps shut down, the last KSC contingents from East Texas and Barksdale returned home on two chartered planes out of Shreveport, one led by Ed Mango and one by Jeff Angermeier. Mango thanked everyone for their sacrifices. Then he cautioned them to remember that their families had not shared the experience. Their families would not be able to fully comprehend the intensity of what the searchers had endured. Mango reminded his group, “Our families all had normal lives. Our lives are the ones that really changed. We are the ones who are going to look at life differently now when we get back. We can’t expect them to understand.” He also informed the group about some of the statistics regarding the results of the recovery operations, so that the people could start to get a feel for the overall size of the effort of which they had been a part. For some people, it was the first time they had heard the magnitude of the accomplishment.
The workers’ families greeted everyone on their arrival at Kennedy’s runway. Mango likened it to a homecoming after an overseas combat deployment. The atmosphere was festive. Several astronauts with their T-38 jets were on hand to thank the families and welcome the staff home again.
The shock of immersion back into “normal life” and the less hectic work pace allowed months of pent-up feelings to surface. Grief, guilt, and anger were the predominant emotions. “The toughest time for me was the first week of May after we came home,” René Arriëns said. “You just kind of started to take in and absorb everything that happened over the last three months. I spent about a week being an emotional wreck.”
Gerry Schumann’s wife Gail said, “He was angry when he came home. He was just not the same person that went. He was very, very angry for many years.”
Gerry said that when he went back to his office the day after returning from Texas, his boss was “… sitting there with his feet up on his desk. I lost it. I cussed him out. Then I left for two weeks and didn’t ever want to come back.”
Schumann was ordered to attend counseling, as were many other people who returned from the field still traumatized by what they had experienced. It took four months before he was even able to sit down with his wife to talk about what he was feeling. His anger was focused on his boss, himself, and then with the whole NASA system—for failing to speak up or do something to prevent the accident. “We were focused on the only job we had, which was to make sure that the vehicle was safe to fly, and if something else happened out there with the operation itself, that wasn’t our problem,” Schumann said. “When you look at it in hindsight, what would it have taken for us to say something?”
People berated themselves for real or perceived missed opportunities to have spoken up, asked difficult questions, or done something differently. Whether it would have changed anything is another matter. The CAIB’s report on the accident noted that NASA’s culture made it extremely difficult to raise concerns that would have been listened to. That was clearly the case in the questions raised during the Mission Management Team discussions about the foam strike.
I know from personal experience that it took big balls to bring something up at any of those meetings, even if you damn sure knew you were right.
Second-guessing one’s actions was not limited to the NASA family. Jeff Williams, who generated maps for the search effort, said, “I’m not the only one who could only sleep three hours per night. I woke up and started thinking about all the things I could have done, should have done, would have done.”4
The trauma of being involved in recovering the crew’s remains haunted the volunteers and the searchers in the US Forest Service for months afterward. “After it was over, the astronauts came to town and wanted to visit with people. I didn’t want to talk to them,” said Marsha Cooper. “There was something I was dealing with, and I just didn’t want to get close to them. I would have lost it. I wasn’t ready. Felix Holmes and I talked a lot after it was over. He called me one day about a month or so after it was all over, as he was just going down the road. He had finally lost it. We all had a breaking point. We just didn’t know when it would come.”
—
On March 31, Kirstie McCool Chadwick, sister of Columbia pilot Willie McCool, and I were special guests at the Florida Marlins home opener game in Miami. Huge Challenger and Columbia plaques decorated the
right center-field wall. We came walking out from behind one of the outfield walls and received a standing ovation. People were hollering down from the stands, “Thank you!” It was great to see that the folks in Miami recognized what was going on up in Brevard County.
Closer to home, KSC held several events during May and June to thank Kennedy’s workers and their families for their contributions and sacrifices in the recovery and reconstruction efforts.
On May 7, our reconstruction hangar team and their families were the guests of honor at a Florida Manatees minor league baseball game at Space Coast Stadium in Viera. It was important to give our workers some relief. We all needed to blow off some steam—to party and forget about the hangar a little bit. We tailgated in the parking lot before the game. Steve Altemus and his team leaders boiled eight hundred bratwursts in beer and grilled them with red onions. I threw out the game’s opening pitch, which promptly landed in the dirt.
At the end of the evening, our group persuaded Ann Micklos to dance on top of the dugout. Micklos later explained, “To me, this was all part of the grieving process. You needed that big family to get you through this. You’ve got to make a joke when it gets too serious. That’s what got us through—that balance between the two. Because if you didn’t have that balance, we never could have done what we did.”
We held a daylong picnic for KSC’s Columbia teams and their families at KARS Park near Kennedy Space Center on May 30. It was the first time the recovery teams from all of the sites came together after the accident, and it was the first joint event ever held for both the recovery and reconstruction efforts. The party was a blowout of mammoth proportions. Hundreds of workers and their families attended. Many stayed overnight in RVs. Jim Comer and his helpers shucked 120 cases of corn and cooked 100 pounds of shrimp. Our finest rocket engineers designed and built an “atomic slip-and-slide” for the kids, and many adults found their way onto it as well. Water-gun fights and volleyball games helped people loosen up and celebrate their hard work and friendships.
—
The exclamation point that provided closure to the accident investigation was independent of the reconstruction and data teams. NASA and the CAIB wanted to simulate as accurately as possible the launch debris strike on Columbia. To do this, they needed to shoot foam insulation into samples of the shuttle’s silica tile and reinforced carbon-carbon wing panels at the speed and angles at which the foam would have collided with the ship during the impact.
Two days after the accident, the CAIB and NASA contacted the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) near San Antonio for assistance in the accident investigation. SwRI had conducted previous studies for NASA on the effects of impacts of much smaller pieces of foam, cork insulation, and ice on shuttle tiles. The Institute was a logical choice for performing the tests that would simulate the conditions of the Columbia accident.
Investigators wanted incontrovertible proof that foam from the external tank was capable of inflicting mortal damage on the shuttle’s thermal protection system. That foam could damage the wing seemed counterintuitive on many levels. How could a piece of lightweight insulation—about the density of Styrofoam and weighing less than two pounds—fall off the tank and cause that kind of damage? And wasn’t it traveling at about the same speed as the shuttle?
In fact, analysis showed a significant velocity difference between the shuttle and the foam at the time of impact. NASA estimated that the shuttle was traveling faster than 1,500 mph—and accelerating—when the foam fell off the tank. After falling off, the foam immediately and rapidly decelerated due to air resistance. The block slowed to about 1,000 mph in the 0.2 seconds between when it came off the tank and when the shuttle’s wing impacted the foam. The relative difference in speeds between the shuttle and foam was therefore more than 500 mph.5
The piece of foam that struck Columbia was four hundred times larger than the pieces tested previously by SwRI. Using a special compressed air cannon, SwRI planned to simulate the collision by firing foam blocks at more than 500 mph into samples of shuttle tiles and wing leading edge panels. High-speed cameras photographed the test firings and impacts, and over two hundred sensors measured the effects of the collisions.
By the time the equipment and procedures were ready for the first test on the landing gear door, the investigation had already narrowed its focus to the wing’s leading edge as the impact area. SwRI ran its test anyway using a landing gear door—one borrowed from Enterprise6 and subsequently covered with silica tiles—to check out the test equipment and processes. As expected, a grazing impact of foam, akin to what would have occurred in flight had the foam hit the underside of the wing, caused only minor damage to the tiles on the landing gear door.
Space shuttle wing leading edge panels are large, expensive, and made to order. The reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) material also wears and becomes more brittle over time, so SwRI could not use newly manufactured panels to get an accurate assessment of potential damage in its impact tests. The test panels would have to come from the wings of Discovery and Atlantis, the two orbiters that had flown about as many times as Columbia. NASA decided to test the process first using fiberglass wing panels from Enterprise, which was not designed to fly in space.
Several test shots at Enterprise’s fiberglass panels—which were stronger than the RCC panels on the flight-worthy shuttles—produced scuff marks from the foam blocks, but no breakage. After getting its process and equipment calibrated, SwRI was now ready to try the tests with the space-flown RCC panels.
First, a foam block was fired at panel 6 from Discovery. The impact created a crack nearly six inches long in a rib supporting the leading edge, and it moved the panel enough to create a small gap in the T-seal between panels 6 and 7. This test proved that foam could damage the RCC material. However, the damage incurred in this test would not have been severe enough to create the burn-through seen on Columbia. NASA estimated a hole of at least ten inches in diameter would have been needed for the wing to ingest a plasma stream large enough to create the damage seen in Columbia’s debris.
The next test target was panel 8, which had flown twenty-six times on Atlantis. Evidence from the reconstructed debris and the OEX recorder indicated that panel 8 was the site of the impact on Columbia’s wing.
At the test on Monday, July 7, the impact from the foam block blew a huge hole through the panel about sixteen inches by sixteen inches across, created several other cracks, and caused the T-seal to fail between panels 8 and 9. This was entirely consistent with the type of damage postulated to have caused Columbia’s demise.
Witnesses were incredulous, but the evidence was incontrovertible. NASA now had the smoking gun matching the fatal wound on Columbia. The test silenced lingering doubts that a foam strike alone was sufficient to damage the wing and doom the ship.
—
In the late spring, we invited the families of the STS-107 crew to visit the reconstruction hangar and see Columbia’s debris. Our staff prepared carefully for the visit. We wanted everything to be as perfect as possible for the families.7
We briefed the spouses in advance to prepare them for what they would see. To make the atmosphere as private as possible, only a few of the staff were on hand when the spouses arrived with their astronaut escorts. I greeted them at the entrance, and Steve Altemus escorted them through the hangar.
Lani McCool was interested in Columbia’s cockpit window frames. She asked me about the windows and where her husband Willie was sitting during reentry. I told her, “As the pilot, he would have been sitting on the ship’s right side.”
She asked, “So, he was behind these windows?”
I said, “Yes, that’s where he would have been.” She then reached into her bag, pulled out a flower lei, and placed it behind a window.
Then it got tough. She asked me point-blank, “What do you think Willie knew?”
I said, “I don’t know. Lani—your husband was one of the best pilots in the world. He knew if he had an aircraft that was
in control or not. I’m sure that at some point, he knew he was in trouble.” She thanked me for being straight with her.
The spouses returned a few weeks later for another visit, this time with some of their children.8 The children were at first reluctant to enter and had to be encouraged to come into the hangar. John Biegert and Robert Hanley escorted them through the crew module area. “For me, it was the most emotional time in the whole process,” Biegert said. “The kids just wanted to hold or touch something that their mom or dad had touched or had been near. We had built up the seats as best we could, and had the flight equipment and hand controllers and switch panels. It was hard for them to see that, but they felt that they had to do it. Some of the kids came back five years later, and I took them through the crew module again.”
The families appreciated being able to see what had happened to the orbiter. They also witnessed the reverence and care with which we were treating the vestiges of Columbia—and the lengths to which NASA had gone to understand and learn from the accident—to ensure that future space travel would be safer because of the sacrifices of Columbia’s crew.
In July, we opened the reconstruction hangar to all KSC workers and their families. We saw it as an opportunity “to educate and inform, give us a new respect for space exploration and those who serve, and allow closure to this tragedy in some ways.”9 We also knew it was important for the people who had been deployed to the recovery operations in Texas to see the results of their labors.
Many workers at KSC felt a sense of guilt over the loss of the shuttle, perhaps feeling they had somehow contributed to the accident or failed to prevent it. Emotions were still raw. Even the women who sewed the quilted fabric insulation blankets for the shuttles thought they might have caused the accident. “I had to personally go out there and let them know that they were not responsible for this loss. They were really upset about it,” said Roy Bridges, who was KSC center director at the time.
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