We set aside Monday through Wednesday, July 7 through 9, for KSC personnel to visit the hangar. Then KSC employees and their families were permitted to visit between three and eight o’clock on Thursday and Friday, and all day Saturday. I sat at the entrance to the hangar and personally greeted every visitor—eleven thousand people by the end of the week. It was tough going for an introvert like me, but I felt they needed to see a familiar face when they arrived in that unsettling environment. NASA, Boeing, and United Space Alliance employees were on hand to answer questions about the debris on the hangar floor, the test processes, and our conclusions about the accident. The Sixteen Minutes from Home video commemorating Columbia and her crew played at a screen off to one side of the hangar. The video never failed to touch people’s hearts.
We stationed several employee assistance counselors throughout the hangar to help folks who were emotionally overwhelmed by the sight of Columbia’s wreckage. And indeed, a few people became distraught when the sight of the debris proved too much for them to bear. Even my wife Charlotte was startled at the powerful impact of the remains of the ship. She said, “I knew what the windows looked like, and I knew they were around the corner, but you just can’t imagine it until you see it. You think you can imagine it, but you can’t.”
It was a remarkable opportunity for the greater KSC family to appreciate what they had accomplished in months of sacrifice and hardship, and to welcome their old friend Columbia back home one last time.
On Sunday, July 10, we conducted a private tour for the families of the women and men who had been working in the hangar for the past five months. Steve Altemus said, “The wives and husbands and sons and daughters of whoever was working in the hangar now suddenly got a sense of what their mom or dad was working on for so many hours for four months. Here’s what they were doing and why it was important.”
In contrast to the rapid, nearly instantaneous start-up of activity in the hangar in February, the reconstruction effort tailed off gradually during the early summer. Groups closed out their areas and moved on.
I gathered with some of my closest associates on the management team on the runway apron outside the hangar entrance near the end of July. I made a special request to the Center director for our team to have a couple of beers that evening. That was unheard of. You just didn’t bring alcohol to “officially” drink on KSC grounds. We swapped stories, pined away at the thought of this phase of our association nearing an end, and toasted one another using space shuttle shot glasses that Jon Cowart supplied for the occasion. Then we drank a toast to Columbia and her crew, and poured a bottle of Scotch onto the runway.
On August 12, Roger and Belinda Gay, accompanied by their son, daughter, and several other relatives and friends, came from Hemphill to Kennedy Space Center as guests of NASA to tour the reconstruction hangar and see the shuttle processing facilities. The Gays spoke to workers at KSC, relating their account of the amazing events of early February and speaking of the bond that quickly formed between the citizens of Hemphill and the NASA family.
The Gays said that the Sabine County community was discussing plans to build a memorial to Columbia and her crew, the helicopter crew who perished during the search, and the community’s volunteer effort. Texas A&M University architecture students were already developing preliminary designs for consideration.
Visiting the reconstruction hangar brought the whole recovery experience full circle for the Gays. Belinda said, “We needed to come here. Seeing the hangar was a very emotional experience and gave us some sense of closure.”10
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Our workforce had endured an incredibly grueling first half of the year. Between the loss of the shuttle and its crew, the hardship of the recovery operations, and the reconstruction, our staff was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. No one knew if or when the space shuttle would fly again. Contractors worried about their job security if the program were to be canceled or scaled back.
By the end of April, I realized our launch team needed a goal in order to push themselves through the grieving process. It was time to get the team back together, operating effectively in familiar surroundings, and focused on flying America’s shuttles again.
I asked my managers to start putting together an intense schedule of launch countdown simulations. We would normally run these “sims” once per mission. However, since the program was on indefinite hold, there might be months or years of stand-down time before the shuttle was ready to fly again. I scheduled the first countdown sim for June 1, exactly four months after the accident. I wanted our team to run a full launch countdown sim every six weeks until the program was back on its feet. It would keep us sharp and future-focused, feeling good about our team, and ready to launch shuttles again.
Overcoming inertia to run sims again was challenging. The team had to take on a massive amount of work. However, people soon found themselves deep into the hardware and procedures again, pulling schematics and drawings, and working through problems. They gradually began to function as a cohesive team again.
The hard work was therapeutic. Some people thought I was pushing too hard, but responding to a tough challenge was what the team did best, and it was what they needed. It helped the team turn the corner from despair over the loss of Columbia to hope for the future of the program.
We didn’t know it then, but it would be another two years before the space shuttle would return to flight. The book was not yet closed on Columbia, and the rules for the future of the program had yet to be written. However, we were finally able to start focusing on the future and putting the past behind us.
Chapter 13
PRESERVING AND LEARNING FROM COLUMBIA
Ron Phelps was NASA’s project manager for reconstructing Challenger after the 1986 accident. When the investigation concluded and it was time to dispose of the debris, Phelps and his team evaluated several sites at KSC and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as storage facilities. They selected the Launch Complex 31 and 32 Minuteman missile silos at Cape Canaveral—each seventy-eight feet deep and twelve feet in diameter—as an appropriate location. Smaller pieces of Challenger’s debris were cataloged, packed into 102 crates, and stored in the silos’ underground equipment and battery rooms.1 Larger pieces of debris were lowered directly into the silo. One segment of a Challenger wing was too large to fit and had to be cut in half. Pieces of Challenger debris that still occasionally wash up on the Florida shore are placed in the side chambers.
The silos are sealed off with concrete caps, to be opened only under extraordinary circumstances. Although Complex 31/32 is officially classified as a storage site, most people consider it a burial site. Sadly, not even a marker or sign identifies the site.
NASA occasionally studied some of Challenger’s debris during investigations of specific issues on the other orbiters. For example, when we discovered cracks in the fuel system flowliners of several shuttles in 2002, our engineers examined the recovered flowliner assemblies from Challenger to see if the problem existed in 1986. Otherwise, Challenger has remained undisturbed and out of sight.
About one month into the Columbia reconstruction effort, I discussed with my team what to do with Columbia’s wreckage once the investigation concluded. I met with Phelps, who advocated burying Columbia’s debris as the easiest thing to do. A wave of emotion immediately overcame me. It is hard to put that feeling into words, but I knew at that moment that we had to do what was right, not necessarily what was easy. I came back and told my team, “I don’t know what we’ll do yet, but we are not going to bury Columbia.” They were relieved. We couldn’t just put her in the ground and pretend the accident didn’t happen.
We discussed alternatives for the next several days. We knew Columbia’s collective debris had the distinction of being the most material ever to have survived a hypersonic breakup and reentry from the boundary between space and the upper atmosphere. The collected eighty-five thousand pounds of debris was ten times the amount recovered from all previous
uncontrolled reentries combined.2 Our materials scientists said Columbia was providing them a diversity of material and accident conditions that they had never studied before.3 Columbia was hard evidence of the effects of high heat, aerodynamic stresses, and an ionizing oxygen plasma environment on a wide variety of materials used in spacecraft. NASA clearly needed to seize the opportunity to learn from Columbia to make future space vehicles safer.
I informally floated the idea of preserving Columbia past Sean O’Keefe, when the administrator was visiting KSC. He encouraged me to develop a plan. Sean’s leadership was absolutely the key to the success of the entire effort. He set the tone for the agency from the outset—one of openness and a willingness to bring something positive out of the tragedy. He embraced the CAIB and its recommendations, and made sure everyone else did as well. This was so different from the mood of NASA following Challenger. Back then it was “put it behind us and move on.”
I asked our vehicle flow manager Scott Thurston to lead a Columbia Preservation Team and develop ideas for storing and studying Columbia’s debris. On May 9, 2003, the team issued a formal Request for Information to gather ideas from the scientific, academic, and government communities. We received fifteen letters of interest in June.4 In addition to suggestions for storing and curating the material, the responses included recommendations for studying pieces of debris, using the material to teach failure analysis techniques, examining how various types of welded or bonded connections performed during Columbia’s breakup and reentry, and analyzing the trajectory of the debris as the vehicle broke up.
The enthusiastic reaction of the research organizations was heartening. The responses validated our vision of Columbia performing an important, ongoing scientific mission.
With approval to preserve Columbia, Thurston’s team next examined options for an appropriate storage facility. Putting Columbia into a silo at the Cape would have challenged the objective of making the material accessible to researchers. They also considered storing the debris in a section of the reconstruction hangar, at the Spacecraft Assembly and Encapsulation Facility in KSC’s industrial area, or in a leased facility near KSC.
By late July, the team identified a 6,800 square foot room on the sixteenth floor of A Tower in the Vehicle Assembly Building. The VAB afforded environmentally controlled space and secure but relatively convenient access to researchers. Since NASA already owned the facility, the costs of revitalizing the site and moving the debris would be minimal—only about $130,000.5
Pam Melroy and Jim Comer flew to Washington, DC, to meet with the families of Columbia’s crew and obtain their blessing for exhibiting the material for research and education purposes in the VAB. The families endorsed the proposal. They felt that the crew would have wanted Columbia to be used as a means of advancing scientific knowledge.
Once NASA leadership approved the VAB site, we started packing everything in the reconstruction hangar and began preparing the VAB room to receive the debris. Amy Mangiacapra, James Harrison, and Jack Nowling of United Space Alliance had all worked in the reconstruction hangar. Now, they would oversee the task of moving the eighty-four thousand pieces of Columbia’s debris to the VAB.
Most of the material went to the VAB the same way that it arrived from Barksdale—in bags inside large triple-wall boxes. The main difference was that the materials were now identified, inventoried, and sorted into tote trays inside the boxes. They were keyed to a database that made it easy to locate and retrieve any piece requested by researchers for study. As in the reconstruction hangar—but on a much smaller scale—the majority of the material would be stored off to the side in the boxes, with selected pieces on display on the floor or on racks.
Beginning on September 15, 2003, workers started loading all of the Columbia material onto flatbed trailers and transporting it one and one-half miles south to the VAB. Piece by piece, box by box, propellant tank by landing gear strut by RCC frame, a team of about forty workers took everything up the VAB elevator to the sixteenth floor and loaded it carefully into the preservation office. The move was finished by the end of September.
The reconstruction phase of Columbia’s story came to a quiet close.
Even though the recovery and reconstruction were officially over, residents of East Texas continued to find pieces of the shuttle that were overlooked during the ground and air searches. The great majority of the calls came from well-intentioned citizens who wanted to do their part to preserve Columbia. Jim Comer said, “One of the toughest emotional moments for me was when a lady sent in a Styrofoam plate with a letter that said, ‘Dear Space Shuttle Team: I found this piece of foam tile in my back yard. God bless all of you for your work.’ I broke down and started crying. I wrote her a letter back and thanked her.”
The volume of calls tailed off after the first several years, but people still continue to find shuttle debris on occasion. One of Columbia’s liquid oxygen tanks—somehow missed during the navy’s search in 2003—was exposed at the bottom of Lake Nacogdoches in late July 2011, when a severe drought caused the lake’s water level to drop about eleven feet.6 NASA and local officials retrieved the tank and took it to KSC to join the rest of Columbia’s debris.
Pieces of Columbia will probably continue to turn up for years. “There’s still stuff out there,” said Greg Cohrs. “The ground was really wet at the time of the accident, so there’s stuff buried. It’s part of the archaeological record now.” I agree. We only found three of the six turbopumps. They’re so massive; three more must be out there somewhere. Perhaps one of them was the car-sized object that people reported hearing splash into the Toledo Bend Reservoir.
Toward the end of search operations in the spring of 2003, NASA established the Columbia Recovery Office to handle calls from citizens about debris findings. Five employees from Johnson Space Center staffed the office until the function was transitioned to Kennedy in October 2003. This administratively consolidated the storage and coordination of Columbia’s debris in one location.7
The anniversaries of all three of NASA’s fatal spacecraft accidents fall within a one-week period between January 27 and February 1. Sean O’Keefe designated the last Thursday in January as an annual NASA Remembrance Day for the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. On that first Remembrance Day—January 29, 2004—KSC Director Jim Kennedy and I officially dedicated the Columbia Research and Preservation Office in the VAB.
Pam Melroy said at the ceremony, “I realized this facility is Columbia’s ‘Arlington.’ We have a very special place to come and reflect and be inspired. If you’ve ever been to Arlington [National Cemetery], it’s a very inspiring place to see all the people that have sacrificed everything for the sake of our country. And it’s the same thing here for the thousands of lives that built Columbia, maintained her, launched her, and flew her. That is our dedication here.”8
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Even before we officially dedicated the Columbia office, its new scientific and educational mission began. In November 2003, two teams from Johnson Space Center requested samples of tile and of Columbia’s right wing leading edge for study. The teams were tasked with developing methods and materials that astronauts could use to repair the shuttle’s thermal protection system in orbit. Even had Columbia’s crew known about the breach in the left wing, there was probably nothing they could have done about it, since the shuttle did not carry a repair kit. The techniques that the JSC teams developed as a result of studying Columbia’s materials were subsequently tested in space aboard Discovery on STS-121 in July 2006.9 In another study, NASA sampled some of Columbia’s high-pressure storage tanks to help certify that the other shuttles were safe to fly.10
One of the first academic uses of samples of Columbia debris was in a masters-level class in materials sciences forensics at Lehigh University. Jim Comer and several others from the reconstruction effort attended the presentations given by the students. Our people were impressed at the insights and conclusions the students garnered from the debris.11
Institutions, spacecraft designers, and other researchers can petition to borrow material from Columbia for study. Scott Thurston said, “Columbia, at her core, was a scientific vessel, flying highly scientific missions. Her ongoing contributions to science are the legacy of her and her crew. We would want them to know that they were still contributing to that mission.”
Unlike a military crash investigation, the CAIB’s analysis of the Columbia accident did not include a detailed survivability analysis of what happened to the crew and their equipment. Pam Melroy vigorously advocated conducting such a study during the accident investigation. However, it was considered to be outside of the CAIB’s charter, and no funding was available to keep her crew module reconstruction team together after the CAIB confirmed the cause of the accident. Much to her relief, the Space Shuttle Program Office later agreed that studying Columbia’s debris offered a unique learning opportunity that could benefit future spacecraft design. In July 2004, NASA formed a multidisciplinary Spacecraft Crew Survival Integrated Investigation Team, with Melroy as one of the deputy project managers.12
The team visited KSC several times and conducted two major debris reviews using material pulled from storage for study. Melroy said she was particularly grateful for the extra effort expended by the crew module reconstruction team in documenting the debris in 2003, because it facilitated retrieving materials for this study.
Melroy recalled the most personally impactful moment of her study to be examining the ship’s R2 control panel, which was immediately to the right of pilot Willie McCool in the cockpit. The switches on other control panels recovered from Columbia might have been jostled during the breakup, impact, or subsequent ground handling. Since the investigators could not be sure how those switches were configured just prior to the vehicle breaking up, the switch positions on those panels were not valid evidence for the investigation. However, the R2 panel was discovered in the field bent nearly in half, which protected the switches from being accidentally moved during the recovery. Some of the switches on the panel are lever-locked, requiring two actions to move them to a new position. When the investigation team pried the R2 panel open, they discovered that two of three lever-locked switches in one cluster were in a different setting than the third. These were the controls to cool down the shuttle’s auxiliary power units before restarting them.
Bringing Columbia Home Page 26
