Outposts on the Frontier: A Fifty-Year History of Space Stations (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)

by Jay Chladek

  STS-112 arrived at the ISS in October, bringing with it the S1 segment of the station’s main solar array truss. The truss segment was massive, as it took up almost the entire cargo bay of Atlantis. Three space walks were conducted to help join the S1 and S0 truss segments together and fully integrate their systems. All three space walks on this mission were conducted by Mir space walk veteran Dave Wolf and rookie NASA astronaut Piers Sellers. Both men accomplished the tasks assigned with no problems. Sellers was born in the United Kingdom and had a meteorology background. He and his wife moved to the United States in 1982 so that he could take a job at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, and he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1991. Sellers was selected to become an astronaut in 1996.

  With the arrival of the Expedition 6 crew on mission STS-113 in late November 2002, the ISS program had a string of successes to look back upon. The station had grown to over twice its original size and had greatly expanded its capabilities. As Expedition 6 crewmembers Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and rookie astronaut Don Pettit left the space shuttle Endeavour to take up residence in the ISS for a five-month mission, hopes were high both on the ground and in orbit that 2003 would be a great year.

  12

  Columbia

  1 February 2003, 08:05 CST—Hemphill, Texas.

  Ask someone to point out the town of Hemphill on a map, and they likely will not be able to. Located on the extreme eastern side of Texas in Sabine County, Hemphill is about the farthest east that one can get in Texas before ending up in Louisiana. The town of about 1,100 residents sits on the western bank of the Sabine River basin, near the Toledo Bend Reservoir. Thanks to the region’s dense forests, a large portion of the town’s residents work for the U.S. Forest Service, while others have jobs in support of camping and fishing activities. There is also the usual mix of farmers and livestock owners.

  Hemphill’s residents are typically early risers. So on that Saturday morning, almost everyone heard a strange sound. For many, it sounded like a dull rumble that increased in volume, peaked, and then faded out to silence about fifteen seconds later. It was loud enough that people taking showers heard it through solid walls and over running water. It shook homes and businesses all over the region. Nobody was sure what they heard, but it sounded as though something bad had happened very close by. Some residents outdoors looked up to see debris streaking overhead and falling out of the sky, but no one knew what had caused it. Almost right after the noise faded and debris began hitting the ground, the town’s 911 dispatch center and local sheriff’s office began receiving calls reporting everything from a plane crash on one side of the county to a possible train derailment on the other.

  STS-107’s Crew and Mission

  The crew of mission STS-107 aboard the space shuttle Columbia was very well known in the astronaut office, as they had trained together for quite some time. The repeatedly slipping launch date kept them together long after other crews had flown. Mission commander Rick Husband, a former test pilot and colonel in the air force, had flown as the pilot on STS-96, one of the first supply missions to the ISS. He was one of three veteran astronauts on the crew. Mike Anderson was a veteran of STS-89, the final shuttle mission to Mir, which brought Andy Thomas home.

  The third veteran was Kalpana Chawla, a veteran of STS-87. Chawla was born in India but moved to the United States to get her degree in aerospace engineering in the 1980s, and she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1990. She was also an aerobatic private pilot. When Chawla joined the astronaut corps in 1995, she was given the nickname KC as it was easier to pronounce than her Indian name. At work, she usually had a smile on her face and the most infectious, upbeat attitude of anyone there.

  There were also four rookies aboard Columbia for this mission. William McCool, Columbia’s pilot, was a naval aviator with attack-jet experience who graduated second in his academy class. He was also blessed with perpetual boyish good looks. Laurel Clark and Dave Brown were both flight surgeons from the U.S. Navy. Clark was married to NASA flight surgeon Jonathan Clark. Flight surgeon Dave Brown had also served time in A-6 and F/A-18 attack-jet squadrons before joining NASA.

  The fourth rookie was Israeli payload specialist Ilan Ramon. Ilan was a child of Holocaust survivors from World War II. He was a former F-16 fighter pilot and a colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces. Two decades prior, he was the youngest member of a group of pilots in the Israeli Defense Forces who were handpicked to conduct a bombing mission against the Osirak nuclear reactor, deep within Iraq’s borders. The purpose of the mission was to deny Iraq the ability to create its own nuclear weapon. The strike was successful, and all aircraft returned safely. As Israel’s first astronaut, he was a celebrity in his home country. Even though he was designated a payload specialist, the length of training time caused by mission delays meant that he was almost as well trained as a mission specialist. His wife and youngest children lived with him in Houston during his training.

  The STS-107 mission carried a Spacehab double module outfitted as a science laboratory. The module was built by a private company known as Spacehab and was the brainchild of the company’s founder, Bob Citron. Like the pressurized Spacelab module, the Spacehab was designed to fit within the shuttle’s cargo bay, and it could fly as a single, short unit or as a longer unit known as the double module.

  46. The STS-107 crew inside the Spacehab lab module. Clockwise from top: McCool, Anderson, Ramon, Clark, Husband, Chawla, and Brown. Courtesy NASA.

  But the Spacehab differed from the Spacelab module in a few key ways due to advances in technology. It was a bit bigger internally and could be outfitted either as a logistics module or as a dedicated laboratory, unlike Spacelab’s sole use as a scientific payload. The Spacelab module, when used by itself, also required loading into the rear of the shuttle’s payload bay due to center-of-gravity issues, limiting what other cargo could be carried on the same mission. Built from lighter materials, the Spacehab had no such limitations.

  The Spacehab had first flown on STS-57 as a single-module science lab, and later it had flown in both single- and double-length configurations as a logistics module on flights to Mir and to the ISS. The use of Spacehab for this dual purpose led to lower mission costs, and it led to the eventual phasing out of the Spacelab module, which flew its last mission in 1998 aboard Columbia on STS-90. STS-107 was the first flight of a Spacehab as a double-length science module. STS-107 was also the last planned shuttle mission dedicated to science gathering. After this flight, the ISS would become NASA’s primary orbital science laboratory, with shuttle missions flying only in support of it.

  The mission lasted over two weeks on orbit; to accommodate that, Columbia was equipped with an Extended Duration Orbiter (EDO) pallet rack at the rear of the payload bay. The EDO rack contained additional tanks of cryogenic liquid oxygen and hydrogen for the shuttle’s fuel cells, allowing for extended operations compared to the eight or nine days of a normal shuttle mission. The space shuttle Endeavour had originally been outfitted with an EDO kit as well, but the system was removed to make it lighter for ISS support flights. Columbia kept its EDO kit since it was already too heavy for most ISS cargoes, although NASA had plans to refit the orbiter for ISS support flights once STS-107 concluded.

  For this flight, around-the-clock science was the order of the day, so the crew were divided into red and blue teams. A total of thirty-two scientific payloads flew on STS-107. Crewmembers would act as subjects for biomedical data collection, which is primarily why two flight surgeons were on board. But experiments were being conducted in other scientific disciplines as well, making this a jack-of-all-trades flight. Scientific payloads involving rats, insects, and primitive organisms such as flatworms were being flown on behalf of several schools on Earth to study the effects of microgravity. A new water-recycling system was also being tested for possible use on the ISS. The properties of flames in zero gravity and how to detect them was also being studied in a continuation of research conducted on previous shuttle fligh
ts.

  Outside the Spacehab, additional experiments were mounted in the payload bay on a bridge rack known as the “Hitchhiker.” They were part of the Fast Reaction Experiments Enabling Science, Technology, Applications, and Research (FREESTAR) package. Among them was a payload known as the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment (MEIDEX). It was a camera and instrument system designed to study the composition and density of dust particles over the African, Mediterranean, and Israeli desert regions and to measure their effects on weather. Ramon was on board primarily to handle the MEIDEX experiment, in addition to other duties.

  At the conclusion of almost sixteen days on orbit, Columbia’s scientific mission was considered a huge success. Over 80 percent of the scientific data had already been electronically transmitted to the principle investigators, along with numerous photographs shot by the crew’s digital and video cameras. Scientists were already digesting the data while waiting for the experiments themselves to return. The crew were proud of what they had accomplished and were ready to return home.

  “Get Ready”

  1 February 2003, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, near the Shuttle Landing Facility.

  On the ground at KSC in Florida just after 09:00 EST, the families of the STS-107 crew were waiting around the VIP area for the two sonic booms that would announce the arrival of Columbia and its final approach to the Shuttle Landing Facility. Pretty much everyone was in a relaxed mood, anticipating the return home of seven astronauts to be reunited with their families.

  For shuttle missions, the NASA astronaut office typically assigned several members of the astronaut corps to become escorts for the families. They would help act as guides to the spouses and children while at KSC during launch and landing. The escorts would also keep the families insulated from the media. But the escorts also had an important secondary role. They acted as assistants to the families when a disaster occurred. That role had come into play only once before during the loss of the space shuttle Challenger on STS-51L.

  For STS-107, astronauts Steve Lindsey, Scott Parazynski, Terry Virts, and Clay Anderson were assigned as escorts and were all on hand for Columbia’s liftoff two weeks prior. Only Lindsey, Virts, and Anderson were available to make the trip to Florida for Columbia’s landing. Anderson and Virts were rookies who hadn’t flown in space yet.

  Since 11 September 2001, security at KSC had been tightened for launches and landings to guard against possible terrorism. Security for this mission was tighter than normal due to the ongoing tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Given Ramon’s assignment on STS-107’s crew, the ongoing war against terrorism in Afghanistan, and all signs pointing to war between the United States and Iraq in a few months time, NASA security, the FBI, and other federal agencies had a larger presence for this mission than normal.

  While members of the astronaut office typically know one another, it is a big group, and some relationships are closer than others. In Clay Anderson’s case, he had several friends on this flight. One particular STS-107 astronaut with whom he had worked before was Mike Anderson. Obviously the two men weren’t related to one another since Mike was of African American descent, while Clay had a much lighter complexion and a noticeably receding hairline. Clay was born in Ashland, Nebraska, and had grown up there. He became the first person born in Nebraska to be selected as an astronaut. One of Mike Anderson’s first duty assignments in the U.S. Air Force right out of flight school was flying jets at Offutt AFB in Bellevue, Nebraska. He had also taken classes at Creighton University in nearby Omaha. So both men were very aware of each other’s Nebraska connection.

  In January 2000 both men were the first to fly a NASA T-38 after concerns about the infamous Y2K computer bug. As an air force pilot, Mike flew front seat while Clay, being a civilian, flew in the rear seat. The flight went without incident. While Y2K concerns seemed more hype than reality, the flight made for a good story shared between them as two astronauts, two Andersons, and two Nebraskans (one by birth, one by association).

  Back at KSC, about ten minutes after 09:00 EST, Clay Anderson and Steve Lindsey were chatting with STS-107 family members. While watching the countdown of the mission clock to the estimated time of landing, both men could hear CAPCOM astronaut Charlie Hobaugh back in Houston on the mission control feed saying “Columbia Houston, UHF comm check” over and over again. Both men wondered why mission control was calling for a communications check on UHF. UHF stands for “ultrahigh frequency.” It is a radio frequency band used by aircraft, but the shuttle is equipped with a UHF backup radio in case of a failure with the normal radio systems. Both astronauts thought it was odd for the call to be made, since UHF isn’t normally used, but they didn’t think much of it otherwise. A minute or two later, Anderson figured something was up when he watched the face of a female security person listening to a walkie-talkie go white as she heard something on her radio. Lindsey stepped away for a bit, apparently to be informed of what had happened. When Lindsey came back, his only words to Clay and the other escorts were, “Get ready.”

  According to Clay Anderson, “Once [Lindsey] said ‘Get ready,’ I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I knew something was wrong. We hadn’t seen [Columbia] come in; we hadn’t heard the sonic booms. We heard comm that was not of the ordinary.” After that, the escort astronauts gathered their designated families together and walked them to the parked vehicles used to drive them over earlier that morning. While the families didn’t know exactly what, they figured that something had happened, as they were being taken from the stands without a shuttle on the runway. Clay made sure to shut the radio off in the vehicle he was driving, because he guessed correctly that news agencies had already picked up on the story; he didn’t want the families to hear anything before an official notification had been made.

  When the group arrived at the crew quarters building after a short drive, everyone was taken into a conference room. At that point, nobody had any firm answers yet, and the escorts were just as much in the dark as the families. Anderson walked down to the management wing of the building and met with astronaut Bob Cabana, who, at the time, was part of the Flight Crew Operations Directorate. While even Cabana didn’t know exactly what had happened, he had heard reports, was in contact with JSC, and likely had also seen the video of Columbia breaking apart in the sky over Texas on the news. Cabana made the decision that the families had to be told. Columbia’s crew had perished on reentry. The families were all told at once. Their reactions were sudden, as kids screamed and adults began to cry. A lot of emotions were released once the announcement was made. It wasn’t even 10:00 EST, and already it had been a long day.

  After Clay Anderson called his wife to tell her what had happened, he went to work, as the escorts still had a job to do. They went back to the hotels to gather the families’ packed bags and the rest of their belongings. The group then drove back to KSC and loaded the luggage onto a NASA transport for the long flight home. The plane arrived at Ellington Field near JSC in the midafternoon, and the families were escorted home by JSC personnel and local police. Once the families of the STS-107 crew were back home, Clay Anderson had to go back to JSC for an all-hands astronaut meeting and got pulled over by a police officer for speeding on his drive back, but he was let off with a warning. The mood in the communities surrounding JSC was very somber that evening and was shared by all.

  1 February 2003, International Space Station Expedition 6, orbiting 250 miles up.

  Meanwhile, in Earth orbit, ISS crewmembers Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and rookie astronaut Don Pettit were off duty. Typically, the weekends were free for them to pursue what activities they wanted to do, with no assigned mission tasks. They were over halfway through their planned four months of assigned duties, and things were going pretty well for an ISS that had been hosting crews for a couple of years. Even with its relatively short time of occupation, the station was already starting to amass a bit of clutter as supplies were stockpiled in the FGB and Unity nodes. But it was
operating well, with excess energy capacity from the new solar arrays.

  There was a planning conference scheduled for that day to update the next week’s scheduled activities, and it didn’t start on time. The crew, instead, was told to standby. The Expedition 6 crew knew that Columbia was heading home that day; a few days earlier, the crews had communicated with one another through the TDRS satellite network. Don Pettit had also been maintaining a chess game in orbit with Willie McCool, and they exchanged moves with one another via email.

  Eventually, JSC director Jefferson Howell got on the communications loop to tell the crew what had happened. Howell had only been the director of JSC since 2002, replacing the somewhat controversial and mercurial George Abbey, who retired in 2001. But Howell was a retired Marine Corps general, and people respected him. For him to communicate directly to the ISS crewmembers rather than have it go through the assigned CAPCOM astronaut meant that this announcement was very important. Howell kept it short and to the point: “I have some bad news; we lost the vehicle.” That was all he had to say. The crew was next brought up to speed quickly and heard the sobering details.

  Investigation and Aftermath

  For everyone in the world who had access to a television set, what had happened in the skies over Texas that Saturday morning was pretty clear. Columbia had tumbled out of control and almost completely broke up, with its destruction looking eerily similar to Mir’s deorbit two years prior. The debris trail extended about two thousand miles, from the western-most piece of debris found just east of the Texas–New Mexico border in the state’s panhandle to a valve that was recovered near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Most of the debris landed in central and east Texas in a nearly three-hundred-mile path extending from south of the Dallas–Fort Worth area to Hemphill. It was a small miracle that nobody on the ground was injured or killed by the falling debris. Some of the pieces were rather large, and the rumbling that people heard was pieces of debris traveling at supersonic velocities as they fell to Earth. One of Columbia’s main engine bells was recovered at a golf course when groundskeepers discovered a new water hazard that they hadn’t installed. The bell hit with such force that it buried itself deeply enough for groundwater to fill the small crater it left.