Live From Cape Canaveral : Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today

by Jay Barbree

  Well, forget about it! John walked by me and winked, and I hit a smart salute and hid a couple of tears. The hope he’d just brought all us gray-haired “keep on going-ers” was the tonic we needed to keep dreaming and planning, to keep goals out there, marching through life with purpose to the end.

  We celebrated John Glenn’s second flight with some pretty hard partying, and my friends Bill Harwood from CBS, Hugh Harris from NASA, Bill Larson from ABC, Colonel Bill Coleman from Fighter Pilots ‘R Lonely, Michael Cabbage from the Orlando Sentinel, Diana Boles from Cats Unlimited, Eddie Harrison from Sailors ‘R Us, and many other spaceflight vets wanted to keep the party spirit going. New Year’s Eve 2000 was approaching and such a special New Year deserved to be celebrated in a special place, so we rounded up all the old folks from the Mercury days we could find and pounded on the air force’s door. We wanted to welcome 2000 with a New Year’s Eve party on John Glenn’s historic Mercury launch pad. All the little naysayer lieutenant colonels trying to make bird colonels threw up their hands in total disbelief. (“These drunks will kill themselves on air force property. They’ll drive into the ditches, into buildings, it’ll just be awful, and I will not have this on my record.”) But a sharp and bright and fun-loving commanding brigadier general by the name of Randy Starbuck said, “Let them have Glenn’s pad,” and picked up his cap, walked through his office door, and with a knowing grin quickly left town.

  The little naysayer lieutenant colonels were forgetting that our generation had always been responsible. As Americans, we didn’t take a backseat to anyone. We sent the first astronauts into orbit and to the moon, and we sure as hell weren’t about to destroy something as sacred as John Glenn’s launch pad.

  Our buddy Ken Warren of the Cape’s public affairs office put on his cleanest and brightest Dallas Cowboys jersey and ran interference. Ken kicked and stomped and shoved the traffic-cop mentality aside. Five hundred old Mercury and Gemini and Apollo vets showed up along with a 1950s big band from Disney World, and we danced to the oldies, saying our good-byes to the 1900s and throwing our arms around the 2000s without dropping a single soiled napkin on historic ground.

  When it was over, and the year 2000 was firmly in place, we drove off the military site without driving into a single ditch, singing, “We’ll always love you, General Starbuck.”

  As the century turned, construction was getting underway on the International Space Station. The orbiting outpost was to be as large as two football fields set side by side, with Russia’s Zarya control module launched first atop one of that country’s huge Proton rockets. The second part followed two weeks later aboard America’s Space Shuttle Endeavour. The crew captured Zarya with the Shuttle’s robotic arm and mated it with part two, called the Unity Node. Another Space Shuttle delivered and outfitted the infant station with logistics and supplies, and yet another crew readied it for the arrival of its main segment, Russia’s Zvezda service module.

  On July 12, 2000, Zvezda launched atop a Russian Proton and docked with Zarya and the Unity Node. Two more service flights were flown before the first crew, to live and work aboard the International Space Station, arrived on October 31, 2000.

  Within weeks, astronauts and cosmonauts were in the swing of things, and the construction flights were jumping off American and Russian launch pads without a hitch. Mission after mission was building the station that would, when finished, include eight large cylindrical sections called modules.

  The modules were carried from Earth separately in the cargo bays of America’s Space Shuttle fleet and on the nose of Russia’s Proton rockets, and construction spacewalkers connected each section in orbit. Eight giant solar panels were needed to supply enough electricity to power a small city after being mounted on 360 feet of metal framework. The first of four sets of solar arrays, and the backbone truss to support them, were carried to the station November 30, 2000. The heart of America’s operation aboard the station, the Destiny Laboratory, was attached to the station in February 2001, and Canada’s big robotic arm that would be used as a construction crane arrived the following April. More truss and backbone sections for the huge orbiting platform were sent up in 2002, and construction spacewalkers—astronaut engineers and trained construction people were humming. The International Space Station was about half-built, and more and more people were spotting this strange object moving across the predawn and early-evening skies.

  The Space Shuttle Atlantis is seen here streaking through orbit behind the International Space Station under a Texas moon. (Scott M. Lieberman).

  My grandson Brian and his friends in Illinois spotted the station early one evening and freaked out. “Papa Jay,” Brian phoned me excitedly. “We just saw this thing that looked like the biggest and brightest star ever moving across the sky. It was way up there…It was…”

  “Brian,” I interrupted, laughing, “You just saw the International Space Station. It travels 52 degrees above and below the equator, and you guys are about 42 degrees.”

  “Man, Papa Jay,” he said out of breath, “that thing’s bright.”

  “Yep, son, it sure is,” I said, enjoying his excitement. “Once it’s built, it will be the second brightest object in the early-evening and predawn sky.”

  “Why’s that, Papa Jay?”

  “Because in the early evening, and during a couple of hours before sunrise, the space station will be lit by the sun while it’s dark here on Earth.”

  “Oh.”

  “Computers are your thing, right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Just go to NASA’s home page, Brian, to the space-station section, and type in your city, and it’ll tell you when the space station will be passing over your location.”

  “That’s great, Papa Jay,” Brian said with excitement. “We’ll keep a log up here, and we’ll let you know when we see it, okay?”

  “Sure, buddy,” I smiled. “You guys will be my official space-station watchers in Illinois.”

  As time passes, the more time one finds to spend with family. Between the Shuttle flights putting more sections of the International Space Station in orbit, the more I found myself on football fields with my oldest grandson, Bryce.

  Bryce is the kind of young man most find likable. He is easygoing, with a grinning personality that gets him just about whatever he wants from his grandfather. Not really because of his grin, but because he was a pretty fair country football kicker, and his foot earned him a handful of college scholarships.

  The first was from the University of South Carolina, but he decided to play at East Carolina and Shenandoah University in Virginia, where he was voted first-team all-conference two years in a row. He even won Most Valuable Player in Special Teams, and until you have experienced it, it’s hard to match the pride you have in chasing a family member around college football fields.

  In a way Bryce and I found more humor in football than we did sincerity, and at the end of the 2002 football season an unusual Space Shuttle launch was calling. I was suddenly focusing on a break in the Shuttle launch team’s space-station construction flights. NASA was preparing the original Space Shuttle for a mission most wished would go away.

  Columbia was the first Shuttle and therefore the oldest. It was lovingly called the fleet’s “Hangar Queen,” and most felt there it should stay. The launch team knew that like the senior citizen it was, Columbia was hard to get out of bed, but once it was on its feet, it was vintage dependability.

  NASA had promised to fly an Israeli astronaut, and he and six others were going up for sixteen days of science. Columbia’s flight was set for January 16, 2003. The launch team smiled and said, “One more time.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Columbia: Had They Only Looked

  I guess those of a superstitious bent could say, “I told you so.”

  All the signs were there. Columbia’s STS–107 launch was the 113th Space Shuttle mission. It had slipped into the second half of January, the same general time period as its doomed predecessors, Ch
allenger and Apollo 1.

  But there was another sign. It was much more ominous and much less obvious. There had been eighty-seven relatively successful Space Shuttle missions flown since the Challenger accident January 28, 1986, and once again, an aura of what might best be called arrogant complacency pervaded the ranks of the agency’s senior management. As was the case before Challenger, they had become less tolerant of dissenting views when they believed they had valid data to support their position.

  Shedding foam from the Space Shuttles’ external fuel tanks had been a major concern during the early missions, but by now it had become a fact of life. It was considered an acceptable risk and more of a post-flight maintenance problem than a threat to flight safety. Space Shuttle managers had come to believe that it was somewhat like hitting your car bumper with the cover of your Styrofoam cooler.

  Columbia’s was the first mission to fly in three years that did not have the International Space Station as its destination. The station, of course, can serve as a safe haven for the crew of a crippled ship. The Shuttle’s mission was a planned science flight with more than eighty experiments during its sixteen days in orbit, an ambitious around-the-clock agenda with more than seventy scientists involved worldwide. On board were commander Rick Husband; pilot Willie McCool; mission specialists Dave Brown, India-born Kalpana Chawla, Mike Anderson, and Laurel Clark; and Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon. Husband, Anderson, and Chawla had flown once before.

  Following an almost flawless countdown, America’s oldest and most storied Space Shuttle rumbled off its launch pad at 10:39 A.M. Eastern time on January 16, 2003. Weather was ideal with a temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit, calm winds, and scattered clouds at four thousand feet.

  The launch appeared to be normal to us at the press site, and these observations were backed up by early reports from Mission Control. But ground cameras later revealed that 81.7 seconds into the flight, at an altitude of 65,000 feet, one large piece and at least two smaller pieces of insulating foam broke away from the external tank’s left bipod ramp, one of the connection points between Columbia and the tank.

  Additional photographic analysis the next day revealed that the larger piece, traveling at more than five hundred miles per hour, struck Columbia’s left wing’s leading edge. The chunk had an estimated weight of 1.67 pounds and was one by two feet in size. It was the seventh known time in Space Shuttle history that foam had fallen from the left bipod ramp—but this time it was fatal, because unknown to Columbia’s astronauts or anyone on the ground, the collision had caused a six-inch breach in the reinforced carbon-carbon panel in the middle leading edge of the left wing.

  Once in orbit, Columbia’s crew went to work on their two shifts while on the ground, the Mission Management Team, with the responsibility for resolving outstanding problems outside the scope of flight directors in Mission Control, gave Columbia’s flight cursory notice. Linda Ham, an up-and-coming former flight director who was the Space Shuttle Program integration manager at the Johnson Space Center near Houston, served as chairwoman.

  Because of its size, the strike was considered to be “out of family,” and a debris assessment team was established to analyze the problem. They relied on a mathematical modeling tool called “Crater,” developed by the Boeing Corporation to predict the penetration depth of debris impact, but the system was stretched beyond its designed limits because of the large size of this particular piece of debris. By flight day nine, after extensive analysis, the team came to the conclusion that there was no flight safety risk, and reported their results to the Mission Management Team.

  During that time, three requests were made to get Department of Defense spy-satellite enhanced imagery of the wing. Two of the requests were turned down, and the third never came to the attention of the Mission Management Team because of a communication breakdown. There were numerous e-mail exchanges about the foam strike between concerned structural engineers at NASA’s Langley and Johnson centers, but their concerns never reached the proper channels. To compound the situation, three days before the mission was to conclude, former astronaut and then NASA associate administrator Bill Readdy accepted a Defense Department offer to provide spy-satellite coverage, but because the Mission Management Team had concluded that this was not a safety-of-flight issue, the imagery was to be gathered only on a low-priority non-interference basis. No imagery was ever taken.

  The Mission Management Team brushed aside further discussions of the foam. The Columbia Investigation Board also noted that the management team met only five times during the course of the mission, not every day as required by Shuttle program rules.

  Ironically, on flight day eight of the mission, Mission Control sent up a message to Rick Husband and Willie McCool informing Columbia’s pilots about the foam hit on the left wing. The message stated there was no concern for reinforced carbon-carbon or tile damage, and because the phenomenon had been seen before, there was “absolutely no concern for reentry.” It was a heads-up for the crew in case the media asked about the incident during an upcoming in-flight news conference.

  On the morning of that fateful Saturday, the first day of February 2003, the Columbia crew, justifiably proud of its accomplishments over the past fifteen days, prepared its ship for the landing at its Florida launch site.

  Touchdown was set for 9:16 A.M. Eastern time, and I took my place before my microphone. On the main NBC network, Weekend Today hosts David Bloom and Soledad O’Brien were moving through their show with little or no interest in Columbia’s landing. After eighty-seven post-Challenger touchdowns without a hitch, this landing was routine. NBC News’s plan was for the Today Show to cut in with a brief video of the landing while I did a play-by-play of Columbia’s return for MSNBC’s Saturday-morning viewers.

  On Columbia’s 255th trip around Earth in sixteen days, commander Rick Husband was given the “go” to put on his brakes and leave orbit. The senior pilot was flying Columbia backward and tails-up when he ignited the ship’s two orbiting maneuvering rockets. Twelve thousand pounds of thrust pounded against Columbia’s forward speed for two minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The burn was “right on the nose,” and it slowed the big Shuttle’s forward motion just enough to drop it out of orbit and onto an hour-long flight path to its Florida landing site.

  Entry interface came over the Pacific Ocean at an altitude of 400,000 feet. This is when the spacecraft skips along the upper surface of the planet’s air, much like a stone skipping across a lake. The first effects of reentry heat can be felt when the Shuttle penetrates the atmosphere. Its surface grows hotter and hotter as it ploughs deeper and deeper into the thickening air. The plasma sheath around the Shuttle is hotter than the molten lava pouring from Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano.

  In physics, plasma is a highly ionized gas containing an approximately equal number of positive ions and electrons. The super-hot plasma is the product of friction created by a fast-moving object through air. It first appeared to Columbia’s astronauts as a faint salmon glow. Nearing the California coast, Columbia was dropping like a rock. Its nose-up attitude was focusing the plasma’s super heat on its reinforced carbon-carbon panels covering the Shuttle’s nose and the leading edges of it wings.

  “This is amazing,” Willie McCool said. “It’s really getting, uh, fairly bright out there,” he added, staring at the growing intensity of the outside fire.

  Rick Husband grinned. It wasn’t his first reentry. He knew this was only the beginning of the blast furnace that was yet to come. “Yeah, you definitely don’t want to be outside now,” he smiled at his pilot.

  Moments later, Columbia crossed the California coast at 8:53 A.M. Eastern time, twenty-three minutes from its Florida touchdown. Below, two news photographers had set up their cameras to photograph the returning Space Shuttle—a man-made shooting star leaving a long plume of fiery plasma trailing in its wake.

  But instead of seeing a perfect plasma trail as expected, the photographers saw a big red flare shoot from underneath
Columbia.

  The two stared at one another. Was that thing coming apart?

  Inside Mission Control the reentry appeared normal until 8:54:24 A.M. Eastern time, when the Maintenance, Mechanical and Crew Systems officer informed entry flight director LeRoy Cain that four hydraulic sensors in the left wing were indicating “off-scale low.” At 8:59:15 A.M., the same crew systems officer reported that pressure readings in both left landing-gear tires had been lost.

  Suddenly, Columbia’s commander, Rick Husband, was calling. He hadn’t talked to Mission Control since entering Earth’s atmosphere fifteen minutes earlier.

  “And, uh, Hou…” he began, only for his transmission to be lost in the middle of the word “Houston.” This was not unusual. Such communications dropouts happen frequently during reentry when the Shuttle is banking and rolling as planned. Its huge tail assembly blocks signals between itself and the TDRS satellite 22,300 miles above the western Pacific. It is the TDRS satellite network that relays transmissions between the Shuttles and Mission Control.

  LeRoy Cain told CapCom Charles Hobaugh to alert the crew about the sensors and tire-pressure losses.

  Husband attempted to respond to Hobaugh with, “Roger, uh, buh—” Those were the last words from Columbia at 8:59:32 A.M. Eastern time as the storied Space Shuttle sped over north central Texas at an altitude of slightly less than forty miles.

  What followed was inevitable. The super-hot plasma sped freely through the six-inch hold into Columbia’s left wing, melting the ship’s inner structure. America’s first Space Shuttle was instantly ripped into more than 84,000 pieces that would be recovered later, and its dedicated crew of seven, without a hint of their doom, died so swiftly they blessedly never finished their final thought.