Jonathan H. Ward's Blog, page 4

Hurricane Season and Rollbacks

June 1 thru November 30. The Atlantic Hurricane Season. As June 1 passed I was reminded how much ‘fun’ it was to experience.

From the earliest days of our manned spaceflight programs, the Launch Director was responsible for two things that outweighed all others, including launch itself. These were to protect the safety of the workforce, and to protect the flight and ground hardware. Obviously, these are everyone’s responsibility, and everyone took them very seriously. But when major processin...

The Stafford-Covey Return-to-Flight Task Group

International treaty required the United States to complete the core assembly of the International Space Station, up through the installation of Node 2 (later called the Harmony module) as soon as possible. NASA had previously committed to the US Congress that Node 2—onto which the European Space Agency’s Columbus module and the Japanese Kibo module would be berthed—would be launched by February 2004.

While meeting that date was clearly impossible after the Columbia accident, NASA was still c...

Returning to a New Normal

As the work in the reconstruction hangar wound down and people gradually returned to their pre-accident jobs, we found ourselves being re-integrated back into a sort of ‘new normal’.

The atmosphere was different, the work itself was different, and the Shuttle was likely on borrowed time. Combine this new normal with the still-present emotional response to the Columbia accident, and you get a workforce with more questions than we could answer, more concern for their futures than confidence—peo...

Columbia’s Reconstructed Debris Tells a Compelling Story

Throughout February, March, and April of 2003, truckloads of Columbia’s debris retrieved in East Texas arrived at the reconstruction hangar at Kennedy Space Center. In the first month or so, several truckloads arrived every week. By April, those deliveries were beginning to tail off as searchers completed clearing the debris field.

Workers in the field knew that NASA was conducting important analyses on the material they’d found and shipped to KSC, but they had no concept of the scope of the...

The Columbia Recovery Phase Ends

Thanks to the tireless and incredibly efficient efforts of the Texas Forest Service, the US Forest Service, FEMA, EPA, and NASA, recovery operations wrapped up at the end of April and beginning of May in 2003.

From the middle of February through the end of April, the Type 1 and Type 2 wildland fire crews from the US Forest Service walked every square foot of an area larger than the state of Rhode Island in their search for debris from Columbia. They painstakingly searched forests, fields, bri...

The Rescue Scenario

Shortly after the accident, during the third week in February 2003, a few of us contemplated if a rescue mission of Columbia’s crew could have been conducted. If it could, what were the chances of success?

Under the guidance of Shuttle Program managers we were asked to quietly study it. We were to conduct our studies in part to satisfy our own curiosity and in part knowing the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) would no doubt ask us one day. The Flight Directors at Johnson Space Cen...

The Day We Launched Early

This posting doesn’t relate to the Columbia accident, but it addresses a question I get on my monthly KSC tours offered through the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Center.

Why were the launch windows for flights to the International Space Station 10 minutes long, while others—especially early in the program—were 2.5 hours long? The answer is Rendezvous.

Without getting into a mini-course on orbital mechanics, for ISS missions we had to get to a specific point in orbit while the station was the...

What to Do with the Debris?

Fourteen years ago, in early April 2003, we were about 2/3 of the way through recovering Columbia’s debris from Texas, although we didn’t know it at the time. But the number of debris trucks arriving at the reconstruction hangar at Kennedy Space Center had begun to tail off in the preceding weeks, so we knew at some point they’d stop altogether.

Two initiatives were being worked at that time. First, what to do with the debris, and secondly, how would debris found after operations ended in Tex...

The Recovery Passes the Halfway Mark

At the beginning of April 2003, the search efforts for recovery of Columbia‘s debris passed the halfway mark.

From the time operations went into full swing at the end of the third week of February, the Texas Forest Service had overseen the mobilization of more than 12,200 men and women from the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. These firefighters came from more than forty states and Puerto Rico.

[image error]Firefighters came from nearly every US state and Puerto Rico to search for Columbia’s wreckage...

“Their Mission Became Our Mission”

In East Texas, people make sure you are aware that nine people lost their lives as a result of the Columbia accident—the seven astronauts and two searchers.

Supplementing the massive ground search for Columbia‘s debris was an aerial search of the area on several miles on each side of the ground search corridor. The Texas Forest Service managed more than thirty contracted helicopters that were operating in the air over East Texas every day.

Pilots flew just above treetop level, as spotters sea...