Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

by Michael D. Leinbach

The photos of the tank were never downlinked. If engineers on the ground had seen the photos, they would have immediately noticed that a large piece of foam—about the size of a carry-on suitcase—was missing from the area at the base of the left side of the strut connecting the orbiter’s nose to the tank.

from one camera showing what appeared to be a large piece of foam falling off the tank 81.7 seconds into the flight. It fell toward the Columbia’s left wing and then disintegrated

into a shower of particles.

There was no backup to the heatshield system. If it was seriously compromised, the crew was not going to make it home.

In one of the most confounding breakdowns of the management process for STS-107, the MMT refused to issue a formal request for images. In essence, the reasoning was: “You don’t have enough data on the problem to warrant getting the intelligence community involved.”

And yet there was no way for the team to gather more data without the intelligence imagery. The imaging capabilities possessed by the intelligence community were highly classified and could not be used as justification for the request, because most of the team was not cleared to hear that information. Trapped

Lower-level engineers at KSC and at Boeing’s shuttle design offices in Huntington Beach, California, adamantly insisted that the foam impact had damaged the RCC. Some refused to certify that the vehicle was safe to come home. The MMT noted and then overruled their objections. The discussions were not even reflected in the MMT’s meeting minutes.

“Prove to me that it’s not safe to come home” demonstrates a very different management culture than does “prove to me that it is safe to come home.”

Complacency and past experience lulled us into believing that the shuttle would get her crew home safely—just as she had done more than one hundred times previously—despite

The MMT incorrectly concluded that no significant damage existed. Besides, the MMT reasoned, there was nothing the crew could have done about it anyway. The MMT flatly declared that there was no “safety of flight” issue involved—that is, no risk for reentry.

a slow-moving object, about the size of a laptop computer, gradually drifted away from the shuttle. Its slow motion implied that it was probably not a piece of space junk or a meteor. Further tests showed that the radar properties of the object were a close match for a piece of RCC panel—possibly part of the wing’s leading edge. It appeared to separate from the shuttle after several thruster firings that changed Columbia’s orbital orientation.

Pressure to keep on schedule had combined with a complacency brought about by so many past mission successes.

Columbia had come apart in a “catastrophic

event” 181,000 feet above Corsicana and Palestine, southeast of Dallas, traveling more than 11,000 mph. As the vehicle broke up, lighter pieces decelerated quickly and floated to earth. Denser objects like the shuttle’s main engines continued along a ballistic path at supersonic speed until they impacted the ground farther east.

Each one of the tens of thousands of pieces of debris produced its own sonic boo...

The breakup had apparently happened less than a minute after NASA lost communications with Columbia at about nine o’clock.

All of the services delivered in the field after the first day included Christian, Hebrew, and Hindi prayers. Lane was deeply moved by the way the astronauts handled the recoveries. He knew how horribly difficult it must have been for them to see their friends and colleagues in that condition. It was a duty far outside the scope of what any astronaut would normally be asked to perform. The strength of the astronauts’ religious convictions also surprised Lane at first. Then he realized that if these people “strap a million pounds of dynamite to their butts for someone else to light, they’d better have mighty deep faith.” Accident Plus Three Hours Thirty Minutes Greg Cohrs was still at his home near Hemphill when he received a call from district ranger Marcus Beard, directing him to report to the US Forest Service office, don his flight suit, and begin searching the area in a government-contracted helicopter. Cohrs arrived at the office only to learn that the helicopter was grounded because airspace over the entire area had just

Shuttle material was government property, and unauthorized possession was a federal crime.

“Figure out who’s in charge by observing the scene. Then go up to that person and say, ‘What three things are biting you on the ass?’ And then you make it your goal to fix those three things. Then you’re part of the team.”

It would take forty-eight to seventy-two hours to gather the appropriate situational awareness, sort out priorities, and begin taking control of the situation. Until then, things would be messy—and probably get messier.

data during Columbia’s descent and breakup showed that debris rained down over a three-hundred-mile-long, fifty-mile-wide path stretching from Dallas to Fort Polk, Louisiana.

Sixty-four agencies were at work in the county, with about 850 people involved in search and support.

“It wasn’t an inanimate object to them. Each item was very alive, very real. They understand that everything around us is a living, breathing being that we cooperate

with. It made me appreciate my heritage, what these people sacrifice, and how special this experience was to them.”

The personnel staffing snapshot on April 7 showed 5,545 people working in search operations. This included 683 EPA, 75 FEMA, 282 NASA, and 4,289 US Forest Service personnel engaged in the ground search; air operations had fifty-five people assigned; and 130 people were working on diving operations. The Texas Forest Service had twenty-two people assigned, and there were a few other resources from DOD, DOT, and the Texas Department of Emergency Management.13

the weeks between February 1 and May 10, 2003, nearly twenty-five thousand men and women searched 680,750 acres of land—in essence, walking every square foot of an area roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. The US Forest Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and state forestry organizations and contractors provided most of the searchers, particularly after February 17.

The combined efforts of these remarkable women and men totaled 1.5 million man-hours.26 They recovered nearly eighty-four thousand pieces of Columbia, with a combined weight of 84,700 pounds. That was equal to about 38 percent of the shuttle’s landing weight. Some of the most critical pieces recovered included the OEX recorder, more than 90 percent of the crew module, and pieces of the heatshield and structure from the left wing and the left side of the orbiter. Every piece of debris recovered was cataloged. This material would provide vital information on how the accident occurred and how the shuttle’s structure was affected as the vehicle broke up.27

The four hundred–page crew survival investigation report, released in 2008, confirmed that the accident was not survivable. Rather than the CAIB’s general finding that plasma intrusion caused the left wing to fail, the survivability study presented a detailed analysis and timeline of how Columbia actually broke up. The proximal cause of the accident was the loss of hydraulic pressure after the system was breached by plasma in the left wing. This caused the ship’s control surfaces to stop responding to steering commands. Columbia went into a flat spin. The crew knew their ship was in trouble. They tried to save it after it went out of control, during a period that lasted at most thirty seconds. The ship broke up due to aerodynamic forces, starting with the left wing. A breach in the crew module caused it to depressurize rapidly, shortly after the body of the ship came apart. The crew lost consciousness almost instantaneously. They did not even have time to lower their helmet visors.

can’t help but be overwhelmed by evidence of the tremendous forces to which Columbia was subjected—heating, melting, tearing, shredding, ionization, and impact.

that searchers could find pieces of material smaller than a thumbnail out in the wilderness—and the care and skill of our reconstruction engineers, who took these tiny pieces and painstakingly rebuilt the wing. It is akin to assembling a dinosaur skeleton from shattered bits of fossil.

Here is the vessel that flew 127 women and men on twenty-eight missions into space. Here is the wounded vehicle that fought valiantly to the bitter end to try to bring her last seven crew members home. Here, in this volume the size of two or three average houses, rests the results of the collective efforts of twenty-five thousand people who searched every square foot of a debris field the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined during three months of 2003. Preserved here is the work of the hundreds of people who processed, cleaned, examined, and cataloged every one of the eighty-four thousand pieces recovered.

The report chided the White House and Congress for squeezing NASA’s budgets so tightly that safety was at risk. The report cited issues in NASA’s transparency, diligence, and oversight dating back to the Challenger disaster (and even the Apollo 1 accident in 1967), but which were never fully and permanently corrected in NASA’s culture.

design. A mission four months before Columbia’s flight also suffered damage from external tank foam, and yet the issue was not even addressed at Columbia’s flight readiness review.

Clearly, changing organizational culture—and making those changes stick—is much harder than improving technology.

More than 130 agencies and more than 300 volunteer groups and private organizations worked together on the recovery.

“Joshua 1:9—the verse that Rick Husband read to his crew before the mission—became the watchword for the whole recovery. ‘Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.’ After