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June 26 - July 9, 2022
NASA’s ingenious heatshield for the shuttle consisted mostly of a system of silica tiles, which not only insulated the vehicle’s structure, but actually radiated heat away from the shuttle.
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.” The former attitude quashes arguments and debates when there is no hard evidence to support a concern. It allows people to talk themselves into a false sense of security. The latter encourages exploration of an issue and development of contingencies.
Management assumed that if there really were a problem, the “smart people” who were looking at it would speak up. Managers seemed not to comprehend that objections had in fact been raised and then brushed aside.
The crew was not even told about the foam strike until January 23—one week into the mission—and then only to prepare them for a question that might arise in an upcoming press conference. Mission Control sent an email to Rick Husband and Willie McCool informing them about the hit and immediately downplaying any worries: “Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry.”
Even if the astronauts had been asked to look for damage, they could not have shed light on the situation without taking extraordinary measures.
The only other way the crew could have checked the wing for damage would have been to take a space walk. That would have required a two-day interruption to the science activities in Spacehab.
So, the MMT did not ask the crew to inspect the orbiter.
That same day—the seventeenth anniversary of the Challenger accident—Rick Husband and his crew paused to remember the crews of Challenger and Apollo 1. Husband said, “They made the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives in service to their country and for all mankind. Their dedication and devotion to the exploration of space was an inspiration to each of us and still motivates people around the world to achieve great things in service to others. As we orbit the Earth, we will join the entire NASA family for a moment of silence in their memory. Our thoughts and prayers go to their families as
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the US military had inadvertently obtained evidence of something breaking away from Columbia on the second day of her flight.
It appeared to separate from the shuttle after several thruster firings that changed Columbia’s orbital orientation.
Weight was an immediate concern. As the first ship in the fleet, Columbia was already heavier than her sister shuttles. The added mass of the Spacehab module meant that STS-107 would be the heaviest shuttle ever to return from orbit. That would make her reentry hotter than usual, even if everything went as planned.
Management did not seriously consider the recommendations to throw overboard all “loose objects” in the crew module and Spacehab, especially with the official determination that there was no concern for flight safety.
I trusted the team that provided the ‘go for entry.’
Pressure to keep on schedule had combined with a complacency brought about by so many past mission successes. The same conditions were present for Apollo 1 and Challenger. And once again, a crew would pay with their lives.
Columbia’s automated flight control system ran all aspects of the flight during reentry, banking and rolling the orbiter to control its speed and energy profile during the period of maximum heating. Rick Husband would take the control stick only in the final couple of minutes of the approach and landing sequence.
Each one of the tens of thousands of pieces of debris produced its own sonic boom as it passed overhead.
Wreckage of the broken shuttle—and the remains of her crew—rained down over Texas and Louisiana for the next half hour along a path that was two hundred fifty miles long.
a cell phone call from someone who had seen video on TV of Columbia’s plasma trail breaking into multiple streaks in the sky above Dallas. The breakup had apparently happened less than a minute after NASA lost communications with Columbia at about nine o’clock.
After he heard the news, Ross stepped out of the van and said a prayer. He called the astronaut escorts for the crew’s families at the midfield viewing stands and told them, “We’ve most likely lost the vehicle and the crew.” He told the escorts to get the families onto their bus and away from the press as quickly as possible and take them to the crew quarters.
The landing clock counted down to zero and then began counting up.
All he could manage to say aloud was, “This changes everything.”
Ann Micklos spoke up, sharing something that Dave Brown had told her before the mission. “Dave said, ‘I want you to find the person that caused the accident and tell them I hold no animosity. I died doing what I loved.’”
At one house, an aluminum I-beam had fallen through the carport roof, broken through the concrete floor, and buried itself in the ground. This eventually turned out to be the only structural damage sustained anywhere in Sabine County.
One requirement of NASA’s agency-wide contingency plan for major incidents was to set up an independent review board—one not under NASA’s direction. Bill Readdy called the people who were named in the plan as members of the accident investigation board. These individuals had the requisite technical, scientific, and organizational expertise to serve on the panel.
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.”
Then they heard about an unusual sighting near Fort Polk, Louisiana. US Forest Service personnel, looking for debris after hearing loud sonic booms the previous day, had driven past several water-filled mudholes in the remote forest. At first glance, the holes were not particularly noteworthy. But then the searchers saw that mud was splattered forty-five feet high on the trunks of trees surrounding several of the holes. The holes were impact craters.
First responders needed to be aware of dangers that included: stored energy (high-pressure tanks and cylinders); monomethyl hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide, and ammonia; pyrotechnic devices (anything marked yellow/black near window frames, landing gear, crew seats, hatches, and antennae); and biological material.
Responders were ordered to stay with anything marked Secret, Confidential, or SSOR (space-to-space orbiter radio) until someone from NASA arrived on the scene to collect it personally.
The FBI said they were investigating approximately twenty reported thefts of shuttle wreckage.
Officials suspected that souvenir hunters illegally collected over one hundred pieces of the shuttle.
Interestingly, after the moratorium was announced for Columbia debris, NASA received a few calls asking if the moratorium also applied to material from the Challenger accident seventeen years earlier. NASA said yes—and several pieces of Challenger’s wreckage were then turned in.
Unless we could prove with certainty what caused the accident, the rest of the shuttle fleet would remain grounded—perhaps permanently.
Without a shuttle fleet, the International Space Station could not be completed.
Through it all, NASA was deeply impressed at the keen eyes of the fire crews during the search. “They did not miss the slightest bit,” Arriëns said of the Native Americans with whom he searched on his first day. “They’d come to me with pieces under a quarter of an inch.” Debbie Awtonomow said, “They were phenomenal. One guy saw a puddle in the woods, and he knew from experience it didn’t look right. They found a six-foot beam buried in the mud under that puddle.”
More than 43,000 pounds of shuttle material had been recovered, representing 20 percent of the shuttle’s weight.
Helicopter spotters located 65 percent of the 2,700 shuttle components that eventually ended up on the grid of the reconstruction hangar.
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.
we’d recover eighty-four thousand pieces of debris—and most of them would be the size of a nickel.
Pieces of Challenger’s wreckage occasionally wash up on the Florida beach to this day, decades after the accident.
we were following a basic tenet of the NTSB’s investigation procedures—to avoid speculating about the cause of an accident for as long as possible.
keeping an open mind as long as possible would actually speed up the investigation.
Sixteen Minutes from Home: A Tribute to the Crew of STS-107.
All told, nine of the eighty experiments carried by Columbia were found inside metal boxes. Scientists who opened the containers believed that at least five of those experiments would yield usable data.
The next test target was panel 8, which had flown twenty-six times on Atlantis. Evidence from the reconstructed debris and the OEX recorder indicated that panel 8 was the site of the impact on Columbia’s wing. At the test on Monday, July 7, the impact from the foam block blew a huge hole through the panel about sixteen inches by sixteen inches across, created several other cracks, and caused the T-seal to fail between panels 8 and 9. This was entirely consistent with the type of damage postulated to have caused Columbia’s demise. Witnesses were incredulous, but the evidence was
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Lani McCool was interested in Columbia’s cockpit window frames. She asked me about the windows and where her husband Willie was sitting during reentry. I told her, “As the pilot, he would have been sitting on the ship’s right side.” She asked, “So, he was behind these windows?” I said, “Yes, that’s where he would have been.” She then reached into her bag, pulled out a flower lei, and placed it behind a window.
“For me, it was the most emotional time in the whole process,” Biegert said. “The kids just wanted to hold or touch something that their mom or dad had touched or had been near.
Some of the kids came back five years later, and I took them through the crew module again.”
I sat at the entrance to the hangar and personally greeted every visitor—eleven thousand people by the end of the week.
KSC strongly urges all new employees—interns, contractors, and civil servants alike—to tour the Columbia room with Ciannilli soon after they begin working at KSC. His orientation emphasizes how culture and complacency led to the spacecraft accidents and how individual actions might have made a difference.
