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

by Michael D. Leinbach

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 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.

Cohrs and the incident commanders knew that the bodies of two of the crew members had not yet been recovered, seemingly contradicting NASA’s press release that seven flag-draped caskets containing the remains of Columbia’s crew members were arriving at Dover that afternoon.25 The NASA release was essentially factual—they had recovered partial remains of all seven crew members—but the bodies of two of them had not been located.

One woman of modest means brought in a cooked chicken, and she apologized profusely that it was all she could spare. She appeared impoverished, so the searchers took up a donation and purchased groceries for her to ensure that she had enough to eat.

Airborne assets from NASA and the Department of Defense also aided in the search. Although specific details on the technologies involved were not divulged, the incident command team could get detailed information on the location, movement, and number of coyotes and buzzards in the forest.

Many people in this deeply religious area saw it as divine providence that Columbia’s crew came to Earth in their community. Had the accident occurred anywhere else, the outcome might have been very different. Here, the people kept what they saw and experienced out of the press. They enfolded the NASA family in a respectful, loving, and healing embrace, and they rose to address a national tragedy in a manner that is difficult for outsiders to fully comprehend.

Horseshit

one of the space shuttle main engine turbopumps was pulled out of the mud at Fort Polk, Louisiana, on February 15. Another was found on March 30 and retrieved on April 1. Still traveling supersonically when they impacted the ground after the accident, the heavy pieces of machinery buried themselves fourteen feet deep. These dense engine components flew farther than any debris after the shuttle broke up, and their trajectory was unaffected by winds aloft. The path from the point where the shuttle broke up near Palestine to where the powerheads impacted near Fort Polk defined the initial centerline of the debris search effort.

The amazing condition of such a critical item was another of the miraculous events surrounding the Columbia accident.

? The box was not designed to survive a catastrophe, but it was protected by other, more robust, structures that absorbed heat and damage.

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.

Challenger fell into the ocean without having left the atmosphere on her mission, traveling a little less than twice the speed of sound at peak velocity during ascent.

television, the shuttle stack did not explode. Rather, the vehicle broke up because of aerodynamic forces after the external tank structure failed. Most of Challenger’s debris—much of it in large chunks and sections—came down in a relatively confined area within sight of the Florida coast.

Columbia, on the other hand, had been traveling in excess of Mach 18 at an altitude of over two hundred thousand feet when it disintegrated. Its wreckage was twisted, shredded, subjected to plasma, melted, oxidized, burned, and scattered over a 250-mile-long path. The vast majority of the debris that came back f...

The remains of Challenger’s astronauts were inside the crew module when it was recovered. The crew compartment had been in the water for more than a month before the navy located it.

“NASA approach to things is to put 50,000 people in a line and move forward an inch at a time.”

Even the pieces of wreckage that were not directly related to the accident held mysteries for us. Why did one piece of equipment come back heavily damaged, while another that was sitting right next to it was relatively unscathed? Why did all the propellant and other tanks in the ship come back in such good shape? Why were the oxygen feed lines in the engine manifolds more decayed than the hydrogen feed lines? Solving these riddles engaged everyone’s intellectual and engineering curiosity and kept us from dwelling too long on the tragedy represented by the debris of our beloved Columbia.

Why is this approached from a scientiific angle, while the watch is seen as miraculous?

“It sounds silly, but it goes back to what you were clinging onto to make this tragic thing something you could cope with,” Hanley said. “The yellow dinosaur was just one of those things.”

This is probably a plausible answer to the miraculous question.

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.

Micklos was stunned. Out of all the people who searched for debris from Columbia, what were the odds that she would be in a van on the anniversary of the accident with the man who had found her watch?

This can be determined. Yes?

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.

The CAIB documented how NASA had permitted the “normalization of deviance” to put both Challenger’s and Columbia’s crews in harm’s way. The Challenger accident was the result of a known systems issue in the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters that had not been corrected. There had been partial burn-through of the O-rings on several previous missions—including the second flight of the space shuttle—but the details of the problem and the potential catastrophic outcomes never came to the attention of the launch decision makers. Lower-level engineers and managers did not allow the issue to be brought forward. Their desire to meet the launch manifest—and each organization not wanting to be the reason for standing down—trumped sound engineering practices of full and open discussion. Human and organizational failures doomed Challenger just as surely as the O-ring failure. Similar conditions led to the Columbia accident. Foam shedding from the external tank was not within the design specifications for the space shuttle, but it had happened repeatedly over the years. Based on the shuttle’s demonstrated ability to survive hits from launch debris, managers justified continuing to fly while pursuing a new 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.

NASA chose to press on in order to meet the unrealistic and self-imposed deadline of completing the core of the ISS by February 2004. The urgency to finish the ISS overrode the urgency to fix a potential safety issue.

All told, the Columbia recovery, reconstruction, and investigation cost two lives and $454 million.

New scanning techniques revealed cracks deep in the insulating foam that were not visible on the surface. It appeared the foam cracked as the tank contracted and expanded due to thermal changes. NASA realized that it was an engineering issue—not human error in applying the foam—which had caused the foam shedding problem.