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

by Michael D. Leinbach

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 last few seconds of telemetry received in Mission Control on February 1 indicated Columbia’s crew likely knew their ship was in trouble in the final half minute before it broke apart. The data showed that Columbia’s steering thrusters were firing to compensate for drag on the left wing, the ship was rolling, and the triply-redundant hydraulic system was losing pressure. All of those conditions would have set off alarms inside the cockpit.

Tribal groups frequently sang songs in their Native languages at night. A hush would fall over the camp while a group chanted their song in their Native tongue. It was a side of America that most NASA workers had never experienced, and it heightened the utter uniqueness of the situation. The wails of the singing and the muffled drums in the darkness often caused KSC

landowner on whose property Ilan Ramon’s remains were found had been informed that Mrs. Ramon was coming to see the site. In preparation for her visit, he built an access road through the woods to the recovery area—at his own expense—to ease her journey.

This was the first incident under the overall auspices of the new Department of Homeland Security, and about 450 federal, state, and local agencies and volunteer organizations worked together in a textbook example of interagency cooperation and collaboration with local communities. In 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

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 Most emotionally important to the NASA family, the remains of all of Columbia’s crew were recovered from the field and returned to their loved ones for interment.

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 from Columbia was smaller than an office desk. Much of it was the size of a nickel.

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

In the end, the investigation concentrated on the problem areas identified in the fault tree. We knew the problem did not start on the right wing, so we didn’t spend a lot of time in detailed examination of the right wing. We knew where we had to concentrate our efforts, but being able to compare Columbia’s right wing to its left wing was invaluable throughout the process.

KSC security special agent Linda Rhode (whom the reconstruction team nicknamed “Agent 99”) accompanied one shipment back from Barksdale with

did not want my team to be worried about possible terrorism, so I brought in the FBI undercover. The FBI special agents appeared just to be regular researchers looking at the materials. They swabbed various pieces and found no evidence of explosive residue anywhere on the vehicle. I never told the team about their visit.

One experiment caused a rare celebration when our workers examined it in the reconstruction hangar. Searchers found a thermos bottle-sized container from an experiment involving a colony of nematodes—small roundworms. The container had been inside one of the lockers in the crew module, so it was relatively well protected until the locker hit the ground. We were amazed to see living nematodes inside the container when it was opened in the reconstruction hangar. Nematodes have a short life span. Because this finding was several weeks after the accident, these were likely the descendants of the original animals in the experiment. Nonetheless, there was joy in the hangar at finding something alive—passengers of Columbia who survived the accident. “You look for the glimmer of hope where you can find it,” said Spacehab’s Marty McLellan.

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.

From the burn patterns on the other tiles, we saw that hot

plasma had entered the wing at high velocity—thousands of miles per hour—and pressurized the wing cavity. The pressure created vents, which blew the superheated plasma and molten metal out of the upper and lower surfaces of the wing. The materials blowing out through the lower vent formed an obvious burn pattern along the underside of the wing. As the plasma stream cut through the leading edge spar, it heated the wing and caused the adhesive that held the tiles onto the wing surface to fail. Those tiles peeled off the wing.

likely failure point being near RCC panel 8 or 9.23 By

The data team and debris team both concluded that a breach in Columbia’s left wing near RCC panel 8 or 9 allowed plasma to enter the wing. Flowing at several thousand miles per hour and with a temperature well in excess of 3,000°F, the plasma acted like a blowtorch and melted much of the wing’s support structure in the shaded area of this diagram.

In a completely private gathering, President and Laura Bush spent nearly two hours with the families at the White House after Anderson’s service. After they spent an hour in conversation in the Oval Office, the president personally took them on an impromptu hour-long tour of the residence.1 On what would have been her forty-second

she opened the package and inspected its contents, the condition of the watch amazed her. The leather band had burned away during reentry, and the crystal had shattered. However, the face of the watch was intact. The hands had stopped at 9:06—either when the crew module broke up or when the watch impacted the ground.

Gerry Schumann’s wife Gail said, “He was angry when he came home. He was just not the same person that went. He was very, very angry for many years.” Gerry said that when he went back to his office the day after returning from Texas, his boss was “… sitting there with his feet up on his desk. I lost it. I cussed him out. Then I left for two weeks and didn’t ever want to come back.”

It took four months before he was even able to sit down with his wife to talk about what he was feeling. His anger was focused on his boss, himself, and then with the whole NASA system—for failing to speak up or do something to prevent the accident. “We were focused on the only job we had, which was to make sure that the vehicle was safe to fly, and if something else happened out there with the operation itself, that wasn’t our problem,” Schumann said. “When you look at it in hindsight, what would it have taken for us to say something?”

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

One of Columbia’s liquid oxygen tanks—somehow missed during the navy’s search in 2003—was exposed at the bottom of Lake Nacogdoches in late July 2011, when a severe drought caused the lake’s water level to drop about eleven feet.

We only found three of the six turbopumps. They’re so massive; three more must be out there somewhere. Perhaps one of them was the car-sized object that people reported hearing splash into the Toledo Bend Reservoir. Toward the end of search

last Thursday in January as an annual NASA Remembrance Day for the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. On that first Remembrance Day—January 29, 2004—KSC Director Jim Kennedy and I officially

switches in one cluster were in a different setting than the third. These were the controls to cool down the shuttle’s auxiliary power units before restarting them. “As a shuttle pilot, I knew exactly what those switches meant,” Melroy said, “and I was absolutely electrified!” The crew—“demonstrating excellent systems knowledge by taking actions not simulated in training”—had attempted to get the hydraulic systems working again after the ship lost control. Melroy said, “They were our heroes. Somehow, it made it easier to bear, knowing they were not helpless, but instead were fighting to save the vehicle in their last moments—right up to the end.”13

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.

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.

An unmarked, locked room off to one side contains the reconstructed crew module. This room is open only to crew families, astronauts, and investigators. The cockpit

The Soyuz undocked on May 3. A computer error caused the guidance system to malfunction during reentry. The ship went into a ballistic trajectory instead of a controlled descent, subjecting the crew to more than eight times the force of gravity. Ground stations lost communications with the ship when an antenna tore loose during reentry. The Soyuz descent module landed in a remote area 276 miles short of the targeted landing site.1 Without a working radio, the crew had no way to contact the recovery forces and let them know where they were and that they were okay. Several tense hours passed before the recovery teams located the ship and extracted the crew. The men sustained minor injuries during their harrowing fall to Earth, but were otherwise unharmed.

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.

My analysis showed that the rescue scenario was feasible from the KSC processing and launch perspective—but only if we got the “Go” by January 23. For that decision to be successful, we would have already needed to be in high gear immediately after learning about the foam impact on Columbia’s wing—significantly altering the crew’s on-orbit activities starting on January 20. NASA would have needed detailed images of the wing from America’s intelligence assets, or would have had to send some of Columbia’s crew outside to inspect the wing. That space walk would have needed to happen on the second or third day of the mission—a completely unrealistic assumption given mission timelines and goals. For all intents and purposes, the mission would have been over at that point, whether or not the wing was actually damaged.

Everything hinged on making the momentous decision on January 23, following the decision to conserve the air scrubbers on the fourth day of the mission. And remember that the request for intelligence imagery surfaced on January 22. Even if the request had been approved at that point, we wouldn’t have had the pictures in time to make an informed decision. Furthermore, the reduction of the crew’s normal activities to conserve consumables would have made a space walk unfeasible in the first place. It had been already too late for a rescue.

Even if by some miracle the crew could pack the hole in the wing with ice and fashion a metal cover for it—two options that engineers explored—it appeared highly unlikely that this would sufficiently protect the ship during reentry.

The ISS could not be a safe haven for a Hubble mission. Without a rescue capability, Sean O’Keefe felt that the risks to human life did not justify prolonging Hubble’s life by a couple of years. On January 16, 2004, he canceled the final planned Hubble servicing mission.7 Mike Griffin replaced O’Keefe as NASA administrator in April 2005. Griffin believed it was so important to extend Hubble’s life and capabilities that he was willing to reinstate the servicing mission—provided the external tank foam shedding issues were resolved and adequate crew rescue capability existed.

For the first and only time, NASA had two shuttles in launch countdown simultaneously. We were ready to launch Endeavour one day after Atlantis if necessary. Tremendous dedication and work went into getting us to this dual-launch posture. Fortunately—like many other things in the space business—this contingency capability was assured but never needed. Atlantis’s flight went flawlessly, so the rescue mission never flew. Atlantis’s crew successfully prolonged Hubble’s life and upgraded its instrument package. In a roundabout way, what we learned from the Columbia accident had once again contributed to the advancement of scientific discovery.

Discovery finally lifted off the launchpad—907 days after the Columbia accident. Trouble ensued almost immediately. A large bird struck the fuel tank less than three seconds after liftoff—which fortunately caused no damage to the vehicle. A small piece of tile fell off the edge of the shuttle’s nose landing gear door some time before the solid rocket boosters separated. One edge of a thermal blanket under the commander’s cockpit window also came loose. And to everyone’s horror, the external tank shed several large pieces of foam, one of which was about half the size of the piece that fatally wounded Columbia. The largest piece fortunately missed Discovery,