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

by Michael D. Leinbach

Columbia, being the first shuttle built, weighed more than her sister ships. After building Columbia, NASA determined that an orbiter’s aft structure did not have to be as beefy. Consequently, Columbia didn’t get some of the more sexy assignments due to her lower performance capability compared to the other orbiters. Still, she flew all her missions exceptionally well. She was a proud old bird. I know she did her best to bring her last crew home safely, just as she had done twenty-seven times before. However, her mortal wound was just too great.

Columbia was a little different from her sister orbiters. As the first shuttle constructed for spaceflight, her structure and internal plumbing were unique. She had a different tile pattern and air lock, and she carried instrumentation that the other orbiters lacked. She was eight thousand pounds heavier than her sister ships. The differences were subtle, but they were significant enough that technicians who serviced the other three orbiters sometimes became frustrated if they were called over to work on Columbia. She developed a reputation at Kennedy for being the beloved black sheep of the fleet. Rather than apologizing for her, the dedicated Columbia processing teams rallied around “their” ship and became even more close-knit as a consequence. They loved Columbia and her quirks. Many people specifically requested to work on Columbia because of her status as the flagship of the fleet. Quality inspector Pat Adkins said: “You can’t actually put into words exactly how you feel about a spacecraft. You use it, you learn it—you know where all its little idiosyncrasies and scars are. You know its weak spots, its strong points. They were all different. If you talk about a mission and don’t talk about the spacecraft like an eighth member of the crew, it’s like trying to tell the story of Star Trek without the Enterprise.” We all knew how he felt. Columbia was just as “alive” to us as the people who flew her.

STS-107 garnered the most stringent security ever implemented for a space shuttle launch.

Security at Kennedy was primarily aimed at protecting the public from NASA’s rockets, rather than the other way around. We established a three-mile “box” in the waters off KSC—an exclusion zone to keep aircraft and boats out of the launch path in case of an explosion early in a rocket’s flight. But now we also had to consider the very real possibility that the shuttle could be attacked. If a plane or boat strayed into the restricted zone around KSC and the vehicle flight path during a countdown, we faced tough decisions. Was it a tourist who just wanted to take some photos up close? Was it a charter fishing boat that strayed off course and forgot to turn on its radio? Or was it someone trying to look innocent, only to then make a sudden hostile move? As the launch director, I had to decide in the moment whether to tell the crew to sit tight in the shuttle or direct them to make an emergency escape. Calling for the escape assured the safety of the crew but could damage the shuttle in the process, forcing a long turnaround before the next launch attempt. To thwart potential terror attacks, we kept Columbia’s scheduled launch time a secret in the weeks leading up to the mission. We had even briefly considered a scheme dubbed Operation Yankee, which would have entailed a surprise liftoff one day in advance of a publicly announced launch date. Finally, on Wednesday, January 15, we announced that “T-zero” for Columbia’s launch would be at 10:39 Eastern Time the next morning. The...

Once Columbia’s main engines shut down, the flight computer commanded pyrotechnic charges to fire to jettison the external fuel tank. Astronaut Mike Anderson triggered cameras on the shuttle’s belly to take photos of the tank as the shuttle pulsed its maneuvering thrusters to move away. Those photos were part of the launch documentation, to note any issues that might require attention on the next missions. The crew did not notice anything unusual about the tank as it slowly drifted away from them. As usual, the tank would break up and fall into the Pacific Ocean south of Hawaii. Standard procedure called for the tank photos to be transmitted to the ground at the end of the first day’s operations. However, the Columbia crew had a busy day ahead of them configuring the experiments aboard Spacehab. 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. Back on the ground, an array of cameras along Florida’s Space Coast had filmed Columbia on her ride uphill. The imagery analysis team at KSC began reviewing the films the afternoon after the launch. The team was frustrated to discover that one of the tracking cameras had not worked at all, and another was out of focus. What particularly caught their eye, however, was footage from o...

Chief among the concerns was the intricate heatshield system completely covering the orbiter. The shuttles had aluminum skin, and when “naked,” they looked remarkably similar to conventional aircraft. However, aluminum has a relatively low melting point and cannot withstand the blazing temperatures of reentry. 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. The tiles were lightweight, porous, and crumbled easily. They covered the belly, the tail, and the maneuvering engine pods protruding from the aft end of the vehicle. The tiles could not be applied as a single unit or even a few large pieces, because the orbiter’s airframe had to flex during launch and reentry as it encountered air resistance. So, the tile system ended up being a mosaic of thousands of tiles, each approximately six inches square and each with a unique shape. Each relatively fragile tile was glued to a felt pad, which was itself glued directly onto the aluminum skin of the orbiter. This allowed for slight movement in the orbiter’s structure without damaging the tiles. Every tile was numbered so that it could be readily identified and placed in the appropriate spot on the orbiter. The tiles were not the only components of the orbiter’s heatshield. Some parts of the shuttle were exposed to more extreme heat than the tiles alone could withstand. The nose cap of the or...

Atlantis’s STS-27 mission, where hundreds of the orbiter’s tiles were heavily damaged during launch, and missing tile created a hole in the heatshield that nearly burned through on reentry. Atlantis held the distinction of being the most heavily damaged spaceship ever to survive reentry.2 And on STS-112, just four months before Columbia’s launch, a smaller piece of foam fell off the external tank and dented the metal ring attaching the left solid rocket booster (SRB) to the tank.

Unknown to NASA at the time—and even to the people manning the intelligence assets that acquired the images—the US military had inadvertently obtained evidence of something breaking away from Columbia on the second day of her flight. The Space Surveillance Network (SSN), which was operated jointly by the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, was a worldwide network of sensing systems designed to track objects in orbit around Earth. Early in the postmortem of the Columbia accident, SSN analysts went back over their tracking data to see if they had obtained any information about Columbia and any objects that might have collided with her in orbit. The analysts noticed that another object was in the same orbit as Columbia beginning on the second day of the mission. After refining the radar data, the analysts determined that 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. Whatever it was, the object reentered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up on January 20, twelve days before the end of Columbia’s mission. Theories about the object and its origin were debated at length during the accident i...

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.3 9:16 a.m. EST

After Sowell’s crew found its first object of the day, his three new elderly volunteers broke from their positions to examine it. They argued over whether the object was a piece of the shuttle, because it appeared to have rust on it. Sowell began to lose his temper. “Look, guys, we’re not a bunch of rocket scientists. You need to get back into line!” To his surprise, one of the men told him that, in fact, they were rocket scientists—retired Apollo-era NASA employees. Sowell was briefly speechless. Regaining his composure, he said, “That’s nice. But get back in line!”

On Tuesday, February 11, Mike Alexander and Dan Sauerwein’s search team emerged from the woods of the Sabine National Forest in sight of the Toledo Bend Reservoir. Someone looked behind them and called for the line to stop. Turning around, Sauerwein was amazed to see shredded canvas high in the treetops—material from one of Columbia’s experiment packages. He thought that if so much of that material was in the treetops near the reservoir, there must be even more in the lake.

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.21

The FBI said they were investigating approximately twenty reported thefts of shuttle wreckage. They were also looking into seventeen Internet auctions of what people claimed to be pieces of Columbia. Officials suspected that souvenir hunters illegally collected over one hundred pieces of the shuttle.24 The US Attorneys Office announced a limited prosecution moratorium—until Friday, February 7, at five o’clock—for people who voluntarily turned in shuttle debris. Other callers returned items that they had picked up but did not initially turn over for fear of being accused of tampering with evidence. 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.25

Garan and an NTSB technician spent hours playing back the tapes, which in many cases were charred or damaged. Most were either blank or contained data from the scientific experiments in Columbia’s Spacehab module. As midnight approached, Garan phoned Houston to report that he had seen nothing relevant to the accident investigation. After the call, he discovered that there was one more tape to check. He began playing it, and within a few seconds, he froze. It was the cockpit video of Columbia’s reentry. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck,” Garan said, “because we didn’t know how long the video was going to last or what it was going to show.” To his relief, the tape ended several minutes before the first sign of trouble. NASA publicly released the video on February 28. The tape showed Columbia’s crew being happy, acting professionally, and enjoying the ride. They were passing the video camera around, smiling at one another, and remarking on the sight of the glowing plasma surrounding the orbiter. They were obviously unaware that anything was wrong with their ship.33

It is fitting that we are gathered here on the shuttle runway for this event. As Sean [O’Keefe] said, it was here last Saturday that family and friends waited anxiously to celebrate with their crew their successful mission and safe return to earth. It never happened. I’m sure that Columbia, which had traveled millions of miles, and made that fiery reentry twenty-seven times before, struggled mightily in those last few moments to bring her crew home safely once again. She wasn’t successful. Columbia was hardly a thing of beauty, except to those of us who loved and cared for her. She was often bad-mouthed for being a little heavy in the rear end, but many of us can relate to that. Many said she was old and past her prime. Still, she had only lived barely a quarter of her design life. In years, she was only twenty-two. Columbia had a great many missions ahead of her. She, along with the crew, had her life snuffed out in her prime. There is heavy grief in our hearts, which will diminish with time, but it will never go away, and we will never forget. Hail Rick, Willie, KC, Mike, Laurel, Dave, and Ilan. Hail Columbia.34

In another stunning development, we learned the “Flight Day 2” object detected by the Air Force was real. Something that was about the size of a laptop computer—with the radar characteristics of a piece of reinforced carbon-carbon—had drifted away from the shuttle on the second day of the mission.

One of the crew remains search teams had found a cockpit window frame from Columbia deep in the Sabine County National Forest on Saturday, but they were unable to retrieve the heavy item. Gerry Schumann took the six members of his debris response team out to the woods to retrieve the frame on Sunday. After parking on the main road as close as they could get to the object’s GPS coordinates, his team had to trudge more than a mile into the woods to find the piece. The team spent nearly the entire day carrying the metal frame out of the forest—taking turns lifting it by its corners, setting it down when people got tired, and maneuvering it around briar patches. Eventually, the team wrestled it back to their truck. Schumann was elated that his team successfully retrieved the item after such an ordeal. After delivering the window to the Hemphill collection center, he bragged about the accomplishment. Don Eddings, Marsha Cooper, and several other US Forest Service people on hand at the command post seemed unimpressed. Eddings asked, “Was that you guys that brought that window in?” Schumann said, “Yes! Great find. It took us all day to get that thing out.” Eddings said, “All you smart-asses had to do was ask us. There’s a fire road near there. We could have drove you guys within fifty yards of it.” Schumann initially felt both angry and deflated, like he had been made to look foolish and that he had wasted so much effort. When he calmed down, he realized this was a wake-up call. ...

One of our priority pieces from Columbia’s underside had arrived at Barksdale—the “sawtooth doubler.” This two-foot by two-foot plate—roughly in the shape of the orbiter itself—had been bonded underneath the orbiter and then covered with tiles. Because the shuttle’s skin was uneven where the doubler was mounted, the tiles covering that part had to be thinner than the surrounding tiles so that the exterior surface of the tiles was smooth. Thinner tiles might not stand up well to the heat of reentry, so it was important to assess the condition of this piece. It was one of the key items in the fault tree of possible failure modes.

Technicians and engineers at Barksdale saw the doubler was badly scorched and melted around the edges. Entirely by coincidence, one of the people processing the piece was the man who had installed it on Columbia in the first place. It devastated him. Sobbing uncontrollably, this member of our KSC team held the piece in his hands and showed it to me. He was convinced that he was responsible for the loss of Columbia and its crew. Frank Travassos, a main propulsion system expert from KSC, and I took him outside. We tried to console him and reassure him that the accident was not his fault. —

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.

Investigators wanted incontrovertible proof that foam from the external tank was capable of inflicting mortal damage on the shuttle’s thermal protection system. That foam could damage the wing seemed counterintuitive on many levels. How could a piece of lightweight insulation—about the density of Styrofoam and weighing less than two pounds—fall off the tank and cause that kind of damage? And wasn’t it traveling at about the same speed as the shuttle? In fact, analysis showed a significant velocity difference between the shuttle and the foam at the time of impact. NASA estimated that the shuttle was traveling faster than 1,500 mph—and accelerating—when the foam fell off the tank. After falling off, the foam immediately and rapidly decelerated due to air resistance. The block slowed to about 1,000 mph in the 0.2 seconds between when it came off the tank and when the shuttle’s wing impacted the foam. The relative difference in speeds between the shuttle and foam was therefore more than 500 mph.5 The piece of foam that struck Columbia was four hundred times larger than the pieces tested previously by SwRI. Using a special compressed air cannon, SwRI planned to simulate the collision by firing foam blocks at more than 500 mph into samples of shuttle tiles and wing leading edge panels. High-speed cameras photographed the test firings and impacts, and over two hundred sensors measured the effects of the collisions. By the time the equipment and procedures were ready for the first...

Space shuttle wing leading edge panels are large, expensive, and made to order. The reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) material also wears and becomes more brittle over time, so SwRI could not use newly manufactured panels to get an accurate assessment of potential damage in its impact tests. The test panels would have to come from the wings of Discovery and Atlantis, the two orbiters that had flown about as many times as Columbia. NASA decided to test the process first using fiberglass wing panels from Enterprise, which was not designed to fly in space. Several test shots at Enterprise’s fiberglass panels—which were stronger than the RCC panels on the flight-worthy shuttles—produced scuff marks from the foam blocks, but no breakage. After getting its process and equipment calibrated, SwRI was now ready to try the tests with the space-flown RCC panels. First, a foam block was fired at panel 6 from Discovery. The impact created a crack nearly six inches long in a rib supporting the leading edge, and it moved the panel enough to create a small gap in the T-seal between panels 6 and 7. This test proved that foam could damage the RCC material. However, the damage incurred in this test would not have been severe enough to create the burn-through seen on Columbia. NASA estimated a hole of at least ten inches in diameter would have been needed for the wing to ingest a plasma stream large enough to create the damage seen in Columbia’s debris. The next test target was panel 8, which ha...

When Columbia launched on January 16, her sister ship Atlantis was in the Orbiter Processing Facility hangar. She was almost ready to be mated to the external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters that were already stacked in the VAB. Could we have gotten Atlantis off the ground in time to save Columbia’s crew? After the accident, I studied how we could have accelerated processing activities and eliminated tests without jeopardizing the safety of Atlantis and her crew. For example, we could skip the terminal countdown demonstration test and the cryogenic fuel loading tests, shaving several days off the schedule. 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. With the ship confirmed to be mortally wounded, mountin...

Missions to the ISS had the advantage of delivering the crew to a place where they could wait for a subsequent mission to retrieve them or go home via the Soyuz. Assuming an injured shuttle could dock to the ISS, its crew could await a rescue mission for ninety days or more. This “safe haven” capability was one of the key factors that led NASA to approve the resumption of shuttle flights.5 The issue was more problematic for servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is in a different orbit than the ISS.6 Because of the laws of orbital mechanics, the amount of fuel needed to move the space shuttle between the orbits of Hubble and the ISS was far greater than the orbiter could carry. 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

future boosters and spacecraft should be designed to protect the ship’s reentry system (the heatshield), because rockets will always shed “stuff” like insulation and ice during the tumultuous minutes of ascent to orbit.

Challenger—the second orbiter to fly in space.

Columbia—the first orbiter to fly in space.

The shuttle used monomethylhydrazine as fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidizer. Both chemicals are extremely toxic, both through inhalation and contact with skin, and cause death with even very limited exposure.

Plasma—the “fourth state of matter,” a superheated gas with approximately equal numbers of positively charged ions and electrons, created during reentry as a fast-moving spacecraft compresses and superheats the surrounding atmosphere.

Reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC)—also known as carbon-fiber-reinforced carbon. A composite material made up of layers of rayon cloth impregnated with a carbon resin and then baked into a hard surface. It is used for structural applications in situations subject to extremely high temperatures, such as the space shuttle’s nose and leading edge of its wings, the nose cones of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and Formula One car disc brakes. RCC is structurally strong and tough, but brittle when impacted with sufficient force.

Challenger carried a crew of eight astronauts on the October/November 1985 flight of STS-61A. Atlantis also carried eight astronauts and cosmonauts on its return from the Russian Mir space station on STS-71 in 1995. Throughout the rest of the Space Shuttle Program, crew complement was limited to seven astronauts.

Shuttle mission numbers were assigned based on their original order in the launch manifest. STS-107 was the 107th assigned flight in the Space Shuttle Program. Changes in launch priorities and availability of hardware occasionally changed the order in which the missions flew. STS-107 was the 113th shuttle mission to fly. In informal conversation, missions were usually just referred to by their number—in this case, “one-oh-seven.”

Columbia’s refit would have involved installing an air lock in the payload bay (Columbia was the only shuttle with its air lock inside the crew compartment) and removing much of the test instrumentation that added weight to the vehicle. This would have included removing the Orbiter Experiments (OEX) recorder, which was to prove crucial to investigating the accident.

Atlantis on STS-27 holds the distinction of being the most heavily damaged spacecraft to return safely from orbit. The cork tip of the right-hand SRB fell off during ascent and gouged the side of the orbiter. More than seven hundred tiles were damaged, and one was knocked off completely. During reentry, plasma completely melted through a steel antenna cover under the missing tile and had started melting the skin of the orbiter, but Atlantis passed through the period of peak heating before its airframe was breached.

Ener later achieved notoriety for entertaining NASA workers with his intricately fabricated tall tales of “one-armed space monkeys” that had escaped from Columbia and were sighted running loose in the woods of Sabine County. At one point, Ener even took out an ad in the local paper seeking to purchase monkey traps.

Cohrs noted that one day later in the search, a military ordnance disposal team “cleared” one item in the field as nonexplosive, which the search team interpreted as meaning “safe.” Cohrs said, “It was actually high-pressure, and we were at risk moving it by hand and vehicle to the collection center, as was pointed out when I delivered it. It was later depressurized on a shooting range. We made our personnel aware of that type of hazard.”

Shuttle radios used classified, military-grade communications security technology to prevent unauthorized access.

Searchers eventually recovered nearly ten hours of video and ninety-two photographs with in-cabin, Earth observation, and experiment-related imagery. Of the 337 videotapes aboard Columbia, twenty-eight were found with some recoverable footage. Only twenty-one rolls of film out of the 137 rolls of film aboard the ship were found with recoverable photographs.

Mike Leinbach believes that perhaps the foam strike on the wing displaced an RCC panel on Columbia’s wing by compromising its support structure and pushing it back into the cavity behind the leading edge. From there, it could have eventually broken off due to thermal expansion and contraction as the shuttle moved back and forth between orbital day and night. He personally still finds this theory more plausible than the idea that the foam actually punched a hole through an RCC panel.

Jim Comer noted that Enterprise was at the time being prepared for exhibit in the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Pam Melroy and Comer traveled to Washington and negotiated with museum director Gen. J. R. “Jack” Dailey for a loan of the leading edge panels and the landing gear door. As a side note, Enterprise did not have thermal tiles, since it was not intended to fly in space. NASA glued tiles to Enterprise’s landing gear door to simulate an operational shuttle for these tests.

Hubble orbits at 28.5° inclination and 335 miles altitude; the ISS orbit is 51° inclination and 250 miles altitude.