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

by Michael D. Leinbach

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...