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

by Michael D. Leinbach

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...