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 highly publicized mission drew large crowds to the KSC area. NASA’s public affairs office requested that more spectators than usual be allowed on site. KSC security went into round-the-clock operations. VIPs and other spectators parked at the KSC Visitor Complex and boarded buses to the viewing stands. Crowd control and protecting the public were the order of the day. In case of a launch emergency, security would have to get all spectators onto buses as quickly as possible for their own safety.
As launch director, I usually pulled a twelve-hour shift on launch day. Officially, I had to be on duty as the shuttle’s external tank was loaded with propellants. That operation began at T minus six hours in the countdown, which was actually about nine hours before launch because of the built-in hold periods in the countdown. But there was always a weather briefing an hour before propellant loading could begin. The launch team needed to consider not only the weather forecast at KSC at the scheduled time of liftoff, but also the weather at potential trans-Atlantic abort landing sites in Europe and Africa. There was no use spending the time and resources to load the shuttle’s tanks if it appeared that weather restrictions would be violated at launch time. These weather forecasts were part of a larger meeting meant to ensure that everything was ready for fueling to begin and for the mission to fly. It made for a very long day.
Firing Room 4 of the Launch Control Center was already a hive of activity when I arrived the night before the launch. Roughly 180 engineers and managers controlled the countdown activities from that room. They were supported by about as many people in the backup Firing Room—the systems experts who knew the vehicle and ground support systems better than anyone. They were on hand to help resolve the usual technical glitches that cropped up during the countdown. VIPs and the prelaunch Mission Management Team observed the proceedings from the two glass-walled “bubbles” flanking the top row of consoles and my station.
A multiagency command center was created for this mission and operated from the second floor of the Launch Control Center. FBI, CIA, and state and local security forces staffed the command center and monitored the operations. Mark Borsi, director of KSC security, reported directly to me on the status of security measures and issues. I also had direct access to coast guard and air force brass via my console.
After two years of rescheduling and delays, launch day for STS-107 finally dawned on January 16, 2003.
In the early morning hours, ground systems pumped 146,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 396,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen into the shuttle’s external tank. At T minus three hours in the countdown, we deployed the Ice Team to the launchpad for a two-hour inspection of Columbia and the pad systems. The Ice Team used binoculars, telephoto lenses, and infrared devices to check for any unusual ice buildup or other debris on the surface of the vehicle, because the super-cooled liquid propellants in the tank might cause ice to form from the always-humid Florida Coast air. A chunk of ice falling off the tank or a booster and striking the orbiter during the ride into orbit could doom the shuttle. The team saw nothing unusual, and they reported their findings back to us in the Firing Room. The countdown proceeded relatively smoothly.
In the Operations and Checkout Building eight miles from the launchpad, astronauts Jerry Ross, Kent “Rommel” Rominger (chief of the astronaut corps), and Bob Cabana (director of flight crew operations) were on hand as Columbia’s crew suited up before the flight. Robert Hanley, who reported to Ross, filmed the proceedings with Dave Brown’s video camera. Brown requested that Hanley videotape the suit-up and walkout as part of the commemorative video that Brown was compiling about the crew’s training. As the crew and their entourage walked out of the building toward the waiting Astrovan, Rick Husband and Willie McCool reached overhead and touched their hands to the STS-107 mission decal on the head of the door frame. It was yet another of the good-luck traditions for space travelers.
The Astrovan drove north to the corner of Kennedy Parkway and Saturn Causeway, near the Vehicle Assembly Building. There, the van stopped to let out Rominger, who went to the Shuttle Landing Facility. He would then fly the Shuttle Training Aircraft around the KSC area to monitor weather conditions throughout the remainder of the launch countdown. NASA needed firsthand accounts of visibility and winds aloft, in case Columbia needed to make an emergency return to the runway. Cabana, Ross, and Hanley said their good-byes to the crew and left the van at the checkpoint by the Launch Control Center. Ross and Hanley joined the crew families in the Launch Control Center. Cabana went to the “bubble” adjacent to the Firing Room to join the Mission Management Team. The flight surgeon came in to man the Firing Room’s biomedical console.
The STS-107 crew rode the remaining three and a half miles to the pad. After pausing for a quick look up at Columbia, they took the short elevator ride to the 195-foot level on the Fixed Service Structure, and walked across the crew access arm to the White Room. Over the next fifty minutes, the pad closeout crew strapped the astronauts into their seats, and then sealed the hatch. The astronauts went through their checklists for the final stages of the launch countdown.
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The children of Columbia’s crew busied themselves drawing with markers on a whiteboard near my office on the fourth floor of the LCC as the final hours of the countdown ticked by. It was another of the KSC launch traditions—a way to keep the kids occupied during what would otherwise be a tedious time for them and to afford their parents some time to be alone with their thoughts. In the days following the launch, our staff would frame the children’s whiteboard art and mount it in the hallway to join the scores of “kid pics” from previous missions.
When the countdown came out of the final scheduled hold at T minus nine minutes, escorts took the children and the rest of the immediate members of the crew’s families out onto the LCC roof and up a stairway to a private viewing area. There they could watch the launch, shielded from the eyes of the press and public—a precaution we implemented after the Challenger disaster.
In the Firing Room two floors below, my launch team prepared to come out of the hold. It was a final chance for managers and engineers to catch their breath and work any last-minute issues. Things would move very rapidly once the count started up again, almost entirely under control of the ground launch sequencing computers.
We were not nervous, but the atmosphere was charged and intense. The room was dead quiet. Launching a space shuttle is never routine.
That intensity went to a whole new level for me when I received a call on the secure line from the air force. Their tracking radar showed an unidentified object due south of the launch complex, heading due north.
Estimated time of arrival at the launchpad area: T-0.
Holy shit. This is it. We’re under attack.
I received several reports of the object’s position, and the command center team plotted its course. Then it disappeared from the radar screen. It reappeared and disappeared several more times over the next couple of mi
nutes.
What the hell is going on?
I called the general who was my liaison at the Department of Defense. He had a direct line to the president in case authorization was needed to shoot down a civilian airplane. The general relayed to me what the pilot of the air force jet circling overhead was saying. Secondhand information always has the possibility of being misinterpreted. I said, “Sir, I trust you completely, but I need to speak to the pilot directly.” The general objected at first, as this was a breach of protocol between the military and a civilian agency. I insisted, and a few seconds later, they patched me through to the pilot.
My hands were shaking. I held onto my console to steady myself. I asked the pilot, “Sir, if there was anything out there, would you see it?”
The pilot responded, “Yes, sir, I would.”
“And do you see anything?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
I was listening carefully to the pilot’s choice of words and the tone of his voice. If he had said, “I don’t think I see anything,” or if there had been any hint of uncertainty in his voice, I probably would have told the crew to punch out, ordering them to make an emergency egress. However, the pilot sounded completely confident.
All the months of planning, the security exercises, the resources deployed, the years of the crew waiting for the mission to fly, the relentless training, the scheduling pressure to fly this mission—it all came down to this decision.
Was there an emergency or not?
At the end of the final countdown hold, my tradition was always to give the crew an upbeat send-off message on behalf of the launch team. I got on the comm loop with Rick Husband and said, “If there ever was a time to use the phrase, ‘Good things come to people who wait,’ this is the one time. From the many, many people who put this mission together: Good luck and Godspeed.”
Rick replied, “We appreciate it, Mike. The Lord has blessed us with a beautiful day here, and we’re going to have a great mission. We’re ready to go.”
I gave the “Go” for the count to pick up on schedule.
The fighter pilot had assured me there was no visible threat, but the internal voice of doubt nagged me.
God—what if I’m wrong?
The final minutes of the countdown quickly ticked away, and all went smoothly. I nervously looked out the window toward the launchpad every few seconds, half expecting to see something heading toward Columbia.
At the launchpad, everything was proceeding exactly as planned. A few seconds before 10:39 a.m., Columbia’s three main engines ignited and quickly built up to steady thrust. Columbia’s nose rocked forward several feet in reaction to the off-center impulse from the engines and buildup of thrust two hundred feet below. The instant the shuttle rocked back to vertical again—6.6 seconds after main engine ignition—the twin solid rocket engines fired. Explosives shattered the hold-down bolts at the same moment, and Columbia leaped into the clear blue sky. Launch and Entry Flight Director LeRoy Cain at Mission Control in Houston assumed control of the mission as soon as the solid rocket boosters fired.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief.
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The families filed back into the LCC after Columbia disappeared from sight about two minutes after liftoff. Eight and a half minutes after launch, Columbia was in orbit. It seemed to be a picture-perfect launch.
After the postlaunch checklists were complete, the launch team and I went to the lobby of the Launch Control Center for the celebratory meal of beans and corn bread, which was served after every successful launch. Still too on-edge to eat, I took a quick bite and shook hands with a few folks on my way to another tradition—the postlaunch press conference. Fortunately, no one else present there knew about the security incident. And they didn’t need to know.
It was later determined that the unidentified object on radar was a cluster of Mylar party balloons with a small, empty metal box—about the size of a clock radio—dangling underneath. Riding on the winds, the balloons dipped into and out of radar coverage. They were found two days later on the shore of the Banana River approximately five miles south of the launchpad.
Chapter 3
THE FOAM STRIKE
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 one camera showing what appeared to be a large piece of foam falling off the tank 81.7 seconds into the flight. It fell toward the Columbia’s left wing and then disintegrated into a shower of particles. The foam had clearly struck the orbiter, but it was impossible to tell from the images exactly where it had impacted or how bad any damage might be.
Ann Micklos, who represented her thermal protection system team during the video review recalled that “people’s jaws dropped. You could have heard a pin drop in that room when we saw the foam strike. We watched it on the big screen again and again and again, trying to understand where the foam impacted the orbiter.”
It was indeed an impressive-looking impact, but debates about its severity began almost immediately. Was this a serious situation? Or was it like all the other impacts—posing a maintenance inconvenience but not a threat to the crew? The imagery lab in Tower K of the Vehicle Assembly Building went to work to enhance the video as much as possible.
Why is foam shedding even a concern? To understand that, we need to review the vulnerability of the shuttle’s design. The shuttle’s flexibility was ironically its biggest downfall. Unlike previous spacecraft designs for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—in which the capsule with the astronauts was at the front end of the rocket—the space shuttle and its crew rode into orbit beside the propellant tank and the rocket boosters. This meant that ice or other debris could fall off the tank and boosters and strike the shuttle during ascent. Damage from launch debris was one of NASA’s major headaches, as there was no way to repair an orbiter’s exterior surfaces once the vehicle reached orbit.
We did not want to put a wounded space shuttle into orbit if we could avoid doing so.
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, becau
se 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 orbiter and the leading edge of its wings were made of a dark gray reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) material that could withstand heat of up to 3,000°F. RCC was hard but brittle. Other parts of the shuttle, which were subject to much less heat during reentry, were covered with quilt-like blankets of silica and felt.
If the foam impact we saw had severely damaged the tiles on Columbia’s belly or impacted the wing’s leading edge, searing hot plasma could enter the vehicle during reentry and melt the ship’s internal structure.
There was no backup to the heatshield system. If it was seriously compromised, the crew was not going to make it home.
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NASA created the Mission Management Team (MMT) process after the Challenger disaster as a way to ensure that potential issues like Challenger’s O-rings1 came to the attention of Shuttle Program managers. NASA wanted a way for information to flow quickly to senior management, without being filtered or suppressed. The “prelaunch” MMT sat on the same row as me in one of the glass-walled “bubbles” in the Firing Room on launch day listening for anything that might make them question launching that day. It was their job to assess issues that were not part of the documented launch countdown process but that could still pose risks to the crew and thus be reasons not to launch.
Bringing Columbia Home Page 3