Bringing Columbia Home

by Michael D. Leinbach

  PART II

  COURAGE, COMPASSION, AND COMMITMENT

  One sometimes contemplates their reason for being here on this earth or being involved in events of a specific place and time. Over the sixteen years I’ve lived in Hemphill, I’ve lamented over not living closer to my parents and have been frustrated with my lack of career advancement. I felt that God wanted me here, but I didn’t really know why. The thought came to me that my role in this event might be the very reason that God placed and left me here in Hemphill.

  —Greg Cohrs, US Forest Service, June 2003

  Chapter 5

  RECOVERY DAY 1

  With the declaration of a spacecraft contingency at about 9:16 a.m. Eastern Time on February 1, what would have been Landing Day became Recovery Day 1. NASA immediately needed to determine precisely where Columbia was and ascertain the condition of the ship and her crew.

  For many of us at NASA, and for the residents of East Texas, our lives had just changed forever.

  Accident Plus Twenty Minutes

  In Tyler, Texas, Jeff Millslagle laced up his shoes for a training run for the upcoming Austin marathon. A rumbling sound startled him. As a California native, he at first thought it was an earthquake. But as the noise continued, he realized it was unlike anything he had ever heard.

  Millslagle was one of the FBI’s senior supervisory resident agents in Tyler. His colleague Peter Galbraith phoned him and asked, “What the hell was that?” They speculated that perhaps one of the pipelines running through the area had exploded. It seemed the only likely explanation. It was certainly not tornado weather. No other natural phenomenon could have caused such a prolonged banging.

  Millslagle phoned the Smith County sheriff’s office to see if they had any reports of unusual activity. They checked and phoned back, “It was the space shuttle reentering.” That didn’t seem plausible, since the shuttle’s sonic booms wouldn’t be audible at sea level until the shuttle was well east of them. The sheriff’s office called again a few minutes later. “The shuttle broke up overhead. There are reports that Lake Palestine is on fire.”

  Millslagle turned on his TV and saw video of Columbia disintegrating. He immediately phoned Galbraith and told him they needed to meet at the FBI office in Tyler.

  He arrived at the office five minutes later, still dressed in his running clothes. Special Agent Terry Lane phoned in from his home west of Nacogdoches. Special Agent Glenn Martin called in from Lufkin, Texas. Both reported what appeared to be pieces of the shuttle on the ground. The sheriff’s office phoned in and asked for guidance. Millslagle said, “Let me go home and throw some pants on, and I’ll drive down to Lufkin.” He called Lane and Martin and told them to meet him at the FBI office there. Galbraith offered to stay in the Tyler office and monitor the situation.

  —

  At Kennedy Space Center, the crowd at the Shuttle Landing Facility was struggling to comprehend why the space shuttle had not returned. Security personnel and the astronaut escorts quickly led the Columbia crew’s immediate families away from viewing stands—and the eyes of the press—toward a special bus that would take them to the privacy and safety of the crew quarters.

  The remaining guests, some of whom were members of the crew’s extended families, were hurried onto buses and taken to the training auditorium in the industrial area of KSC about seven miles south of the landing facility.

  Cell phones began ringing as the guest buses left the Shuttle Landing Facility. As word spread about what had happened, distressed passengers screamed and cried. Some demanded that the volunteer visitor escorts on the buses tell them what was happening. The escorts had no information to share. They were as confused and heartbroken as the passengers.1

  Ann Micklos was waiting at the SLF with the landing convoy to greet her former boyfriend, Columbia’s Dave Brown, upon his return. She realized there was a serious problem when she saw the astronauts running toward the crew families’ bleachers.

  Ann immediately called Brown’s parents from her cell phone. They were at home in Virginia watching the television coverage of the landing. The Browns were confused about the situation. They asked Ann if the shuttle was going around for another landing attempt. She explained that Columbia and her crew only had one chance to land. Her words caught in her throat as she told them it didn’t look like they would be coming home.

  As shocked and distressed as the spectators, the landing and recovery convoy teams at the runway briefly found themselves uncertain as to what they should do. The checklists that had taken them to this stage of operations were no longer valid. No procedures covered what to do in a scenario in which the recovery convoy was deployed but the shuttle did not come down at the landing site.

  Reality began to sink in as the rest of the recovery team returned to their hangar. Workers were told not to talk to the press. They were also instructed to lock up all hardware and paperwork to impound everything for investigation.2 They huddled in the hangar’s foyer area. It seemed that everyone was crying and making phone calls to loved ones. Someone offered a few words of prayer.

  Ann Micklos spoke up, sharing something that Dave Brown had told her before the mission. “Dave said, ‘I want you to find the person that caused the accident and tell them I hold no animosity. I died doing what I loved.’”

  Managers in the Firing Room started phoning supervisors, telling them to report to work immediately. Many of the people they tried calling were already getting ready to leave or were on their way to KSC. They had seen the stunning video on TV and wanted to help however they could.

  —

  At NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base, California, Robert Hanley had just arrived at the standby landing team’s trailer and heard them discussing Houston’s inability to contact Columbia’s crew. He and the team watched the minutes tick by on the clock, without any updates from Houston. Growing nervous, Hanley called his colleague Judy Hooper in the crew quarters at KSC.

  “Judy! Where’s our crew?”

  She replied, “I can’t talk now,” and hung up the phone.

  Hanley instantly knew that something terrible had happened. Switching the television to CNN, he saw the pieces of Columbia fanning out like fireworks across the sky over Texas.

  The room went silent.

  Hanley looked at his team and said, “We lost the crew.”

  He held his emotions in check long enough to walk into the bathroom. Then he fell apart. How could I lose my friends so close to home? His thoughts went to the crew families at KSC, the people that he had come to know so well during the crew’s training period. He normally would have been with them at the landing site. Now he was thousands of miles away, feeling helpless. There was absolutely nothing he could do.

  The staff quietly cleaned up their paperwork. Hanley headed to the airport for what would feel like the longest trip home of his lifetime. Television monitors in the terminal at the Burbank airport replayed video of the accident again and again, while passengers went about their business in the terminal. Hanley wanted to stand on a chair and scream at everyone to shut up and think about what had just happened. He found a quiet spot where he could call his father. He cried with him on the phone until he regained his composure.

  —

  In Sabine County, Texas, Greg and Sandra Cohrs sat down to breakfast and turned on their television. Reports began coming in that Columbia had “exploded” over Dallas. Grass fires were springing up in the area. Greg said to Sandra, “I bet we’ll be involved in this before it’s over.” US Forest Service personnel, regardless of their job titles, typically were called in to help respond to all-risk or all-hazard incidents—wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and even terrorist attacks—in their local communities and across the nation.

  Cohrs called the district fire management officer to find out if he should report for work. The officer said he was waiting for a call and told him to stand by. In the meantime, Cohrs prepared to do his usual Saturday yard work, but then a call ba
ck informed him that he would be on flight duty that day as a spotter.

  Cohrs brought up the Intellicast weather radar website on his computer as part of his usual preflight routine. Despite the clear blue sky above, the radar image showed a wide swath of something in the air along a northwest to southeast track from Nacogdoches, Texas, through Hemphill and heading on toward Leesville, Louisiana. The largest concentration of radar returns was centered over Sabine County, and the cloud appeared to be slowly drifting north and east. He realized that the weather radar was picking up the debris from Columbia that was still falling to the ground. He took several screen snapshots of the radar display.

  Accident Plus Thirty Minutes

  Sean O’Keefe and the other senior leaders huddled with me in my small conference room on the fourth floor of the Launch Control Center. We turned on a TV and saw for the first time the videos of Columbia’s plasma trail flashing and breaking up into smaller smoke trains.

  Our hearts sank. We then knew for certain that Columbia was lost. There was no hope for her or the crew.

  O’Keefe stared at the monitor. He put his hands on the table and said, “I wonder how many people on the ground we just hurt.”

  Associate Administrator Bill Readdy formally activated NASA’s Contingency Action Plan for Space Flight Operations. Although it was rather general, the plan prescribed what NASA’s leaders needed to do immediately to bring order to an emergency situation.3 Among other things, the plan called for the formation of formal task forces to respond to and investigate the accident. Over the ensuing weeks, this list would grow to include one independent review board and fourteen formal internal task forces, working groups, and action teams.4

  O’Keefe left the meeting and phoned President George W. Bush, who was at Camp David. Bush’s first question was, “Where are the families?” O’Keefe was moved that the president’s primary concern was to ensure that the families were being cared for. Bush then requested to speak with the families later that morning to express his personal remorse and to offer condolences from the nation. He and O’Keefe agreed that they would wait to place the call until the families had time to absorb the emotional blows of losing their loved ones.

  While O’Keefe was out of the conference room, Roy Bridges asked me, “Mike, what do you think happened?”

  I replied, “The only thing I can think of is the foam strike.” I called for someone to bring us copies of the photos of the launch debris hitting the shuttle’s wing.

  O’Keefe returned, and I passed around the photos. I said, “We don’t know if this is it, but there’s nothing else about this flight that stands out. This is the only thing I can think of as a potential problem.”

  Everyone stared at the photos. Someone said, “Okay. Let’s file this away for now. Don’t jump to any conclusions.”

  We then discussed who should lead NASA’s overall response to the accident and coordinate the various teams that would be responding from NASA’s centers. Someone suggested appointing Dave King, who had spent nineteen years at KSC in roles including launch director, director of shuttle processing, and deputy center director. King had just recently moved to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. O’Keefe and Readdy quickly agreed that King’s experience made him an excellent choice to lead the recovery effort.

  King, at home watching television, had just seen the news that NASA had lost communications with Columbia. Barely half an hour after the accident, his phone rang. Bill Readdy was on the line.

  “Dave, do you know what’s going on?”

  “Well, I know something’s going on, but I don’t know what.”

  “I need you to run the recovery operation. I need you to go find our friends.”

  King instantly felt the heavy burden of the responsibility he was being asked to bear. Having been through the Challenger disaster and its aftermath early in his NASA career, he knew the things that could go wrong if the recovery of a ship and its crew was not handled properly.

  King decided on the spot that he would do everything in his power to make this situation proceed better.

  —

  Five miles south of the Launch Control Center, Jerry Ross had raced back from the Shuttle Landing Facility to his office in the Operations and Checkout Building. He switched on the television to a news channel and saw the video of Columbia’s breakup.

  He met the crew families as they arrived at the crew quarters on the building’s third floor. He did not tell them what he had just seen on television. Rather, he did his best to make them as comfortable as possible.

  STS-107 was Bob Cabana’s first mission as the head of the Flight Crew Operations Directorate. He had ridden out with the crew on launch day, and he had been eagerly awaiting their return on the runway. Now he had to face the hardest thing he had ever done—telling the families that their loved ones weren’t coming home. When he felt he had enough information, he and Ross joined the families in the crew conference room. Cabana explained to them that it was unlikely that any of Columbia’s crew could have survived the accident.

  Ross spent the next several hours trying to comfort the families. He had their luggage collected from their hotel rooms, and he made arrangements to fly everyone back to Houston.

  Ann Micklos returned to her office near the Vehicle Assembly Building after the landing convoy demobilized. Someone called to ask if she wanted to go to the crew quarters to be with the Columbia families. While she appreciated the gesture and sympathy about the loss of Dave Brown, she knew that her situation was very different.

  “I chose to stay in the office and to try to figure out what happened with what data we had,” she recalled. However, her coworkers could see that she was in shock.

  After a while, they told her, “We’re driving you home.” She arrived to a house full of people to support her.

  —

  Things were going crazy in East Texas. In his office in Hemphill, Sheriff Maddox desperately needed to figure out what was happening in Sabine County. A deputy had just come on duty, and Maddox immediately dispatched him to the north end of the county. He phoned law officer Doug Hamilton from the US Forest Service and asked him to check on a possible train derailment near Bronson in the western side of the county. Maddox hopped in his car to head for the nearby natural gas pipeline. His dispatcher radioed him and said, “NASA just called and said it wasn’t a pipeline explosion. That was just the shuttle going over and breaking the sound barrier. You can go about your regular duties.”

  Maddox drove over to Hemphill’s youth arena to see what was going on at the livestock weigh-in. People asked him what it was that had passed overhead. Maddox told them that it was the shuttle breaking the sound barrier. One woman said, “But they haven’t heard from it in fifteen minutes.”

  Maddox knew something was wrong. He got back in his car. The dispatcher radioed that people were calling in from all over the county about items raining down from the clear blue sky, breaking tree limbs, and hitting the ground.

  Phone calls began pouring in to the town’s volunteer fire department in addition to those coming in to the sheriff’s office. “There are things falling out of the sky!” “Something just hit the road!” Then news of Columbia’s loss came through. The firefighters debated for several minutes about what to do. Volunteers started heading out to investigate the calls and secure the items being found.

  Hemphill City Manager Don Iles arrived at the fire station as a radio report came in from a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officer on US 96 near Bronson. “There’s a big metal object in the middle of the highway. It gouged the road. I’m looking at it, but I don’t know what to make of it.”

  The dispatcher asked if it had any identifying marks or numbers. The DPS trooper said, “Yeah, but it’s only partial.” He read back the numbers to the dispatcher, who then told him to wait. The trooper said he would stay at the scene by the object and keep vehicles from running over it.

  A few minutes later, the dispatcher came back on a
nd said, “I’ve just been in touch with NASA. Please do not pick up or touch any of the material, because it could be radioactive or poisonous.” There was dead silence on the other end of the radio as the trooper pondered his situation.

  Doug Hamilton arrived at the site of the reported train derailment, about five miles from his house, but there were no trains in sight anywhere. He called back to the sheriff’s office and was asked to head to the wreckage sighting on US 96.

  Sheriff Maddox and Hamilton met the DPS trooper at the scene. The metal object was the waste storage tank from Columbia’s crew module—the first confirmed piece of the shuttle found in Sabine County.

  With the nature of the situation now confirmed, the accident scene in Sabine County officially became a federal incident. Hamilton, as a federal law enforcement officer, was now the man in charge.

  Hamilton photographed the tank, and he and the others cordoned off the area with crime scene tape. They recorded its GPS position and called it back in to the dispatcher. Maddox and Hamilton had no officers available to guard the wreckage. The three men drove off together in Hamilton’s government car to investigate the next reported sighting.

  Someone overheard their radio report. When officials came back later in the day to retrieve the waste tank, it was gone.5

  Hamilton, Maddox, and the trooper next responded to a call from a woman’s farm outside Bronson. She had found partial human remains in her pasture. The sheriff went to the farmhouse and asked the family for a sheet to cover the remains. Someone suggested that they be removed from the pasture. Hamilton refused. “No, we ain’t movin’ nothin’! This is a crime scene.” He now knew that the gravity of the situation required more than just taking photos and recording GPS locations. He photographed the remains and placed a sheriff’s department officer on guard.

  Hamilton and Maddox drove from scene to scene for the next several hours, meeting DPS troopers at the location of each reported sighting. A few findings appeared to be partial remains of the crew, but most were pieces of the shuttle.