“As a shuttle pilot, I knew exactly what those switches meant,” Melroy said, “and I was absolutely electrified!” The crew—“demonstrating excellent systems knowledge by taking actions not simulated in training”—had attempted to get the hydraulic systems working again after the ship lost control. Melroy said, “They were our heroes. Somehow, it made it easier to bear, knowing they were not helpless, but instead were fighting to save the vehicle in their last moments—right up to the end.”13
The four hundred–page crew survival investigation report, released in 2008, confirmed that the accident was not survivable. Rather than the CAIB’s general finding that plasma intrusion caused the left wing to fail, the survivability study presented a detailed analysis and timeline of how Columbia actually broke up. The proximal cause of the accident was the loss of hydraulic pressure after the system was breached by plasma in the left wing. This caused the ship’s control surfaces to stop responding to steering commands. Columbia went into a flat spin. The crew knew their ship was in trouble. They tried to save it after it went out of control, during a period that lasted at most thirty seconds. The ship broke up due to aerodynamic forces, starting with the left wing. A breach in the crew module caused it to depressurize rapidly, shortly after the body of the ship came apart. The crew lost consciousness almost instantaneously. They did not even have time to lower their helmet visors.
The survivability group’s report included multiple, detailed recommendations on the design of crew-worn equipment, seats and restraints, and the crew compartments for future space vehicles. The report also contained suggestions for crew training and procedures to cope with emergency situations.
NASA’s response to the report was positive and supportive. “In the end,” Melroy said, “it made me feel better to know that people were saying, ‘There are no holds barred—if there’s a way of making things better, we’ll do it.’ It reminded me of what a great culture NASA has—that we are committed to learn everything we can from tragedies.”
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United Space Alliance’s Amy Mangiacapra was Columbia’s first caretaker and curator, a role she held for ten years. “I maintained the temperature and humidity in the room, made sure everything stayed clean and dust free, gave tours to senators, even scrubbed the floors,” she said. “The room is really remote. There’s nobody around. I was totally by myself, for eight to twelve hours a day, surrounded by Columbia. She was like one of my children. You can’t pour that many years into something that special and come away without being completely changed. It was an honor to say that every day I got to go to work and take care of Columbia.”
NASA transitioned the preservation office curator role from a contractor to a permanent NASA staff position. Mike Ciannilli assumed the lead role, and by January 2016, his charter expanded to include NASA’s new Apollo, Challenger, and Columbia lessons learned program.
KSC strongly urges all new employees—interns, contractors, and civil servants alike—to tour the Columbia room with Ciannilli soon after they begin working at KSC. His orientation emphasizes how culture and complacency led to the spacecraft accidents and how individual actions might have made a difference.
Selected artifacts from Columbia toured all of the NASA centers in 2008 to reinforce the agency’s safety culture. “It’s not to point fingers or lay blame,” Ciannilli said, “but people need to understand why it’s important for every single person to be vigilant every day. You can tell them that, and sometimes it doesn’t sink in. But after people see the debris, they say, ‘Wow—I really get it now.’”
Being in the Columbia room changes people, forcing them to think and reflect. After touring the facility, NASA Administrator and former astronaut—and Columbia pilot—Charlie Bolden was visibly shaken. He asked Ciannilli, “How can you do this every day?”
Ciannilli responded, “I try to focus on the good that Columbia does in changing people’s hearts and minds. I don’t do it—Columbia does it. She has the loudest voice. She speaks more eloquently than anyone ever could.”
The Columbia room’s 6,800–square foot area does not afford enough space to exhibit every piece of debris. Amy Mangiacapra, Steve Altemus, and Jim Comer selected representative items that are readily recognizable and that tell a story about the accident or the investigation. Educational posters and placards around the room provide details about the items and the recovery and reconstruction efforts. Signed banners—along with hundreds of cards, letters, and posters from schoolchildren—decorate the walls in the room.
An unmarked, locked room off to one side contains the reconstructed crew module. This room is open only to crew families, astronauts, and investigators.
The cockpit window frames, which used to be the first items visitors saw upon entering the room, were relocated in 2016 to the Forever Remembered exhibit at the Atlantis building at the KSC Visitor Complex. Now, one first sees the remains of Columbia’s air lock and tunnel to the Spacehab module, assembled horizontally on three frames. A rack nearby holds the remnants of maneuvering thrusters.
Columbia’s nose landing gear strut lies near the front of the room. A pan underneath the piston still catches occasional drops of hydraulic fluid leaking from the strut. The left main landing gear strut and its tires are also on display, showing how heat entering the left wing affected the inboard and outboard tires differently.
Racks on the right-hand wall hold avionics boxes from Columbia’s instrument bay. Some are badly melted and almost unidentifiable. Others are relatively pristine, with serial numbers still clearly legible.
A section of Columbia’s vertical stabilizer is surrounded by sections of the right and left pods flanking it on the ship. The pieces clearly tell the tale of how the accident originated on the left wing of the ship. The left maneuvering system pod and left side of the tail are pitted and slumped, with globules of metal melted into the tile. The right side pod has none of that kind of damage.
Lexan frames holding about half of the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing exhibit the damage in the vicinity of panels 8 and 9, where the wing breach occurred. Across the aisle is a section of the left wing tile table, containing the recovered tiles from the left wing behind the breach. The tiny “Littlefield Tile”—the farthest west piece of debris recovered—rests on a shelf nearby.
Columbia’s nose cap sits on a pallet, still bearing sticks, grass, and dirt from the forest floor from where it was recovered in Sabine County. The engine powerheads that were pulled from mud-filled craters in Louisiana lie on pallets with other pieces of wreckage from Columbia’s aft structures.
Starting about one hundred feet back into the room, scores of triple wall storage boxes—bearing labels such as BODY FLAP BOX 1 or PLUMBING-UNIDENTIFIED—line the walls and contain the bulk of Columbia’s debris.
Two rooms at the far end of the facility hold the dozens of cryogenic and propellant tanks that were recovered from the field. Some look as though they merely floated to Earth. Others are dented or covered with shredded Kevlar. The lighter objects slowed down rapidly in the upper atmosphere and fell out of the sky. The heavier ones traveled farther and impacted the ground at higher speeds, some still supersonic.
I can’t help but be overwhelmed by evidence of the tremendous forces to which Columbia was subjected—heating, melting, tearing, shredding, ionization, and impact.
But I’m also amazed at the massive undertaking to bring Columbia home and understand how she perished. The display frames for the RCC panels hold large as well as minuscule pieces of the shuttle’s wing. Just one frame provides evidence both of the high quality and diligence of the search efforts—that searchers could find pieces of material smaller than a thumbnail out in the wilderness—and the care and skill of our reconstruction engineers, who took these tiny pieces and painstakingly rebuilt the wing. It is akin to assembling a dinosaur skeleton from shattered bits of fossil.
Whenever I visit, I look at the room as a whole and contemplate what it represents. Here lies 40 percent of
America’s first space shuttle—the collective effort of thousands who designed, built, and maintained her. Here is the vessel that flew 127 women and men on twenty-eight missions into space. Here is the wounded vehicle that fought valiantly to the bitter end to try to bring her last seven crew members home. Here, in this volume the size of two or three average houses, rests the results of the collective efforts of twenty-five thousand people who searched every square foot of a debris field the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined during three months of 2003. Preserved here is the work of the hundreds of people who processed, cleaned, examined, and cataloged every one of the eighty-four thousand pieces recovered.
Here is a warning of the dangers of complacency and suppressed debate.
And here lies hope people will learn from Columbia to make spaceflight safer—although it will never be routine.
Chapter 14
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
The dangers inherent in human spaceflight resurfaced only a few months after the Columbia accident—while the search-and-recovery operations were still underway. The next space shuttle flight after Columbia was supposed to bring home the ISS Expedition 6 crew of Kenneth Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and Donald Pettit in early March of 2003. With shuttle flights suspended indefinitely, NASA and Russia decided to send the Expedition 6 crew home in May aboard the Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft docked at the station.
The Soyuz undocked on May 3. A computer error caused the guidance system to malfunction during reentry. The ship went into a ballistic trajectory instead of a controlled descent, subjecting the crew to more than eight times the force of gravity. Ground stations lost communications with the ship when an antenna tore loose during reentry.
The Soyuz descent module landed in a remote area 276 miles short of the targeted landing site.1 Without a working radio, the crew had no way to contact the recovery forces and let them know where they were and that they were okay. Several tense hours passed before the recovery teams located the ship and extracted the crew. The men sustained minor injuries during their harrowing fall to Earth, but were otherwise unharmed.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board released its report on August 26, 2003. The investigators blamed the loss of Columbia as much on NASA’s politics and culture at the time as on hardware failure. The report chided the White House and Congress for squeezing NASA’s budgets so tightly that safety was at risk. The report cited issues in NASA’s transparency, diligence, and oversight dating back to the Challenger disaster (and even the Apollo 1 accident in 1967), but which were never fully and permanently corrected in NASA’s culture.
The CAIB documented how NASA had permitted the “normalization of deviance” to put both Challenger’s and Columbia’s crews in harm’s way. The Challenger accident was the result of a known systems issue in the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters that had not been corrected. There had been partial burn-through of the O-rings on several previous missions—including the second flight of the space shuttle—but the details of the problem and the potential catastrophic outcomes never came to the attention of the launch decision makers. Lower-level engineers and managers did not allow the issue to be brought forward. Their desire to meet the launch manifest—and each organization not wanting to be the reason for standing down—trumped sound engineering practices of full and open discussion. Human and organizational failures doomed Challenger just as surely as the O-ring failure.
Similar conditions led to the Columbia accident. Foam shedding from the external tank was not within the design specifications for the space shuttle, but it had happened repeatedly over the years. Based on the shuttle’s demonstrated ability to survive hits from launch debris, managers justified continuing to fly while pursuing a new design. A mission four months before Columbia’s flight also suffered damage from external tank foam, and yet the issue was not even addressed at Columbia’s flight readiness review.
Clearly, changing organizational culture—and making those changes stick—is much harder than improving technology.
We were working on fixing the foam problem, but in hindsight, not nearly as aggressively as we should have been. NASA chose to press on in order to meet the unrealistic and self-imposed deadline of completing the core of the ISS by February 2004. The urgency to finish the ISS overrode the urgency to fix a potential safety issue.
NASA’s decisions—and nondecisions—ultimately caused the loss of Columbia, took the lives of her crew and two searchers, endangered citizens on the ground, resulted in the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars for a recovery and reconstruction effort, and delayed ISS assembly missions for three years.
Senior NASA officials expressed surprise throughout the investigation as they learned about the concerns people said they had tried to raise while Columbia was in orbit. Leaders said they had no idea serious issues were not being elevated to their attention, when policies were clearly in place to encourage open and honest discussion. As with Challenger, the agency’s culture eroded over time into one of “prove to me why it’s not safe to fly.” It created a fear to speak up and be a dissenting voice, which ultimately stifled debate and killed the crew. Administrator O’Keefe also said that he was disappointed to learn that no one had called a safety hotline or alerted high-ranking officials about their concerns—a system that was already in place to allow anyone to escalate issues anonymously and without fear of retribution.2
In addition to the deeply embedded cultural issues at the agency that still needed to be fixed, the CAIB pointed out that the shuttle’s design was inherently flawed. Too many problem scenarios were possible from which a shuttle crew had no way to escape or survive. The risk could be mitigated somewhat, but in the CAIB’s opinion the Shuttle Program was “operating too close to too many margins.”3 The CAIB recommended that NASA accelerate steps to replace the space huttle.
Administrator O’Keefe embraced all of the CAIB’s recommendations and assured the board NASA would implement them. It was tough medicine to take, but we needed it.
All told, the Columbia recovery, reconstruction, and investigation cost two lives and $454 million. Of that, FEMA spent $302 million for public safety and the search operations in Texas and Louisiana. NASA’s $152 million share of the cost included the recovery and reconstruction of the debris and the funds needed to support the CAIB’s investigation.4
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As a sidebar to the investigation, the CAIB quietly asked us to determine if there might have been an opportunity to launch a rescue mission to save Columbia’s crew, had we known that the ship was doomed. At the same time, they asked engineers in Houston if there might have been a way for Columbia’s crew to repair her wing with materials on board the ship. Admiral Gehman deliberately waited until May to request the analyses to allow emotions to cool down following the accident. We had already conducted our own internal studies before Gehman’s request.
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, mounting a rescue mission would have been a mammoth undertaking and a very risky proposition. Knowing that foam from the external tank had doomed Columbia, would we dare to launch Atlantis with an identical external tank, possibly one with the same fatal flaw? If Atlantis were also damaged during ascent, we would have lost two shuttles and two crews.
This would not have been solely a NASA decision. President Bush would have needed to be involved in the process, and there would have been very little time for debate.
Columbia’s crew would have been told to shut down all noncritical activity on the ship and sleep extended hours to prolong the cabin’s carbon dioxide removal capability while awaiting the rescue. They would also close down the Spacehab module, effectively ending Columbia’s science mission.
Meanwhile, the rescue mission crew would rehearse procedures in Houston for rendezvousing with Columbia and transferring her crew to Atlantis. At KSC, a “full court press” of round-the-clock activity would put Atlantis on the launchpad no earlier than January 31.
Bringing Columbia Home Page 27