Bringing Columbia Home

by Michael D. Leinbach

  With Constellation canceled and the shuttle winding down, NASA was in a bind. The Commercial Crew program was born, calling for private companies to build vehicles and operate flights to the ISS under NASA charter. However, the program was still in its infancy, and the first commercial crew flights were at least four years away. NASA decided to extend the Space Shuttle Program with one final mission to carry supplies, equipment, spare parts, and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the ISS. But the transfer of decades of knowledge and talent to the subsequent program—a critical success factor in the early days of America’s manned spaceflight programs—would not be possible.

  Atlantis rolled out to Pad 39A on June 1, 2011, for STS-135. Many people at KSC had spent their entire careers working with the space shuttles. It seemed impossible to believe this would be the final mission.

  I ruffled some feathers by openly addressing the issue with the Firing Room personnel—most of whom were contractors—at the conclusion of the launch simulation. Most members of our launch team had been together for twenty or more years. Many of these wonderful, dedicated people had taken part in the search for Columbia or had worked in the reconstruction hangar. Virtually all of the contractors were going to be laid off when the STS-135 mission ended, and no one had addressed the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. So I told my team what I really thought. As politically inappropriate as it was, I apologized to them on behalf of NASA. I got spanked for that, but I felt it was the right thing to do for my team.

  We launched STS-135 on July 8, 2011. Atlantis returned to KSC in a predawn landing twelve days later. Completion of the ISS was cause for celebration, but it also meant the end of the Space Shuttle Program. LeRoy Cain and I hugged each other tearfully on the Shuttle Landing Facility runway. We had both been through so much since the terrible events of February 1, 2003.

  With no new system to transition into, opportunities for contractors to stay in the space program were scarce. Layoffs began the next day. This had a far-reaching effect on the teams that developed over the thirty-year life of the Space Shuttle Program. Losing this extraordinary expertise was a casualty whose impact cannot be fully appreciated until the time comes to rebuild it. Pam Melroy said, “We accumulate wisdom. The hardware is the least of it. Someone could hack into your computer and steal all your information about the shuttle, but they wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to operate it. It’s all about the corporate knowledge that we share.”

  After the mission, I told reporters, “It doesn’t matter what the change is—any major change in one’s life, you go through these four stages: denial, anger, exploration, and acceptance. We’ve all been through that now in the Shuttle Program and we’ve accepted the fact that it’s over. This is the end of the program, and people will move on and do well.” I concluded my comments with, “It’s important, but it’s not the end of the world. The sun will rise again tomorrow.”18

  As a career civil servant, I was assured of a job after the Shuttle Program ended. For several years, though, I had been toying with the idea of retiring. With no manned launches in the foreseeable future, I thought this was as good a time as any to punch out. The launch director role fit me pretty well. After a career of launching shuttles, I don’t think I could have been a budget guy behind a desk. I retired from NASA in November 2011.

  NASA’s remaining shuttles retired to museums in 2012—Atlantis at Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex, Discovery at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, Endeavour at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, and Enterprise at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum in New York City.

  Chapter 15

  CELEBRATING 25,000 HEROES

  As time passed following the accident and the remarkable events of the first half of 2003, people gradually returned to their daily lives. No one wanted to dwell on the horrors of the accident or the tremendous hardships that people endured in the immediate aftermath. And yet, there was a collective need to honor the sacrifices the crew made on behalf of their countries and to celebrate the incredible work accomplished by thousands of people in the aftermath.

  Just a few months after the recovery effort wrapped up, the Texas communities along Columbia’s path began thinking about how to honor the crew of Columbia and tell the story of their communities’ roles in the recovery.

  Lufkin placed the commemorative plaque presented by NASA at the farewell dinner in the city’s Louis Bronaugh Park, installed a monument, and flew a Columbia flag in the park’s flag circle. Displays in the town’s Civic Center highlighted Lufkin’s key role in the recovery effort. Farther east, San Augustine placed a stone memorial to Columbia at the town’s Civic and Tourism Center.1

  Hemphill in particular sought to memorialize both its identity as “ground zero” for the accident and the actions of the thousands of volunteers who helped NASA search for the crew. In a very real sense, Sabine County’s citizens believe their community is hallowed ground—the place where God chose to bring Columbia’s crew to rest.

  Belinda Gay, Marsha Cooper, and Ellen Mills took the lead and devoted years to envisioning and promoting several commemorative sites for Columbia. First, the town revamped the raised circular Lone Star monument at the intersection of Highway 87 North and Farm Road 83. Its new design incorporated the STS-107 mission emblem in the center of the star and placed the motto THEIR MISSION BECAME OUR MISSION around the outer ring of the circle. The site also included stone monuments to the Columbia crew and the two searchers who perished in the helicopter accident, as well as the US and Texas flags and the Columbia banner.

  Second, they explored developing a commemorative glade at the “nose cone site” west of town. The community solicited site design concepts from architecture students at Texas A&M University. Hemphill’s memorial committee then spent several years working to persuade legislators to designate the site as a national landmark or a national park. Their proposal made it to Washington, DC. However, the National Park Service determined in 2014 that despite the historical significance of the Columbia accident, the site did not meet the suitability standards to become part of the national park system.2

  For the third planned memorial, Gay, Cooper, Mills, and other citizens of Sabine County envisioned a museum in the town that would serve as a visitor center, a repository for artifacts and information related to the STS-107 crew and the community’s role in the recovery, and an educational center that would eventually include a space shuttle cockpit simulator. Generous donations from many people around the country—including a major grant from Mr. Albert Smith in memory of his wife, Patricia Huffman Smith—funded the museum.

  NASA provided educational materials. Lockheed donated unused shuttle wing RCC panels and a shuttle nose cap. The families of Columbia’s crew shared personal mementoes from their loved ones. Evelyn Husband donated Rick’s contact lens case—the one that Marsha Ivins and Jim Comer had examined in the reconstruction hangar. Laurel Clark’s husband Jon donated her collection of science and aviation books, filling the shelves in the museum’s education center.

  The night before the museum’s dedication, Willie McCool’s father approached Marsha Cooper and asked if she could open the display case containing his son’s memorabilia. The senior McCool removed from his pocket a pair of gold astronaut wings—which would have been presented to Columbia’s pilot upon completion of his first space mission—and placed them in the case. “This is where they belong,” he told her.

  The Museum opened on the eighth anniversary of the accident—February 1, 2011. Sabine County’s commemoration committee produced a video, Of Good Courage, on the tenth anniversary of the accident. Both the museum and the video provide heartfelt evidence of the determination of the people of Sabine County to ensure that Columbia, her crew, and the remarkable accomplishments of the citizens of East Texas will not be forgotten.

  In NASA’s Apollo, Challenger, and Columbia Lessons Learned Program, Mike Ciannilli sought opportunities to educate the broader public on the sacr
ifices made by astronauts and their families on behalf of the country’s space program. As part of his educational mandate, he worked quietly behind the scenes with the families of the Challenger and Columbia crews to obtain their consent to present representative debris from the two vehicles in an educational display at KSC, along with personal memorabilia from the fallen astronauts. Thanks to his efforts, part of Challenger’s fuselage sidewall and Columbia’s cockpit window frames were enshrined in 2015 in the “Forever Remembered” exhibit in the Atlantis building at the KSC Visitor Complex. They are the only artifacts from either vehicle viewable by the general public.3

  Pat Adkins now volunteers as a docent in the Atlantis building. When the exhibit opened, Adkins was somewhat startled to see the frames on display, still bearing embedded bits of the dried mud and grass from when he retrieved one of them in Sabine County.

  In quiet times, he finds himself at the exhibit, reflecting on his experiences in East Texas after the accident. “It’s not a tourist attraction. It’s a memorial. People need to understand that there is a cost of doing what we did and what we’re going to continue to do. The public needs to see that there are people out there doing these things—not only for themselves, but also for their country—and it’s a good thing. This is a reminder that sometimes it’s hard.”

  —

  What did the participants throughout this mammoth undertaking learn about themselves, their communities, and their country as a result of their role in bringing Columbia home? And what should Americans in general take from this moment in our history?

  Astronaut Jerry Ross said, “First and foremost, people need to understand the greatness of the United States of America and its citizens. The outpouring of support and prayers we received was tremendous. Second, the United States has an incredible wealth of capabilities. To see the energy and expertise and materials and technical capabilities that descended on Lufkin within hours of the accident was so reassuring. Finally, there were no ulterior motives. Every individual was there to do what they could to get the country’s space program flying again.”

  Local communities proved the usefulness of the incident command system. I suspect that most Americans are not aware their community leaders have been trained in this powerful process for dealing with disasters, both natural and man-made. In Texas, every county judge is required to attend a three-day class on the system, as are most firefighters and law enforcement personnel.

  Mark Allen was the logistics lead on the ICS team headquartered in Hemphill during the recovery. He is now county judge of Jasper County. He said, “The training’s important, but it’s more than just checking off that box. It’s the network you build through exercising and training and working together. All of us from the local counties have banded together on different incidents, and we’ve learned to trust each other’s judgment. That’s real important in a critical situation where it’s high stress, no sleep, and lots of coffee, and you’re making it up as you go along. You’ve got a structure and a whole bunch of other people that you know that can do this.”

  The disaster provided the local communities an opportunity to be their best—to demonstrate how their leaders and citizens could step up when their country needed them most. “If people couldn’t do one thing, they’d find something else to do that would help out. Everybody did it as a team, and that was the reason for success,” said Greg Cohrs.

  FEMA’s Scott Wells said, “The shuttle disaster is a great case study on how the whole community works together to accomplish something. The president’s 2010 national security strategy was that the Government can’t do it all alone anymore. The threats that face the nation are so big that it’s going to take the whole community—local, individuals, volunteer organizations, states, Federal government—everybody. That is starting to take traction now.”

  As Jerry Ross said, another key to success was that everyone operated without personal agendas. More than 130 agencies and more than 300 volunteer groups and private organizations worked together on the recovery. While we may think of agencies as faceless entities, they are in fact composed of everyday people who are trying to do their best. Rather than carving out their own professional turf, personnel in the Columbia aftermath concentrated on how they could bring their agencies’ resources and expertise to bear to help solve problems and get things done.

  “I don’t care how much you fuss and fight—you can be brought together on common grounds,” said US Forest Service law enforcement officer Doug Hamilton. “But I never thought it would be to this extent. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to tell the story of just how it was, because you had to be here to see this—how everybody worked together without arguing and bickering.” Hemphill City Manager Don Iles said, “As tragic as this was, it was a good moment for our community. Everybody in this county did the right thing.”

  In contrast to the Challenger accident investigation—which NASA held relatively close to the vest—NASA’s leadership after the Columbia accident was much more open about rooting out the issues. Sean O’Keefe demanded that we bring everything out into the open as rapidly as possible “…warts and all. You’re going to hear about it sooner or later. So let’s hear it sooner so that we can deal with it. I take great comfort that of the many stories about the accident that were written after the fact, not a single one of them suggested that we were suppressing information.”

  As a result, people from all walks of life seemed even more eager to help NASA return to flight. KSC’s Stephanie Stilson said of her experience with the people of Nacogdoches, “We had screwed up. And to know that these people were still willing to support us and be part of resurrecting our reputation made me appreciate even more being a civil servant. I’m proud of working for NASA and the federal government and being an American citizen.”

  In its darkest hour, NASA reconnected with the country at a local level, uniting with people who might never otherwise have had contact with the agency. Astronaut Brent Jett said, “It made me so much more appreciative of the unsung, good Americans who will respond and do everything they can to help. Their true goodness was humbling. That was the biggest thing that affected me.”

  Dave King said, “I learned it wasn’t my space program. All these people cared deeply about what NASA was doing, our successes and failures and the tragedy we had. But they wanted us to understand that it’s America’s space program—it’s not NASA’s program or that of the individuals who work for us or our contractors.”

  Astronaut Dom Gorie added, “This kind of response made it so very clear that this country absolutely demands a manned space program. They want to continue it and honor the people that had given their lives to it. When it came time for me to think about my next mission—and was I truly willing to put my family through this kind of stress again—the support we got was a big part of my decision to fly again.”

  Leaders were needed at all levels of the recovery and reconstruction efforts. People stepped up to the task, and in many cases greatly exceeded even their own ideas about what they were capable of doing. Jim Comer was one example. He was a good leader before the reconstruction, but he was great by the time he left. He showed us a confidence that you can’t learn from classes. And there were so many others. Amy Mangiacapra rose way above her pay grade to do the things she did. Ed Mango, Steve Altemus, and many others saw their careers deservedly accelerated as a result of their leadership in a crisis situation.

  Jamie Sowell of the US Forest Service said, “I learned so much from leading and inspiring a group of volunteers—getting 110 percent out of them every day, asking them to do something after the glamour has worn off and they want to go home. ‘Come on! Just one more ridge. One more road. One more hour.’ Something great was going on here. Everyone wants to be part of something great. Finding the part that they can be successful in is the key—positive ways that they can contribute. I’ve carried those lessons every day since then.”

  Jon Cowart, who now works with NASA’s Commercial Crew pr
ogram said, “While I had great appreciation for the technical things we did in the hangar, I learned to value the people on my team much more. I was much better able to relate to the people working under me and with me. It made me a better manager of human beings.”

  Security special agent Linda Rhode said, “The astronauts gave everything they had. They have a lot of courage, and they have to work together in a very small space. If they don’t, their mission won’t succeed. When I’m working on projects with difficult people, I try to remember, ‘What would the astronauts do?’ They would take the high road. What’s best for the agency? What’s best for our mission? Those are the important questions.”

  Every person interviewed for this book said that the Columbia experience was a singular defining moment in his or her life. Firefighter Jeremy Willoughby, who was on the fire crew that found the OEX recorder, said, “I come from a very small town—Madison, Florida—and it’s just unbelievable to think when I look back on it. How did I get put on this huge part of history?”

  Mike Ciannilli said, “It was a time in my life I’d never want to experience again. But I can’t ever imagine not living through it.”

  Volunteer searcher Dwight Riley from Sabine County said, “It’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. I’m seventy-eight now. If they called me to do it again, and if I was still able to walk, I’d be right there.”

  Scott Thurston, now working with the Orion and Space Launch System programs at KSC said, “People ask me how I can stay so calm under pressure. Compared to standing in front of the orbiter you and your friends have worked on for all those years, and seeing it broken apart and trying to investigate what happened, this is a lot easier to handle. I stay calmer in adversity than I used to.”