Bringing Columbia Home

by Michael D. Leinbach

  Flight Director—the leader of the flight control team in the Mission Control Center, with overall responsibility for mission operations and decisions regarding safe flight. The flight director assumed control of a mission upon ignition of the solid rocket boosters at T-0.

  Grid search—a technique for systematically searching an area. Searchers space out abreast at a prescribed interval and walk forward together, each person scanning the ground around them. When they reach the assigned distance from the starting point, the line pivots around one of the end people, and the group walks in the other direction. Grid searching increases the likelihood of finding a missing person or object, since it ensures that every square foot of the search area is covered.

  Heatshield—the protection system around a spacecraft that helps it survive the heat of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. The heatshield system of the space shuttle included silica tiles on its underside, reinforced carbon-carbon panels on its nose and wing leading edges, and quilted silica and felt blankets on areas not subject to high heating.

  Hypergolic propellants (also called “hypers”)—chemical liquids used to power the orbiter’s onboard maneuvering system rocket engines and thrusters. Hypergolic chemicals ignite instantly when the fuel and oxidizer come in contact with each other. The shuttle used monomethylhydrazine as fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidizer. Both chemicals are extremely toxic, both through inhalation and contact with skin, and cause death with even very limited exposure. Tanks of both propellants were located in various places throughout the orbiter.

  Incident command system (ICS)—a standardized process for command, control, and coordination of multiple agencies in response to an emergency situation.

  Incident Management Team (IMT)—a group that responds to an emergency using the incident command system framework. IMTs are “typed” according to the scope and complexity of the incidents they are certified to manage.

  Inconel—an alloy of nickel, chromium, iron, and other metals used for spacecraft parts subject to high-temperature and/or high stress environments.

  International Space Station (ISS)—a microgravity and space environment laboratory in low Earth orbit, funded and manned by the United States, Russia, Japan, the European Space Agency, and Canada. It has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000, recently by six astronauts at a time. Major assembly of the ISS occurred between 1998 and 2011 with unmanned vehicles delivering the Russian segment modules and the space shuttle delivering the components for the US side of the ISS.

  Johnson Space Center (JSC)—NASA’s center in Houston, Texas, which is home to the astronaut corps, the engineers who designed the space shuttle, the Space Shuttle Program Office, training facilities, and the Mission Control Center. Often referred to simply as “Houston.”

  Kennedy Space Center (KSC)—NASA’s principal launch facility located on the Atlantic coast of central Florida, which prepares and launches manned and unmanned spaceflight missions.

  Launch Control Center (LCC)—a four-story building at Kennedy Space Center that serves as the hub for conducting NASA test and launch operations. The LCC has four Firing Rooms, computer and communications systems support areas, as well as offices and conference rooms.

  Launch Director—the head of the launch team at Kennedy Space Center, responsible for making the final “Go for launch” decision.

  MADS recorder—see OEX.

  Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC)—NASA’s center in Huntsville, Alabama, which designs the propulsion systems for NASA’s manned spacecraft.

  Michoud Assembly Facility—NASA’s facility near New Orleans, Louisiana, where the space shuttle’s external tanks were built and tested. The tanks were shipped by barge from Michoud to Kennedy Space Center.

  Mishap Investigation Team—a multidisciplinary NASA internal team responsible for debris recovery, protection, and impoundment immediately after a spacecraft accident.

  Mission Control Center—the building at Johnson Space Center housing the flight control room where flight directors and flight controllers managed a space shuttle mission from launch until landing.

  Mission Management Team (MMT)—a group of managers from all aspects of the Shuttle Program throughout NASA and its shuttle contractors. The MMT held reviews to clear a shuttle mission for launch and was supposed to meet every day during a mission to keep leaders informed and, if necessary, debate risks and solutions to issues occurring before or during the flight, especially those outside documented launch or flight procedures.

  NTSB—the National Transportation Safety Board.

  OEX—the Orbiter Experiments recorder, akin to an airplane’s flight-data recorder, which recorded on magnetic tape the state of hundreds of pressure, temperature, motion, and other sensors inside Columbia. Also called the Modular Auxiliary Data System (MADS) recorder.

  OMS pods (pronounced “ohms”)—removable flight structures on each side of the aft end of the orbiter’s body, at the base of the vertical stabilizer (tail), containing the Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engines and maneuvering thrusters.

  Orbiter—the winged vehicle at the heart of the Space Transportation System. The orbiter was about the same size as a DC-9 or MD-80 commercial airliner. It took off like a rocket and landed like a glider.

  Orbiter Processing Facility—one of three specially outfitted hangars near Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building in which orbiters were maintained, repaired, and configured for upcoming missions.

  Payload bay—the cargo compartment in the middle section of the space shuttle. The payload bay was fifteen feet in diameter and sixty feet long—about the size of a school bus. The shuttle could carry up to sixty thousand pounds of payload into Earth orbit.

  Plasma—the “fourth state of matter,” a superheated gas with approximately equal numbers of positively charged ions and electrons, created during reentry as a fast-moving spacecraft compresses and superheats the surrounding atmosphere.

  Pyrotechnic devices (“pyros”)—small explosive charges for initiating dozens of critical actions on the space shuttle. Some of the functions performed by pyros included severing the bolts that held the shuttle to the launch platform at the moment the solid rocket boosters ignited, separating the external fuel tank from the orbiter, deploying the drag chute when the orbiter landed, blowing the hatch for emergency egress—even lowering the landing gear.

  Rapid Response Team (RRT)—a team of about ninety engineers and technicians from Kennedy Space Center who deployed if the shuttle made a “nonroutine” landing, tasked with securing the vehicle and bringing it back to KSC.

  Reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC)—also known as carbon-fiber-reinforced carbon. A composite material made up of layers of rayon cloth impregnated with a carbon resin and then baked into a hard surface. It is used for structural applications in situations subject to extremely high temperatures, such as the space shuttle’s nose and leading edge of its wings, the nose cones of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and Formula One car disc brakes. RCC is structurally strong and tough, but brittle when impacted with sufficient force.

  Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF)—the concrete runway at Kennedy Space Center where the space shuttle returned at the end of its missions. At 15,000 feet in length, the SLF is one of the longest runways in the world.

  Solid rocket booster (SRB)—one of two large solid-propellant motors that together provided 83 percent of the thrust in the first two minutes of the space shuttle’s flight. SRBs separated from the external tank and parachuted into the ocean, to be reused on later missions.

  Soyuz—the Russian manned spacecraft used to ferry crews of up to three people to and from low Earth orbit.

  Spacehab—a pressurized module carried in the shuttle’s payload bay and connected to the crew module’s air lock by a tunnel. Spacehab modules carried scientific and medical experiments the crew could operate in a shirtsleeve environment while on orbit.

  Space shuttle—see Orbiter.

  STS-xxx—abbreviatio
n for “Space Transportation System.” NASA designated space shuttle missions as STS followed by a number. The numbering was sequential based on the order in which the flights were initially approved. Priority changes or equipment problems occasionally caused some missions to be moved ahead or back in the launch manifest. Columbia’s final flight was STS-107, but it was the 113th shuttle mission to fly.

  T-0 (pronounced tee zero)—the moment in the countdown when the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters ignite, explosive holddown bolts sever, and the shuttle lifts off the launchpad.

  T-38—two-seat, supersonic jet aircraft used by the astronauts for training, transportation, and maintaining flying proficiency.

  Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test (TCDT)—the unfueled dress rehearsal for a space shuttle countdown and launch. The crew was strapped into their seats in the orbiter while the launch team supported them from the Firing Room.

  Thermal protection system (TPS)—see Heatshield.

  Tiles—blocks of low-density, porous silica bonded to the skin of the space shuttle to protect it from the heat of reentry. More than twenty thousand tiles—each with a unique shape—were on each space shuttle. They ranged from one to five inches in thickness depending on their location on the shuttle.

  Trans-Atlantic Landing (TAL, pronounced “tal”)—one of the abort modes available to the space shuttle if an emergency situation prevented it from going into orbit. The shuttle could land at designated landing sites in West Africa and Europe, as well as several air bases along the US East Coast.

  Type 1 Team—the most highly trained and qualified level of Incident Management Team, certified to work in response to complex national and state level emergency situations.

  United Space Alliance (USA)—the contractor responsible for most space shuttle operations and maintenance at KSC. In the mid-2000s, about 13,000 government and contractor employees were at KSC; 8,100 of those were USA staff.

  Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB)—the building at KSC where space shuttles were “stacked”—raised to a vertical position and mated to the external tank and solid rocket boosters in one of the four cavernous “High Bay” assembly areas before transport to the launchpad.

  White Room—a small area on the launch tower from which an astronaut crew enters their spacecraft.

  NOTES

  Except where otherwise noted, quotes and observations attributed to people throughout the book are taken from the authors’ interviews with those individuals. Other detailed information that is not footnoted is from Mike Leinbach’s personal notes and files.

  Chapter 2: Good Things Come to People Who Wait

  1. Challenger carried a crew of eight astronauts on the October/November 1985 flight of STS-61A. Atlantis also carried eight astronauts and cosmonauts on its return from the Russian Mir space station on STS-71 in 1995. Throughout the rest of the Space Shuttle Program, crew complement was limited to seven astronauts.

  2. Tariq Malik, “NASA’s Space Shuttle By the Numbers: 30 Years of a Spaceflight Icon,” Space.com, March, 9, 2011, www.space.com/12376-nasa-space-shuttle-program-facts-statistics.html.

  3. Shuttle mission numbers were assigned based on their original order in the launch manifest. STS-107 was the 107th assigned flight in the Space Shuttle Program. Changes in launch priorities and availability of hardware occasionally changed the order in which the missions flew. STS-107 was the 113th shuttle mission to fly. In informal conversation, missions were usually just referred to by their number—in this case, “one-oh-seven.”

  4. NASA, “Sixteen Minutes from Home: A Tribute to the Crew of STS-107,” KSC Web Studio (Kennedy Space Center, FL) video, February 2003.

  5. Each one of the four orbiters was in a constant state of flux—undergoing maintenance, being “de-configured” after returning from a mission, being prepared for an upcoming mission, being tested, being stacked, sitting at the launchpad, flying a mission, or being upgraded for safety and/or performance reasons. There were three hangars and four orbiters, occasionally requiring one of the vehicles to sit in an empty bay in the Vehicle Assembly Building while awaiting space in a hangar.

  6. The STS-107 crew also ran an interface test in June 2001, before the STS-109 mission was moved ahead of STS-107 in the launch schedule. STS-107’s experiments were removed from the payload bay, replaced with Hubble Space Telescope servicing equipment, and then placed back into the payload bay after Columbia returned from the STS-109 flight.

  7. Columbia’s refit would have involved installing an air lock in the payload bay (Columbia was the only shuttle with its air lock inside the crew compartment) and removing much of the test instrumentation that added weight to the vehicle. This would have included removing the Orbiter Experiments (OEX) recorder, which was to prove crucial to investigating the accident.

  Chapter 3: The Foam Strike

  1. Challenger was lost due to a cascading series of events that started with the failure of rubber O-rings in a joint of a solid rocket booster. Low-level engineers were unable to persuade middle management to delay the launch or even to seriously consider their concerns that the O-rings and the booster design might not work as intended in the frigid temperatures on the morning of Challenger’s January 28, 1986, launch day. Because middle management quashed the concern, the launch team and mission controllers were unaware that there was a potentially serious problem.

  2. Atlantis on STS-27 holds the distinction of being the most heavily damaged spacecraft to return safely from orbit. The cork tip of the right-hand SRB fell off during ascent and gouged the side of the orbiter. More than seven hundred tiles were damaged, and one was knocked off completely. During reentry, plasma completely melted through a steel antenna cover under the missing tile and had started melting the skin of the orbiter, but Atlantis passed through the period of peak heating before its airframe was breached.

  3. Steve Stitch, email message to Rick Husband and Willie McCool, subject “INFO: Possible PAO Event Question,” January 23, 2003, www.jsc.nasa.gov/news/columbia/107_emails/foamemails.doc.

  4. Evelyn Husband and Donna VanLiere, High Calling: The Courageous Life and Faith of Space Shuttle Commander Rick Husband (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003), 163.

  5. A study managed by LeRoy Cain subsequently determined that even if it were possible to jettison the payload bay contents and unneeded consumables on the ship, the maximum temperature reduction on the wing leading edges was at best only 7 percent (“Entry Options Tiger Team,” NASA Mission Operations Directorate, Flight Director Office, April 22, 2003).

  Chapter 4: Landing Day

  1. NASA, STS-107 Shuttle Press Kit (Houston, TX: NASA, December 16, 2002), 17.

  2. NASA added the Inflight Crew Escape System to space shuttles after the Challenger accident. Starting when the shuttle was at about thirty thousand feet in altitude, the astronauts could depressurize the crew module, jettison the hatch, and then extend an escape pole through the opening in the fuselage. One by one, the astronauts would hang a strap on the pole and slide out through the hatch. Their individual parachutes would open once they were clear of the shuttle. It took about ninety seconds to get the crew out this way, by which time the orbiter was at an altitude of ten thousand feet (“Everybody Out!” NASA Educator Feature, https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/features/F_Everybody_Out.html). This process would occur over the ocean, where the shuttle would be ditched.

  3. NASA, Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report SP-2008-565 (Houston, TX: NASA Johnson Space Center, 2008), 1–29.

  Chapter 5: Recovery Day 1

  1. John Tribe, “Forever Remembered,” unpublished personal recollections on the STS-107 mission.

  2. Kim Anderson email, February 4, 2003, accessed at www.ars-fla.com/Mainpages/Spaceflight/STS-107/KimAnderson-STS-107.htm.

  3. Within hours of assuming the role of NASA administrator in December 2001, O’Keefe asked his senior leaders to brief him on what would happen if something were to go wrong. NASA formalized a new contingency plan in November 20
02, and revised it in January 2003, less than a month before the Columbia accident. O’Keefe later said in an interview with Jonathan Ward, “When you’re in a situation like that, I don’t know many people that can stand there and be as ice-cold as it takes to actually think through the proper series of those kinds of events. You can tell the difference between those who have an organized way of proceeding, versus those that say, ‘What in the hell do we do now?’ The one thing I didn’t have to worry about on February 1, 2003, was what we were going to do next. The guy standing next to me on the runway has the binder that says, “Here’s the plan, and here’s how we do it, starting with: ‘Item 1. Here’s who we need to call and here’s how we’re going to set up a mishap investigation.’”

  4. NASA, NASA Accident Investigation Team Final Report (Washington, DC: NASA Headquarters, August 22, 2003), iv. The fourteen organizations included the Columbia Task Force, the Headquarters Contingency Action Team, the NASA Accident Investigation Team, the Mishap Investigation Team, the Reconstruction Team, the Orbiter Vehicle Engineering Working Group, the Emergency Operations Center, the Data and Records Handling Working Group, the Early Sightings Assessment Team, the Systems Integration Working Group, the External Tank Working Group, the Space Shuttle Main Engine Working Group, the Reusable Solid Rocket Motor Working Group, and the Solid Rocket Booster Working Group.

  5. “Grand Jury Indicts Man for Stealing Shuttle Toilet,” Lufkin Daily News (Lufkin, TX), May 8, 2003 (www.lufkindailynews.com/news/newsfd/auto/feed/news/2003/05/08/1052368037.00303.3371.4691.html). The tank was recovered on May 7 in a strange turn of events, and its alleged thief became the fifth person to be indicted in East Texas for stealing debris from the shuttle. Eyewitnesses to his arrest stated that, by day, he was involved in the search for crew remains. He then allegedly went back to bring debris home from the field at night, hiding items under clothing in his trailer. He also had a stash of pyrotechnic devices—he did not know what they were or how dangerous they were—under his bed. Rumor held that he had a romantic encounter with a female searcher, and when his wife learned of the affair, she notified local authorities of the stolen material in their home. Accused of withholding the “compactor tank assembly” from NASA’s recovery efforts, he was also indicted by a grand jury on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. In August 2003, he was acquitted of the theft charge in exchange for pleading guilty to the firearms charge.