Endurance

by Scott Kelly

  Charlie spoke again. “Columbia, Houston. Comm check. Columbia, Houston. UHF comm check.” He had switched to the backup comm system. Still no response from Columbia. My heart started beating faster. The countdown clock got down to zero and started to count up. Columbia was supposed to be on the ground by now, and, being a glider, it had little margin to arrive late. Charlie kept making the same call over and over again. I jumped in my car and headed to the space center, dialing my brother on my cell phone. My call woke him up. By then reports were coming in that pieces of the orbiter were falling about a hundred miles north of Houston. Mark and I talked about the parachutes, the possibility that the crew might have survived using escape procedures that were developed after the Challenger disaster. Every subsequent shuttle crew trained to extend an escape pole out the hatch, use it to slide out past the wing, then parachute down to safety. No one had actually tried this, of course. Mark and I hoped that it could work, though we weren’t optimistic.

  It soon became clear what had gone wrong. The space shuttle’s external tank, which was sort of like an enormous orange thermos, was covered with foam to help insulate the cryogenic propellant inside and keep ice from forming on the surface. Almost from the start of the shuttle program, the vibration of launch and subsequent air pressure as the vehicle accelerated had been causing pieces of foam to fall off the tank. Engineers had been unable to completely resolve the issue. Usually the foam fell away from the orbiter, or fell in small enough bits that there was little damage. But the day Columbia launched, a noticeably large piece of foam, about the size of a briefcase, had fallen and struck the leading edge of the orbiter’s left wing, a particularly bad place for the heat shield to be damaged. There had been a brief discussion on the ground as to whether this foam strike would cause a problem, and the managers and engineers involved had quickly concluded that it would be fine. The crew of Columbia was never a part of these discussions, and though they were informed of the foam strike, they were told the impact had been analyzed and that there was “absolutely no concern for entry.”

  Seventeen years earlier, the Challenger commission had blamed that disaster on a creeping complacency about safety in the shuttle program. The culture at NASA had changed a great deal as a result, but now it seemed maybe that complacency had crept back in again. It’s not as though no one had raised the alarm about this issue: Apollo veteran John Young, commander of the first space shuttle mission, and conscience of the Astronaut Office, was always standing up in our Monday morning meetings, trying to convince people of the danger posed by the foam. I remember him saying distinctly, “We have to do something about this or a crew is going to die.”

  I thought about the people I knew who had been on Columbia. I had known Dave Brown longer than most of my classmates because he had been at Pax River when I was. He had a great gap-toothed smile and a casual attitude that belied his enormous accomplishments—he had been admitted to an elite program that allowed flight surgeons to become Navy pilots. He had helped Mark prepare for his NASA interview and then helped me when I was called. That was the type of guy he was.

  Laurel Clark was a Navy doctor before she became an astronaut, and our families had become close soon after we moved to Houston. She had a son, Iain, the same age as Samantha. Laurel would often pick up Samantha and take her along with Iain to the zoo on Saturdays. Laurel and her husband, Jon, were part of an inner circle that met often for social evenings at Mark’s house. Laurel liked wine, and so did the rest of our group, and we spent many great evenings together. We gave her the nickname “Floral” for her flowery fashion sense and her love of gardening. She had a carpet of violets at her house, and in the weeks and months after the accident everyone in our class would be given a small pot full of them to care for and remember her by. Most of us kept them on the windowsills in our offices, and Lisa Nowak would often come by and take care of our violets for us if they weren’t doing well.

  Willie McCool, a fellow Navy pilot, and I had crossed paths briefly at Pax River before we were both selected as astronauts. He had been finishing up his tour as a test pilot when I was just starting mine. I remember the first time I saw his name on a list of the new class and thought it had to be the best astronaut name ever. Willie was infectiously positive, extremely smart, and genuinely caring about the people around him.

  I didn’t know the other crew members nearly as well because they hadn’t been in my class. Rick Husband, the commander, a dedicated family man and Air Force pilot; Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian American woman in space and an aerospace engineer; Mike Anderson, an Air Force pilot with a ready smile; and Ilan Ramon, an Israeli fighter pilot who had been chosen to represent his country on this shuttle mission. Ilan was considered a national hero, the youngest pilot to have taken part in a risky air strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. He subsequently became one of Israel’s first F-16 pilots. The crew left behind a total of twelve children.

  In my experience, when colleagues have died in accidents, we find ourselves reflecting on what great people the deceased were. Still, it was a special blow to lose a group of seven people who were all so warm, generous, and kind. It was as though we had lost the seven most respected and well liked of all our colleagues.

  That day, my brother and I decided on our own to get some astronauts up to the area where the debris was falling. This was a bit ballsy of us, as we weren’t very senior in the Astronaut Office. We called George Abbey, now the former director of the Johnson Space Center, who continued to hold a great deal of sway in Houston. He recommended we call the Harris County constable, who got us in touch with the Coast Guard at Ellington Field. Mark and one of our astronaut colleagues got into a helicopter and were soon searching through the East Texas terrain for debris and the bodies of our friends and colleagues.

  I stayed back with a large group working on a recovery plan for the astronauts’ remains and the orbiter debris, so we could reconstruct what had happened. After the Challenger disaster, pieces of debris recovered from the ocean floor provided physical proof of what had gone wrong, and, as with Challenger, we would gather pieces of the shuttle in a hangar at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When I got home that evening, Leslie and I went to my brother’s house to be with Jon Clark, Laurel’s husband, and Iain, now eight. They had just returned from Florida after the horribly long, futile wait at the landing facility. It was heartbreaking to see them and try to comfort them. Our classmate Julie Payette was temporarily staying with Mark and his family at the time, and she and I tried to impress upon Jon and Iain that the crew’s deaths were likely painless. We had no way of knowing this for sure, of course, but we wanted to believe it for ourselves as much as for Laurel’s grieving family. Later we would learn the crew probably had less than ten seconds of useful consciousness after the orbiter’s pressure hull was breached. None of them had time to lower their helmet visors, so we knew depressurization must have taken place very quickly. After one of the control panels was recovered from a field, investigators deduced that Willie had tried to restart two of the auxiliary power units, so we knew they must have had at least a sense that something was going wrong.

  The next day, I headed north in my car and helped out with the search for debris and human remains. I was teamed up with an FBI evidence-response team that had been involved in identifying remains at the World Trade Center. They worked with dogs that could distinguish human from animal remains. Standing in a wooded area where debris had fallen, I thought about other airplane crashes that had killed my friends and colleagues. The charred smell, the search for pieces of smashed aircraft, and the burned remainder of an elegant flying machine—all of it reminded me of the opening pages of The Right Stuff. In all my years of flying and scores of colleagues lost, this was my first time as part of the accident recovery team, like the pilots in Tom Wolfe’s book. I don’t think Tom ever saw such wreckage himself, but I could now confirm that he described it all perfectly.

  Word had spread at JSC about the search, and
a large number of NASA workers volunteered to help. But the area where debris had fallen covered so many thousands of square miles, from central Texas to Louisiana, that we needed more people. Emergency workers from all over the country, many of them Native American firefighters from the western states, descended on the area and quickly set up tent cities, complete with their own supplies. I was impressed by their dedication, organization, and skill at walking detailed search patterns in the thick woods of East Texas. They recovered thousands of fragments of Columbia, and every piece would help us figure out what had gone wrong.

  At the Kennedy Space Center, workers started to assemble parts on an outline of the shuttle’s silhouette painted on the concrete floor of a hangar. The first time I walked into that space to see the debris laid out, I was struck by the sight. The fact that a spacecraft can hit the atmosphere and burn up, yet the pieces can still be identified and reassembled this way, was eerie. I had been assigned to the next flight of Columbia, and it was strange to see the orbiter that was supposed to have been mine to command mangled and burned on the concrete floor. I later learned that it had been a toss-up between Willie McCool and me as to who would serve as pilot of my Hubble Space Telescope repair mission and who would fly the ill-fated mission of Columbia.

  Since the debris field was so large, the pieces of the orbiter couldn’t all be recovered on foot. A couple of weeks later, I was put in charge of directing an air search, using airplanes and helicopters to locate the larger pieces. You would think a piece of a spacecraft would be instantly recognizable, even from the air, but we wasted time investigating old cars, bathtubs, rusted-out appliances, and all kinds of garbage that, from a distance, looked like it could have come from the shuttle. There were rumors of remains of murder victims found during the search, and sites the searchers thought looked like methamphetamine labs, though I could never determine whether these rumors were true.

  Of the debris we did find from Columbia, some of it was strangely undamaged. I found the space shuttle’s Canon printer lying in the woods without a scratch on it—the same model of printer that I would later struggle with while living on the space station. We found samples from science experiments the crew had worked on, still intact—so much so that scientists could complete some of the research goals of the mission. A petri dish full of worms even survived the disaster.

  Every day I was out searching, the Salvation Army was out there too, providing food and coffee, offering any kind of help they could. Ever since, I never walk by their ringing bells at Christmastime without putting something in the red kettle.

  A few of the astronaut doctors worked in the local morgue, safeguarding the remains of our fallen colleagues as they awaited transport. Eventually I escorted Laurel’s body from the morgue to Barksdale Air Force Base in a Black Hawk helicopter. As I climbed out of the helicopter, I was surprised to see an Air Force general in full dress uniform saluting sharply, behind him a full formation of officers and airmen at attention. I was moved by their show of respect while the flag-draped casket was carried into the hangar. Later, Laurel’s remains were transferred to an aircraft to be flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the military’s mortuary, for a forensic autopsy.

  As the search went on, a second tragedy occurred: a Forest Service helicopter crashed while searching for debris. Two people were killed and three more were injured. The ensuing investigation revealed that the pilot was flying outside the operating limits for the aircraft, maybe in an effort to get to a hard-to-reach area. No one talked about calling off the search for debris and remains, but this was another sobering reminder of the risks inherent in aviation.

  Three of the crew were buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and other funerals were held in the crew members’ home states. NASA hired or borrowed airplanes to take those of us closest to the crew to Arlington and to the other funerals. On a blustery day that would have been Laurel’s forty-second birthday, she was laid to rest next to two of her Columbia crewmates. Seeing the pageantry of the full military honors, and the finality of her casket lowered into the ground, I absorbed fully the loss we had suffered and became more aware than ever of the risks we were taking traveling into space. I had lost friends and colleagues to airplane crashes many times before. I’d stopped keeping an exact count when the number got into the thirties; it is now in the forties—but I had never lost anyone as close to me as Laurel Blair Clark.

  I can honestly say the Columbia accident never for a second made me think about quitting. But my colleagues’ deaths gave me a renewed sense that my daughter could have grown up without a parent, just as the Columbia crew’s kids have done. The shuttle program had been suspended until the accident investigation board could come to a conclusion about what had happened, so I didn’t have much to do for the next six months. Eventually I was named chief of the Space Station Integration Branch, heading up a group of astronauts and engineers making decisions about hardware and procedures for the International Space Station, which had now been inhabited nonstop for more than two years. (It was still small and rudimentary compared to the expanded station I would visit in the future.) I was learning everything I could about how to make the station work most efficiently and effectively.

  In August 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board submitted its findings. It did not call for the shuttle program to shut down completely, as some had feared. But it would not be allowed to continue forever. The board recommended that after the assembly of the International Space Station was complete, planned for 2010, the shuttle orbiters should be recertified in order to keep flying. This process would require dismantling and rebuilding all three orbiters from the ground up. Recertification would be so complex and expensive there was no way NASA would be able to get Congress to pay for it, so we knew that most likely the shuttle would be scrapped. Besides, NASA wanted to focus on a new exploration vehicle (the project that has now become the Space Launch System and Orion) and wouldn’t be able to fund it properly while supporting both the space shuttle and the space station. The shuttle program would be the one to go. I agreed with that decision, though I knew I would miss it.

  —

  IN OCTOBER 2003, Leslie gave birth to our second child, Charlotte. The birth shaped up to be even more difficult than Samantha’s. When Charlotte was delivered by C-section, she had no heartbeat and wasn’t breathing. I still remember the sight of her tiny limp blue arm hanging out of the incision, while Leslie’s doctor was yelling for help. I’d had a great deal of training and experience dealing with emergencies, but the situation in the operating room was so disturbing I had to leave. My brother and Samantha were in the waiting room, and they told me that I looked as white as a sheet as I came out of the OR. I sat with them for what seemed like an eternity, until Leslie’s doctor came out to tell us that both Leslie and Charlotte were fine now, though it had been touch and go for a while. He warned me that because Charlotte had been deprived of oxygen for some period of time during birth, she might have health problems as she grew up, including the possibility she could have cerebral palsy. He had no way of knowing what her outcome might be, and it was his professional responsibility to warn me of the possibilities. But when I asked his personal opinion, he said, “I don’t think she’ll have cerebral palsy. I think she’ll be just fine.” He was right.

  Our mission was put back on the schedule for September 2006. Not long after, it was postponed to June 2007. All this reshuffling gave me the opportunity to make changes to my crew. I suggested that Lisa Nowak should get to fly on an earlier flight for two reasons: her obsessiveness gave me pause, and if she had to wait to fly on STS-118, it would be nearly ten years after she had been accepted as an astronaut. I argued that she should be put on the second return-to-flight mission, which would fly well before ours. As luck would have it, that mission had my brother, Mark, on it.

  At the same time Lisa was moved, Scott Parazynski was moved as well, to the mission just after mine, with Pam Melroy as commander. In exchange for Scott, we go
t Rick Mastracchio. Rick had worked as a flight controller in mission control before applying to become an astronaut, and in that role he had designed many of the contingency abort procedures we practiced in the simulator. I knew this would make him an invaluable crew member during ascent and entry, and he was extremely competent with everything technical.

  Part of being an astronaut involves having your health monitored more closely than most people’s. Every year I had my annual flight physical in February, the month of my birthday, and February 2007 was no exception. After my physical, I was told that I had a slightly elevated level of prostate-specific antigen. All men have a certain amount of this enzyme in their blood, and levels can vary naturally, but an elevated level can be an indicator of prostate cancer. Because my levels weren’t very high, and because I would be unusually young to be diagnosed with this kind of cancer, I decided to wait until after my upcoming mission was over to investigate it further.

  STS-118 was a mission to deliver a number of key components to the International Space Station: a small truss segment, an external stowage platform, and a new control moment gyroscope, a device that allows the station to control its attitude. We were also to carry a SPACEHAB logistics module, which was packed with supplies to bring up to the station. When it returned, it would carry science samples, broken hardware, and garbage back down. We would be flying the sixth mission after the loss of Columbia, and several of the subsequent missions had withstood damage to the heat tiles from debris falling during launch. Each time, engineers examined the damage and determined anew how to avoid it, but then it would happen again. I would have preferred that tiles not be damaged, of course, but I was glad the issue was being taken seriously now, and it seemed to me we were doing everything we could to mitigate the risk.