Aloft

by William Langewiesche

  The Columbia was flying on autopilot, as is usual, and though it continued to lay flares in its wake, the astronauts aboard remained blissfully unaware of the trouble they were in. They passed smoothly into dawn above the Arizona border, and sailed across the Navajo reservation and on over Albuquerque, before coming to the Texas Panhandle on a perfect descent profile, slowing through 13,400 mph at 210,000 feet five minutes after having crossed the California coastline. Nineteen seconds later, at 7:58:38 central time, they got the first sign of something being a little out of the ordinary: it was a cockpit indication of low tire pressures on the left main landing gear. This was not quite a trivial matter. A blown or deflated main tire would pose serious risks during the rollout after landing, including loss of lateral control and the possibility that the nose would slam down, conceivably leading to a catastrophic breakup on the ground. These scenarios were known, and had been simulated and debated in the inner world of NASA, leading some to believe that the best of the imperfect choices in such a case might be for the crew to bail out – an alternative available only below 30,000 feet and 220 mph of dynamic airspeed.

  Nonetheless, for Columbia’s pilots it was reasonable to assume for the moment that the indication of low pressure was due to a problem with the sensors rather than with the tires themselves, and that the teams of Mission Control engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Houston, would be able to sort through the mass of automatically transmitted data – the so-called telemetry, which was far more complete than what was available in the cockpit – and to draw the correct conclusion. The reverse side of failures in a machine as complex as the shuttle is that most of them can be worked around, or turn out to be small. In other words, there was no reason for alarm. After a short delay the Columbia’s commander, Rick Husband, calmly radioed to Mission Control, ‘And, ah, Houston…’ Sheathed in hot atmospheric gases, the shuttle was slowing through 13,100 mph at 205,000 feet.

  Houston did not clearly hear the call.

  With the scheduled touchdown now only about fifteen minutes ahead, it was a busy time at Mission Control. Weather reports were coming in from the landing site at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. Radar tracking of the shuttle, like the final accurate ground-based navigation, had not yet begun. Sitting at their specialized positions, and monitoring the numbers displayed on the consoles, a few of the flight controllers had begun to sense, just barely, that something was going seriously wrong. The worry was not quite coherent yet. One of the controllers later told me that it amounted to an inexplicable bad feeling in his gut. But it was undeniable nonetheless. For the previous few minutes, since about the time when the shuttle had passed from California to Nevada, Jeff Kling, an engineer who was working the mechanical-systems position known as MMACS (pronounced Macs), had witnessed a swarm of erratic indications and sensor failures. The pattern was disconcerting because of the lack of common circuitry that could easily explain the failures – a single box that could be blamed.

  Kling had been bantering good-naturedly on an intercom with one of his team, a technician sitting in an adjoining back room and monitoring the telemetry, when the technician noted a strange failure of temperature transducers on a hydraulic return line. The technician said, ‘We’ve had some hydraulic ’ducers go off-scale low.’

  Kling had seen the same indications. He said, ‘Well, I guess!’

  The technician said, ‘What in the world?’

  Kling said, ‘This is not funny. On the left side.’

  The technician confirmed, ‘On the left side…’

  Now Kling got onto the main control-room intercom to the lead controller on duty, known as the flight director, a man named Leroy Cain. In the jargon-laced language of the control room Kling said, ‘Flight, Macs.’

  Cain said, ‘Go ahead, Macs.’

  ‘FYI, I’ve just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle, hydraulic return temperatures. Two of them on system one, and one in each of systems two and three.’

  Cain said, ‘Four hyd return temps?’

  Kling answered, ‘To the left outboard and left inboard elevon.’

  ‘Okay, is there anything common to them? DSC or MDM or anything? I mean, you’re telling me you lost them all at exactly the same time?’

  ‘No, not exactly. They were within probably four or five seconds of each other.’

  Cain struggled to assess the meaning. ‘Okay, where are those… where is that instrumentation located?’

  Kling continued to hear from his back-room team. He said, ‘All four of them are located in the aft part of the left wing, right in front of the elevons… elevon actuators. And there is no commonality.’

  Cain repeated, ‘No commonality.’

  But all the failing instruments were in the left wing. The possible significance of this was not lost on Cain: during the launch a piece of solid foam had broken off from the shuttle’s external fuel tank, and at high speed had smashed into the left wing; after minimal consideration the shuttle program managers (who stood above Mission Control in the NASA hierarchy) had dismissed the incident as essentially unthreatening. Like almost everyone else at NASA, Cain had taken the managers at their word – and he still did. Nonetheless, the strange cluster of left-wing failures was an ominous development. Kling had more specific reasons for concern. In a wonkish, engineering way he had discussed with his team the telemetry they might observe if a hole allowed hot gases into the wing during re-entry, and he had come up with a profile eerily close to what was happening now. Still, he maintained the expected detachment.

  Cain continued to worry the problem. He asked for reassurance from his ‘guidance, navigation, and control’ man, Mike Sarafin. ‘Everything look good to you, control and rates and everything is nominal, right?’

  Sarafin said, ‘Control’s been stable through the rolls that we’ve done so far, Flight. We have good trims. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary.’

  Cain directed his attention back to Kling: ‘All other indications for your hydraulic systems are good?’

  ‘They’re all good. We’ve had good quantities all the way across.’

  Cain said, ‘And the other temps are normal?’

  ‘The other temps are normal, yes, sir.’ He meant only those that the telemetry allowed him to see.

  Cain said, ‘And when you say you lost these, are you saying they went to zero…’

  ‘All four of them are off-scale low.’

  … or off-scale low?’

  Kling said, ‘And they were all staggered. They were, like I said, within several seconds of each other.’

  Cain said, ‘Okay.’

  But it wasn’t okay. Within seconds the Columbia had crossed into Texas and the left tire-pressure indications were dropping, as observed also by the cockpit crew. Kling’s informal model of catastrophe had predicted just such indications, whether from blown tires or wire breaks. The end was now coming very fast.

  Kling said, ‘Flight, Macs.’

  Cain said, ‘Go.’

  ‘We just lost tire pressure on the left outboard and left inboard, both tires.’

  Cain said, ‘Copy.’

  At that moment, twenty-three seconds after 7:59 local time, the Mission Control consoles stopped receiving telemetry updates, for reasons unknown. The astronaut sitting beside Cain, and serving as the Mission Control communicator, radioed, ‘And Columbia, Houston, we see your tire-pressure messages, and we did not copy your last call.’

  At the same time, on the control-room intercom, Cain was talking again to Kling. He said, ‘Is it instrumentation, Macs? Gotta be.’

  Kling said, ‘Flight, Macs, those are also off-scale low.’

  From the speeding shuttle Rick Husband – Air Force test pilot, religious, good family man, always wanted to be an astronaut – began to answer the communicator. He said, ‘Roger, ah,’ and was cut off on a word that began with ‘buh…’

  It turned out to be the Columbia’s last voice transmission. Brief communica
tion breaks, however, are not abnormal during re-entries, and this one raised no immediate concern in Houston.

  People on the ground in Dallas suddenly knew more than the flight controllers in Houston. Four seconds after 8:00 they saw a large piece leave the orbiter and fall away. The shuttle was starting to come apart. It continued intermittently to send telemetry, which though not immediately displayed at Mission Control was captured by NASA computers and later discovered; the story it told was that multiple systems were failing. In quick succession two additional chunks fell off.

  Down in the control room Cain said, ‘And there’s no commonality between all these tire-pressure instrumentations and the hydraulic return instrumentations?’

  High in the sky near Dallas the Columbia’s main body began to break up. It crackled and boomed, and made a loud rumble.

  Kling said, ‘No, sir, there’s not. We’ve also lost the nose-gear down talkback, and right-main-gear down talkback.’

  ‘Nose-gear and right-main-gear down talkbacks?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  At Fort Hood, Texas, two Dutch military pilots who were training in an Apache attack helicopter locked on to the breakup with their optics and videotaped three bright objects – the main rocket engines – flying eastward in formation, among other, smaller pieces and their contrails.

  Referring to the loss of communications, one minute after the main-body breakup, Laura Hoppe, the flight controller responsible for the communications systems, said to Cain, ‘I didn’t expect, uh, this bad of a hit on comm.’

  Cain asked another controller about a planned switchover to a ground-based radio ahead, ‘How far are we from UHF? Is that two-minute clock good?’

  Kling, also, was hanging on to hope. He said. ‘Flight, Macs.’

  Cain said, ‘Macs?’

  Kling said, ‘On the tire pressures, we did see them go erratic for a little bit before they went away, so I do believe it’s instrumentation.’

  ‘Okay.’

  At about that time the debris began to hit the ground. It fell in thousands of pieces along a swath ten miles wide and 300 miles long, across East Texas and into Louisiana. There were many stories later. Some of the debris whistled down through the leaves of trees and smacked into a pond where a man was fishing. Another piece went right through a backyard trampoline, evoking a mother’s lament: ‘Those damned kids…’ Still another piece hit the window of a moving car, startling the driver. The heaviest parts flew the farthest. An 800-pound piece of engine hit the ground in Fort Polk, Louisiana, doing 1,400 mph. A 600-pound piece landed nearby. Thousands of people began to call in, swamping the 911 dispatchers with reports of sonic booms and metal falling out of the sky. No one, however, was hit. This would be surprising were it not for the fact, so visible from above, that the world is still a sparsely populated place.

  In Houston the controllers maintained discipline, and continued preparing for the landing, even as they received word that the Merritt Island radar, in Florida, which should by now have started tracking the inbound craft, was picking up only false targets. Shuttles arrive on time or they don’t arrive at all. But, repeatedly, the communicator radioed, ‘Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check,’ as if he might still hear a reply. Then, at thirteen minutes past the hour, precisely when the Columbia should have been passing overhead the runway before circling down for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center, a phone call came in from an off-duty controller who had just seen a video broadcast by a Dallas television station of multiple contrails in the sky. When Cain heard the news, he paused, and then put the contingency plan into effect. To the ground-control officer he said, ‘GC, Flight.’

  ‘Flight, GC.’

  ‘Lock the doors.’

  ‘Copy.’

  The controllers were stunned, but lacked the time to contemplate the horror of what had just happened. Under Cain’s direction they set about collecting numbers, writing notes, and closing out their logs, for the investigation that was certain to follow. The mood in the room was somber and focused. Only the most basic facts were known: the Columbia had broken up at 200,000 feet doing 12,738 mph, and the crew could not possibly have survived. Ron Dittemore, the shuttle program manager, would be talking to reporters later that day, and he needed numbers and information. At some point sandwiches were brought in and consumed. Like the priests who harvest faith at the bedsides of the dying, grief counselors showed up too, but they were not much used.

  Cain insisted on control-room discipline. He said, ‘No phone calls off site outside of this room. Our discussions are on these loops – the recorded DVIS loops only. No data, no phone calls, no transmissions anywhere, into or out.’

  Later this was taken by some critics to be a typical NASA reaction – insular, furtive, overcontrolling. And it may indeed have reflected certain aspects of what had become of the agency’s culture. But it was also, more simply, a rule-book procedure meant to stabilize and preserve the crucial last data. The room was being frozen as a crime scene might be. Somewhere inside NASA something had obviously gone very wrong – and it made sense to start looking for the evidence here and now.

  Less than an hour later, at 10:00 AM eastern time, a retired four-star admiral named Hal Gehman met his brother at a lawyer’s office in Williamsburg, Virginia. At the age of sixty, Gehman was a tall, slim, silver-haired man with an unlined face and soft eyes. Dressed in civilian clothes, standing straight but not stiffly so, he had an accessible, unassuming manner that contrasted with the rank and power he had achieved. After an inauspicious start as a mediocre engineering student in the Penn State Naval ROTC program (‘Top four fifths of the class,’ he liked to say), he had skippered a patrol boat through the thick of the Vietnam War and gone on to become an experienced sea captain, the commander of a carrier battle group, vice-chief of the Navy, and finally NATO Atlantic commander and head of the U.S. Joint Forces Command. Upon his retirement, in 2000, from the sixth-ranked position in the U.S. military, he had given all that up with apparent ease. He had enjoyed a good career in the Navy, but he enjoyed his civilian life now too. He was a rare sort of man – startlingly intelligent beneath his guileless exterior, personally satisfied, and quite genuinely untroubled. He lived in Norfolk in a pleasant house that he had recently remodeled; he loved his wife, his grown children, his mother and father, and all his siblings. He had an old Volkswagen bug convertible, robin’s-egg blue, that he had bought from another admiral. He had a modest thirty-four-foot sloop, which he enjoyed sailing in the Chesapeake, though its sails were worn out and he wanted to replace its icebox with a twelve-volt refrigeration unit. He was a patriot, of course, but not a reactionary. He called himself a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. His life as he described it was the product of convention. It was also the product of a strict personal code. He chose not to work with any company doing business with the Department of Defense. He liked power, but understood its limitations. He did not care to be famous or rich. He represented the American establishment at its best.

  In the lawyer’s office in Williamsburg his brother told him that the Columbia had been lost. Gehman had driven there with his radio off and so he had not heard. He asked a few questions, and absorbed the information without much reaction. He did not follow the space program and, like most Americans, had not been aware that a mission was under way. He spent an hour with the lawyer on routine family business. When he emerged, he saw that messages had been left on his cell phone, but because the coverage was poor, he could not retrieve them; only later, while driving home on the interstate, was he finally able to connect. To his surprise, among mundane messages he found an urgent request to call the deputy administrator of NASA, a man he had not heard of before, named Fred Gregory. Like a good American, Gehman made the call while speeding down the highway. Gregory, a former shuttle commander, said, ‘Have you heard the news?’

  Gehman said, ‘Only secondhand.’

  Gregory filled him in on what little was known, and explained that part of NASA’s contingency
plan, instituted after the Challenger disaster of 1986, was the activation of a standing ‘interagency’ investigation board. By original design the board consisted of seven high-ranking civilian and military officials who were pre-selected mechanically on the basis of job titles – the institutional slots that they filled. For the Columbia, the names were now known: the board would consist of three Air Force generals, John Barry, Kenneth Hess, and Duane Deal; a Navy admiral, Stephen Turcotte; a NASA research director, G. Scott Hubbard; and two senior civil aviation officials, James Hallock and Steven Wallace. Though only two of these men knew much about NASA or the space shuttle, in various ways each of them was familiar with the complexities of large-scale, high-risk activities. Most of them also had strong personalities. To be effective they would require even stronger management. Gregory said that it was NASA’s administrator, Sean O’Keefe, who wanted Gehman to come in as chairman to lead the work. Gehman was not immune to the compliment, but he was cautious. He had met O’Keefe briefly years before, but did not know him. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t being suckered into a NASA sideshow.

  O’Keefe was an able member of Washington’s revolving-door caste, a former congressional staffer and budget specialist – and a longtime protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney – who through the force of his competence and Republican connections had briefly landed the position of Secretary of the Navy in the early 1990s. He had suffered academic banishment through the Clinton era, but under the current administration had re-emerged as a deputy at the Office of Management and Budget, where he had been assigned to tackle the difficult problem of NASA’s cost overruns and lack of delivery, particularly in the Space Station program. It is hard to know what he thought when he was handed the treacherous position of NASA administrator. Inside Washington, NASA’s reputation had sunk so low that some of O’Keefe’s former congressional colleagues snickered that Cheney was trying to kill his own man off. But O’Keefe was not a space crusader, as some earlier NASA administrators had been, and he was not about to pick up the fallen banners of the visionaries and try to lead the way forward; he was a tough, level-headed money man, grounded in the realities of Washington, D.C., and sent in on a mission to bring discipline to NASA’s budget and performance before moving on. NASA’s true believers called him a carpetbagger and resented the schedule pressures that he brought to bear, but in fairness he was a professional manager, and NASA needed one.