Ilan’s funeral was going to be in Israel. A handful of us were asked to go and represent NASA. Steve MacLean was Ilan’s CACO. He and his wife went. Carola and I went as well. On the day we arrived in Tel Aviv, a public memorial was held at the Israeli Air Force Base adjacent to Ben Gurion Airport. All the big Israeli politicians were there: Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu. The next day Ilan was buried in Moshav Nahalal, a small village near Nazareth. The cemetery there is up on a hill, and Ilan’s grave was at the top looking out over the valley, a place of honor. The service was conducted by the chief rabbi of Israel, and at the end we walked up and placed stones on Ilan’s grave.
Up until that day, Ilan was a great friend and colleague and a guy I played ultimate Frisbee with. It was only when I saw the scale of his memorial and the entire nation in mourning that I fully realized what he meant to the people of Israel. I saw why he’d been chosen. He had all the qualifications as a pilot and an engineer, but he was also someone who represented the best of his countrymen. He had the personality and the temperament to use his position for good.
Ilan’s dream was to have peace in his homeland. He always made it clear that he was flying for the state of Israel, not only Jews but Muslims, Christians, everyone. Going to space is one of the few things that unites us as human beings. The Americans, the Russians, the Japanese—once you sign up for this mission, it doesn’t matter what flag is on your shoulder. We work together because the goal we’re striving for is more important than whatever the politicians are fighting about that week. Before Columbia broke apart over East Texas, Ilan was headed home to a hero’s welcome. He was going to use that fame to tell the story of space to his own people, to give them a common purpose, something to unite them. When we lost Ilan, we lost more than a great pilot, family member, and friend: We lost someone who could have made a difference in a very difficult part of the world.
After a couple of months, the memorials were over and the public mourning ended. People moved on. But inside the astronaut office nobody moved on. In the weeks, months, and years after, we stayed in touch with the families and loved ones of the crew. Kent Rominger and I would go for T-38 runs up to Amarillo to have a piece of pie with Rick Husband’s mom. I would call her every few weeks to check in. Other astronauts did the same with the other families. That sense of brotherhood and togetherness I felt when my father was sick, that really kicked in, especially for the kids. The Girl Scouts’ daddy-daughter dance was scheduled a few weeks after the accident. I went with Gabby, but Mike Anderson’s daughter suddenly found herself without a dad. Steve Robinson, one of the astronauts in Mike’s class, was a forty-something bachelor with no kids. He dressed up in a suit and tie and took her to the dance. I remember telling him, “Steve, it’s great of you to do this.”
He said, “Are you kidding me? This is the best date I’ve ever had. I’m honored to be here.”
That was the way we all felt. Nothing we did could make up for losing a parent, but we were going the make sure those kids had people there for the school plays and baseball games and birthday parties their mothers and fathers had to miss. Carola and the kids and I stayed especially close to Rona Ramon and her children. Rona stayed in Houston for a couple of years, not wanting to disrupt the kids’ lives any more than they already had been, but that meant she was now raising four kids alone in a foreign country. The second-oldest boy, Tal, had his bar mitzvah a couple of months after the crash, and we all went to help out and support him. When Ilan’s oldest son, Asaf, won an academic award for being one of the top students in the ninth grade, Rona couldn’t make the ceremony, so Carola and I went and watched him get his medal and took him out for sushi afterward. In moments like that we tried to be there and pitch in as much as we could.
After a few years Rona and the kids moved back to Israel. After high school Asaf enrolled in the Israeli Air Force Flight School to become a pilot just like his father. In 2009 he graduated first in his class, just like his father, the first time a father and son had done so in the history of Israel. Flying was in their blood. Asaf said he hoped to become an astronaut one day, too. Then, only a few months later, while flying a training mission in the Hebron Mountains on a Sunday morning in September, Asaf suffered a g-force–induced loss of consciousness in an F-16 at a low altitude. He crashed and was killed instantly. He was twenty-one years old.
I couldn’t make it to Asaf’s funeral because of my second space flight, but I called Rona. She wasn’t doing well. Losing a son was harder than losing a husband. I finally made it over to visit in 2010, and Rona took me to visit Ilan and Asaf in their graves. They’re buried side by side in the two plots Ilan and Rona had intended for themselves. Standing over Asaf’s headstone, Rona said, “This was supposed to be me.”
Asaf’s death put an end to flying in the Ramon family. The younger children, Rona grounded them. She went straight to the prime minister and said, “No more.” All three of them served, but they never flew. That family had sacrificed enough. David, the youngest boy, still wanted to fly. When she told him he couldn’t, he said, “Don’t you think I would make a good pilot?”
“Yes,” she told him. “You would be a great pilot. Better than your father. Better than your brother. In our family we are very good in the sky, but the sky has not been good to us.”
20
WHY WE GO
After burying our friends, one Friday afternoon that June, Digger and I flew down to the Kennedy Space Center to say one last good-bye—to our spaceship. All through February and into the spring, crews were walking the debris field that Columbia had left strewn across Texas and Louisiana. Anytime a piece of the shuttle was found, it was collected and shipped to the Kennedy Space Center. There, in one of the hangars, they had an outline of the shuttle on the floor. As the pieces came in they were being cataloged and arranged where they belonged. If they found a piece of the fuselage, it would go here. If they found a piece of the landing gear, it would go there. Like putting together a puzzle. Some pieces were charred and twisted. Others were remarkably intact. I could stand in the middle of it and see: This was the ship that took me to space. My locker was here. The galley was there. That’s the window where I listened to Radiohead and looked out at the wonders of the universe. By looking at what survived and what didn’t, I could tell where the explosion happened and how the shuttle came apart.
There was a separate room, a private area the public wasn’t allowed to see. That was where the crew’s personal effects were being collected. It was surprising some of the things that made it down. A few photographs survived. Ilan’s diary survived. Several of its pages were readable, too. We recovered parts of their helmets, pieces of their flight suits. As with the shuttle itself, by looking at what was left behind I could see how they died.
Digger and I mostly walked around the hangar, not saying much. That was more or less the mood back in Houston as well. It was somber. It was like a collective post-traumatic reaction, like everyone had been punched in the gut. But life doesn’t stop. While the accident investigation board conducted its inquiry, we still had a lot of work to do. Some of the astronauts were tasked with aiding the investigation. Some of us were tasked with reworking the shuttle systems to prevent future accidents. Most of us were tasked with keeping business as usual moving forward, which is what I was doing as best I could. We still had people on the space station. Don Pettit and Ken Bowersox ended up staying there an extra three months while they waited for a ride home with the Russians on the Soyuz, and I was CAPCOMing for them regularly. Future flight crews were already assigned, and even with those missions being delayed and shuffled around, we had to work on the assumption that the shuttle was coming back online eventually. So we kept training, kept doing runs in the pool. But there was no joy in any of it. It felt like everyone was going through the motions. One morning a few months after the accident, I was supporting Scott Parazynski on a training run in the pool. We were getting ready to lower him into the water and he stopped and looke
d at me. He said, “Mike, I don’t want to do this.”
I said, “I don’t wanna be here, either, but we have to.”
The truth is, for me, things hadn’t been going well even before the accident. Sean O’Keefe was sending me out for different media and PR appearances and I was enjoying that part of the job, but my main goal was to get assigned to another flight and get back to space. That had turned out to be a challenge. As soon as STS-109 landed safely, the Hubble team turned its efforts to the final servicing mission, Servicing Mission 4. That last Hubble flight was the flight that every spacewalker wanted. The culture at NASA is about serving the greater good and there is no “I” in team and all that, but people still have egos. People want the chance to tackle the high-profile assignments. People want the chance to do interesting, challenging work. So as the last Hubble flight got under way, there was some political jockeying going on. People were trying to position themselves to get assigned.
On 109, John Grunsfeld had been my mentor and protector. Shortly after we got back, he was called up to DC for a new job, serving as chief science officer. That left me without the advocate I’d come to rely on. When the first set of development runs for the final servicing mission started up I was included in them. Then the second set of development runs started, and I wasn’t invited to the planning meetings. Suddenly I was out of the loop.
I went and talked to the head of the EVA branch and asked him why I wasn’t being included. He said it was because of my postflight evaluations on 109. They weren’t bad, but they weren’t great. It was a matter of experience. As far as doing the work and executing my tasks, I’d done fine. But Newman and some of the other people rating my performance said that I hadn’t shown the leadership skills to be an EV1. They said I needed more seasoning before I could be the lead spacewalker on a team. Basically, the EVA branch was saying I needed at least one more mission under my belt before taking a lead role. But the EVA plan for the final Hubble flight was the same as it had been for ours, to go out with two leaders and two first-time spacewalkers. I couldn’t go back as a rookie, and I hadn’t established myself as a leader. I was somewhere in the middle, which meant I wasn’t going back to Hubble.
I was disappointed. I’d set my sights on going back. I wanted to be a Hubble guy. Now the discussion around the office was that I’d be better suited to go to station and get more experience there. But there was a long line of people who’d been training on station while I was working on Hubble. Before the accident a whole bunch of station assembly flights were announced, and I wasn’t on them. I was in limbo. Then Columbia happened and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever fly again.
On August 23, 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued its report. At 81.7 seconds after launch, a briefcase-size piece of insulating foam from the external tank broke off and struck the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing and punctured a hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon panels of the wing’s thermal protection system. The purpose of the thermal protection system was to protect the shuttle from the 3,000-degree temperatures that are generated by the friction of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, but after the debris strike, the compromised panels allowed superheated air to penetrate the wing, melting its internal structure. The wing sheared off and the shuttle broke apart in the sky.
At the beginning of the investigation, when they first started looking at this foam impact as the cause, I said, “No way. That can’t be it.” This foam was lighter than air. I could hit you over the head with a piece of it and you wouldn’t feel a thing. The truth is that bits of foam had been flying off that tank since the first shuttle flights. The external tank is like a gigantic thermos bottle filled with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which have to be kept at –297 degrees Fahrenheit and –423 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. That’s what the insulating foam does. For the most part, given the extreme stress of launch, it adhered very well. But around the tank’s joints and valves, the foam had a tendency to flake off. The damage to the orbiter was never critical, so it came to be viewed as a maintenance issue, something to be patched up in turnaround for the next launch, and not a safety issue. We looked at the shuttle hitting these bits of foam like an eighteen-wheeler hitting a Styrofoam cooler on the highway. One is going to plow right through the other. The more flights that landed safely, the more that assumption became accepted as fact. But any engineer can tell you: Past success is not an indicator of future safety. The fact that something bad hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean the possibility of failure isn’t present, and relying on a good track record is no substitute for rigorous scientific testing.
This foam was as light as a feather, which leads one to assume that it’s harmless, but low-density objects slow down quickly once they lose propulsion. At the moment the foam broke loose from Columbia’s tank, the shuttle was moving at 1,568 miles per hour. The foam hit the wing 0.161 seconds after coming off, but in that microsecond it had slowed down to 1,022 miles per hour, which means the shuttle hit the foam with a relative velocity of over 500 miles per hour. If you run into anything at 500 miles per hour, I don’t care how light it is, it’s going to do some damage. Which is what the postaccident testing showed. An independent team of investigators took chunks of foam and shot them out of a cannon at the leading edge of a wing salvaged from the space shuttle Enterprise, causing everything from small cracks to gaping holes.
Perhaps the saddest part of the Columbia tragedy is that we might have been able to do something. While the shuttle was still in orbit, people on the ground were aware that there might be a problem. The debris strike was photographed during ascent and was first noticed by a group of engineers going over the launch footage on day two. From the photos, it was possible to tell that a debris strike had happened, but not how bad the damage was or if there was any damage at all. Since 107 was a science and research flight, it didn’t have a robot arm on board to inspect the wing. Discussions were had about doing a space walk to inspect the wing or having a defense department satellite do a flyby to take images, but those were very expensive and risky contingencies that would have disrupted the mission. Because of this blind spot we had—this belief that foam strikes weren’t dangerous—an official decision was made not to investigate the extent of the damage.
Another official decision was made as well: not to inform the crew. In the moment the feeling was: Even if we do find that there’s extensive damage to the wing, there’s nothing we can do to fix it while they’re in orbit. Either the crew risks reentry with the wing as it is or they stay stranded in space until they run out of life support. In hindsight, the investigation board concluded that if the damage had been identified early enough, another shuttle could have been launched in time to attempt a rescue mission. And if we’d known there was a hole in the wing, there’s no way we would have left Columbia’s crew there without putting another crew in harm’s way to try to save them. But we never reached that point because this collective blind spot kept everyone from seeing how bad the situation might be. Since it was believed nothing could be done about the problem—and since no one could be certain that a problem even existed—it was better that the crew not know. When I spoke to Ilan and Rick and the others on the last night of their mission, they were laughing and excited to see their families again. None of us knew that they were already doomed.
The Columbia tragedy is one of those situations where no one person is to blame but ultimately everyone is responsible. We had all allowed ourselves to become complacent about reentry. We were all guilty of underestimating the danger. There were also larger institutional problems with NASA itself, failures of communication, failures of oversight. Like most accidents, Columbia was 100 percent preventable. If proper safety protocols had been in place and been followed, our friends might still be alive today.
Before the shuttle could fly again, every one of those problems had to be addressed. We redesigned the external tank so that insulation wouldn’t keep flying off it. We improved the imagery on the shuttle for
launch, putting high-definition cameras everywhere: on the tank, on the solid rockets, on the ground. That gave us eyes on every inch of the shuttle to see if anything went wrong during launch. We developed tools and techniques to inspect the shuttle for damage once in orbit. Now every flight would carry the robot arm and also a new device to extend the reach of the arm, an inspection boom with high-def cameras, lasers, and other sensors that allowed the crew to survey the entire ship. We developed repair techniques for spacewalkers to go out and repair damaged tiles.
The final component in this new recovery plan was the space station itself. It added another layer of inspections: You could flip the shuttle with the underside facing the station and do a close, thorough scan of every square inch. It’s also a safe haven. If you’re at station and you encounter a problem you can’t fix, the worst-case scenario is you stay there and catch a ride home with the Russians on the Soyuz or you wait for the next shuttle flight to come up and get you.
If the Columbia accident exposed NASA’s greatest weaknesses, the recovery from Columbia may have been NASA’s finest hour. No attempt was made to cover up the cause of the accident or deflect accountability. No question went unasked. No assumption went unchallenged. Every single aspect of the shuttle’s operations was taken apart, looked at, rethought, and rebuilt. We worked around the clock for two years straight in an all-hands-on-deck effort to understand what had happened and to prevent it from ever happening again. When I look back on it now, it was truly amazing what we accomplished. That superhuman effort was enough to put the shuttle back in operation in order to complete the work of assembling the International Space Station. Which was great, but in the end it wasn’t enough to save the shuttle program itself—and it wasn’t enough to save Hubble.
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