Launch on Need

by Daniel Guiteras

  “No, not hi-res yet. But my guys don’t even like the prelims from 208.”

  “How so?”

  “We’re not one-hundred percent certain what we’re looking at yet,” Sims said, rushing to qualify his remarks. He knew Brown would crucify him if he assumed anything about the orbiter’s safety after having viewed only the preliminary launch films. “Ken, we think something struck the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing.”

  “What? I looked at the prelims myself. Didn’t see anything like that.”

  Brown knew E208 was a high-resolution video camera fitted with a 400-inch lens that began filming Columbia seven seconds before liftoff at a rate of 48 frames per second. By T-plus-240 seconds, it had run through 1,000 feet of film.

  “I need the telemetry, Jeff. Tell me the time, speed and altitude,” Brown fired back, temporarily distracted from his pain.

  “Okay, but understand this is still preliminary. We show the strike at 81.9 seconds after launch. Velocity was 2,300 feet per second. Altitude was about 65,000 feet.”

  “Wait. 81.9 seconds? Are you sure about the time?” Brown couldn’t remember a debris strike of any kind so late in a launch. The engineers understood that as time elapsed, the shuttle’s velocity grew, increasing the amount of damage a wayward piece of debris could inflict on the orbiter’s tender skin.

  Mass times acceleration.

  “Those are the numbers I have now, but I think they’ll hold up in further study,” Sims said with concern in his voice.

  Brown and his team, known as the Intercenter Photo Working Group, were responsible for analyzing video and still images from each shuttle launch to determine whether there were any “safety-of-flight issues”—NASA’s term for anything that put either the crew or vehicle at risk.

  “Okay, so what’s your hunch?”

  “What, as to the source?” Sims knew how Brown’s brain worked. “Not from our prelims, no. They’re far too blurry to say what struck the wing. If I had to bet, though, I’d put all my money on the ET bi-pod foam.”

  Brown’s office door swung open and crashed against the doorstop. Steve Metzer, Brown’s senior photo analyst, hurried into the room. “Sorry,” he said, seeing Brown was on the phone.

  Brown held up an index finger to Metzer.

  Metzer didn’t wait. “Ken, your films…”

  Brown nodded. “Jeff, gotta go, my films are here. Call you later.” Brown hung up.

  “That was Sims,” Brown said, using his arms to push himself up. There was an unusual lightness in his voice as his nervous system climbed the apex of another medication up phase. “He says there was a debris strike, a late hit.”

  “Ice?” Metzer asked to Brown’s back.

  “Don’t think so,” Brown said, turning to open the door of the video viewing room. “Sims thinks it’s more of that goddamn bi-pod ramp foam.”

  As he entered the viewing room, Brown barked, “Get the hi-res up. Run 208 first. Cue it to T-plus-75. Remember, we’re looking for anything out of the ordinary—ice shards, foam insulation showers, blurred images, anything abnormal.”

  All eyes looked up from their consoles. Brown’s rants weren’t new to anyone on staff, even to Paul Rusnick, who’d joined Brown just two weeks earlier.

  When Brown got riled, they gave him anything he asked for. When he had a hunch, the team helped him until it proved to be right or wrong—he was rarely wrong. Brown had a talent for pinpointing the smallest detail. He worked with precision, like a radiologist scanning the CT films of a multiple-trauma victim.

  Back in 1986, it was Brown—at the time merely an engineer on the team—just one of the “Photo Guys”—who saw the first ghost of smoke for Challenger. He’d watched the disaster over and over for hours, trying to find the cause, any clues to what went so terribly wrong. He vividly remembered how, in a final exhausted effort, he’d rewound the film from camera E60 back to T-minus-seven seconds and watched the playback at an agonizingly slow frame rate. At Launch-plus-0.678 seconds, the faint puff of gray smoke finally showed itself, blooming at the field joint between sections three and four of the starboard solid rocket booster (SRB). Brown had stared at the film as the puff grew into a torch that consumed the black rubber seal, the O-ring, between the SRB sections. The torch then thickened, burning through the metal side of the SRB like a separate rocket. The result was a catastrophic explosive fury.

  Brown had taken the loss of crew and craft personally, as if he’d lost members of his own family.

  But that was twenty-three years ago. There had been eighty-eight shuttle launches since then, two solid rocket boosters used per launch, without any failures. The problem was considered by all at NASA to be fixed.

  These days, Brown and his team of engineers worried mostly about the rain of debris from the shuttle’s external fuel tank during launch. For some time, it had been the focus of their reports. Small pockets of trapped air inside the insulating foam would expand with the increase in altitude and aerothermal heating of launch. Small chunks of insulating foam debris were falling with an almost predictable frequency. Orbiters returned from space with pockmarked underbellies, as if they’d been subjected to some botched dermabrasion treatment. With their protective skins scarred, Columbia, Endeavor, Atlantis, and Discovery were all dispatched for tile repair as part of their post-flight turnaround maintenance.

  “I just got off the phone with Sims from Marshall,” Brown told his team as he approached the video console. “They think they saw something contact Columbia’s wing at T-plus-81.9 seconds. Sims thinks it’s bi-pod foam.”

  Brown had everyone’s attention.

  “81.9 seconds,” Metzer exclaimed. “Man that is late.”

  “Exactly,” Brown said. “We’re gonna have to study this one closely. Velocity was 2,300 feet per second at the point of impact.

  That’s over 1,500 miles per hour, folks.”

  “What’s all this about the bi-pod foam?” Rusnick asked.

  Brown shot a look at Rusnick. He hated new guys. But he figured that if he couldn’t make every imaging assessment for NASA between now and when the Star Trek era arrived, he could at least serve as mentor for the incoming group of engineers.

  So as Metzer readied the film, Brown took a moment to explain the bi-pod foam problem to Rusnick.

  “I insult everyone,” Brown said to Rusnick. “So don’t take it personally. I don’t know how well you understand various shuttle systems. I’ll assume you know nothing.”

  Rusnick nodded, tried to smile off Brown’s not-so-subtle insult, but Brown had reached him. He always did.

  “Alright. So the huge rust-colored ET actually contains two separate tanks, one for liquid hydrogen at minus-423 degrees and one for liquid oxygen at minus-297 degrees. Fuel for the shuttle’s main engines during launch.”

  Rusnick kept eye contact with Brown, nodded as he listened.

  Brown looked over at Metzer to gauge how much time he had before the hi-res film would be ready.

  “Ready in a second,” Metzer said as he looped the film through the projector.

  “The ET is covered with foam insulation to prevent condensation and ice from forming on the outside surface of the tank,” Brown said. “The foam also helps to limit the aerodynamic heating of the tank during ascent. The assembly of the ET and the application of foam insulation is done at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.”

  Bored with his own voice, Brown glanced back at Metzer. Still working. There was more to the foam story.

  “The majority of foam insulation over the 154-foot tank is applied with robotic precision to a thickness of one inch. In certain places on the ET, where specialized hardware such as Orbiter attachment struts or the liquid-oxygen feed line interrupts the otherwise-smooth surface of the tank, insulation is applied by hand. The bi-pod strut, the point where the forward aspect of the Orbiter is physically connected to the ET for launch, is covered in hand-applied foam.

  “I’ve been to the facility. I’ve seen the tech
nicians mold and sculpt aerodynamic ramps of foam around blunt projections—they do an amazing job. Problem is that the hand-applied foam lacks the uniformity and proper adhesion of the spray-applied insulation. The foam looks great on the launch pad. But when the engines light and the vibration starts, well, you get the idea. Every time the bi-pod foam has come loose during a launch, it has missed hitting anything critical. Except for now. We may have taken our first direct hit.”

  Metzer turned on the projector. The film’s ID tag and the time code came up on the Da-Lite screen immediately. Brown cut the lights with a forearm swipe to the switch plate.

  “So you’re saying the shedding of bi-pod foam is a known phenomenon?” Rusnick asked.

  Metzer shot Rusnick a glare so intense he had no trouble seeing it even though his eyes were still adjusting to the darkened room. Don’t even go there, it said.

  But Brown didn’t hesitate with a response. “Over the shuttle’s history, my department has documented six events of foam loss specifically from the external tank bi-pod area. The first was in 1983, then 1990, twice in 1992, again in 1994, and for a sixth time just three months ago.”

  Rusnick shook his head in disbelief.

  “Sims says it happens just after 80 seconds,” Brown said, reminding his team. “This may be bi-pod incident number seven.”

  Metzer had hand-cued the film to only T-plus-55 seconds, so the engineers waited in the darkened room, watching Columbia climb. Two SRBs and their orange plumes, the three main engines and their sharply focused bright-blue cones.

  Brown’s bird seemed to be doing everything right.

  “Okay 72, 73, 74, T-plus-75 seconds,” Metzer said, reading off the time code. “Here we go guys.”

  The team watched the screen without blinking, uncertain of what was coming, wondering what they could have missed on their preliminaries.

  “There. Right there,” Brown blurted out. “Not a mere strike but a goddamn debris shower. It’s a huge hit.”

  For the next ten seconds, the projector chattered at the back of the room and the silent film played on. The team watched Columbia race on to orbit as if the strike had not occurred.

  Currently Columbia was in orbit, and all her systems apparently were working well. In fact, most at NASA were focused on progressing the mission to completion. The crew was well into its second workday and power-up of SPACEHAB—the onboard shirt-sleeve microgravity laboratory—was complete. Neither the crew nor Mission Control had any sense or sign Columbia’s wing had been struck.

  As if he already had a plan, Brown spoke first. “Alright we need to analyze the hit, quantify it. Go back to T-plus-79 seconds.”

  “Run it five frames per second?” Metzer asked.

  “Yeah, five should do it,” Brown answered.

  Metzer made the necessary adjustments to the projector, and then called out like he was a missile launch coordinator of a nuclear submarine, “T-plus-79 at five fps, here we go.”

  The team watched the debris strike repeatedly. Brown couldn’t help but be reminded of Challenger and all the time he’d spent searching the films for her fatal moment.

  Now he faced a new challenge. He needed to determine the seriousness of Columbia’s launch video. Did the image of debris crashing into the wing and being pulverized into a silver-white shower represent a safety-of-flight issue? In his mind, he recited his mantra: Prove she’s safe to fly.

  Brown flipped on the lights after several viewings. “We need a clearer picture than that. I can’t see where the debris strike is going after it hits the wing. Where’s the cover letter that came with the films?”

  The National Imagery and Mapping Agency provided the processing of NASA’s high-resolution launch films. It typically included a brief cover letter outlining what had been processed and whether it had encountered any problems during processing.

  Metzer reached into the FedEx box, found the letter. He handed it to Brown, who began shaking his head in disbelief as he read the letter. The engineers waited.

  “Holy shit, you’re kidding me!” Brown looked up with a face of concern that worried everyone in the room. He leaned against the console, carefully guarding his back. Then he slowly and quietly delivered the news.

  “Only two cameras got a look at the debris strike.”

  Brown seemed out of breath, exhausted, like he’d already spent days considering the ramifications of such limited imaging.

  “What?” Metzer said in disbelief. “We’ve got twelve cameras trained on the launch and…”

  Brown cut Metzer off, paraphrasing from the letter. “According to National Imagery, we got only two views.” Brown’s engineers moved in closer. “208, which we already looked at, and 212, also from the south, giving us 35-millimeter stills.”

  Brown was right; the photo group would have limited imaging to determine the angle and velocity of impact, severity of impact and, ultimately, how to advise the shuttle management team.

  Scattered along the Atlantic Coast of Florida, from the northern end of the Playalinda peninsula south past Cape Canaveral to Patrick Air Force Base, were twelve camera sites used by NASA for engineering analysis of rocket launches. Except for the mobile camera sites, the camera locations were the same as those used for the Apollo missions. Each site had both video and still-photo capability and was designated as short-range, medium-range or long-range tracking based on its proximity to the launch pad.

  The short-range trackers ran out of film as expected at T-plus-57 seconds, more than 20 seconds before the damaging event occurred. The medium-range trackers filming to T-plus-110 seconds and long-range trackers to T-plus-165 seconds offered the only possibility of seeing the debris strike.

  Brown read on. “Of the five potential camera views that could have helped us, two sites gave us nothing due to angle of view and atmospherics. That’s not too surprising.”

  “Okay, so that leaves three sites. What about them?” Metzer urged, hoping Brown had misread the report.

  Brown returned to the letter for an answer to Metzer’s inquiry and finished reading the letter to himself. The engineers waited patiently, exchanging silent glances and shrugs.

  “Well, those three can’t help us either,” Brown finally said. “The first lost track of Columbia on ascent, the second saw only the top half of the left wing, and the third, if you can believe it, was out of frickin’ focus!”

  “Then we’re gonna need satellite or ground-based imagery, right?” Metzer asked without hesitation.

  Brown looked at Metzer, knew he was right. Doesn’t he know it will take an act of Congress to get outside imaging?

  Chapter 2

  Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas

  Space Shuttle Program Office

  Jan. 17, 2003

  SPACE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM (STS)-107 Mission Management Chair Julie Pollard snapped back from a rare moment of inattention and daydreaming. She found herself staring at the STS-107 milestones-to-launch posters, “Go For Processing,” “Go For Stacking,” and “Go For Pad,” she had placed prominently on the wall behind her office computer. Back to work.

  She resumed updating her notes from the teleconference that had ended just five minutes earlier. She would get the official meeting minutes later that day, but she always took a few notes on things she needed to personally review after a teleconference.

  On her computer screen, the cursor flashed patiently, waiting for further additions to the open document. It read:

  Mission Management Team Teleconference

  STS-107

  Flight Day 2

  Friday, Jan. 17, 2003

  Follow-up Items:

  1) Having trouble with KU-band transmission from SPACEHAB-experiment-data to ground. May be a payload provided equipment problem—checking with contractor. Ground team at the POCC worked it last night but wasn’t able to resolve the problem.

  2) Crew is now back on preflight time line after shifting sleep/wake schedules by one hour.

  3) Some minor
onboard power fluctuations noted by crew.

  4) SRBs have been recovered and are in tow as of yesterday afternoon…evidence of possible SRB forward skirt buckling…should arrive at CCAFS [Cape Canaveral Air Force Station] by Monday.

  5) Next MMT teleconference is Tuesday (instead of Monday) at 8:00 A.M. for those who will be taking Monday as their Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

  Pollard could not help having a good feeling about this mission. So far the problems with Columbia and her crew seemed relatively minor. The crew would be staying within the protective confines of Columbia. There were no planned space walks. She would not have the worries that came to an MMT whenever the mission objectives required astronauts to work outside their spacecraft. It was turning out to be a relatively easy mission to chair. In 14 days Columbia would return home, and then she would be on to her next assignment.

  She waited for her document to print with a calm feeling of control. But what she could not have known was that there was no contingency plan for what was about to happen. It was not something she failed to plan for, something she had done wrong. And there was no 300 page manual that would help her out of this mess.

  In less than an hour she would receive an e-mail revealing a problem with Columbia of mind-bending magnitude.

  Chapter 3

  Cocoa Beach, Florida

  Friday, Jan. 17, 2003

  10:27 AM EST

  VETERAN SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT John Stangley stepped slowly from the shower of his Cocoa Beach hotel room into a cough-inducing fog heavy as Bucksport, Maine, sees in mid-January. He stood before the bathroom mirror gazing at his image, a private moment to evaluate his mind and body, both of which seemed equally distorted behind swirling tentacles of moisture-laden air. He rested his hands on the cool marble countertop and leaned in for a closer look.

  “Well, I’ve finally done it,” he said rather proudly, dabbing the towel over his forehead and face. He felt proud of himself for having taken a step, but was acutely aware he hadn’t shaken the looming apprehension and uncertainty over his future. After more than ten months of sleeping in late, waking to an empty house, and refusing to do any work, he had finally accepted and completed an assignment.