Michael Leinbach - Bringing Columbia Home - The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

Farther east, in Sabine County, near the Louisiana border, timber sale forester Greg Cohrs of the US Forest Service was also startled from his sleep. He heard a tremendous boom followed by a rumble that lasted for minutes. His wife Sandra put on her housecoat and opened the back door. She heard popping and crackling noises in the air above. Cohrs tried to imagine what could produce such a constant rumbling and banging. It was not a naturally occurring sound—certainly not thunder. His mind turned to worries about terrorism. Had Houston or New Orleans been destroyed by a nuclear explosion?

“Brother Fred” Raney, minister at First Baptist Church and captain of the volunteer fire department in the small town of Hemphill, heard such an intense blast that he thought the cross-county gas pipeline passing through Sabine County had ruptured. Hemphill’s funeral directors—John “Squeaky” Starr and his son Byron—also believed they heard a pipeline explosion. The constant rattling and booming had a rhythmic quality that sounded almost mechanical.

Elementary school teacher Sunny Whittington was in the barn at Hemphill’s youth arena. Her children both had animals entered in the county livestock show, and it was time for the first weigh-in. The open-sided structure began shuddering violently, punctuated by a tremendous noise that sounded to her like “a sonic boom multiplied by a thousand times.” People ran out of the arena. Whittington saw dozens of smoke trails, some spiraling and some going straight across the sky. She asked her husband, “Tommy, what’s happening?” He speculated that perhaps a plane was crashing or that two planes had collided.

House windows vibrated so intensely that people feared the glass would shatter. Knickknacks fell from shelves and dressers. The nonstop booms lasted several minutes, shaking US Forest Service law officer Doug Hamilton’s brick house to its foundations. Absolutely convinced that it was Judgment Day, he opened his front door and prepared to meet Jesus.

In addition to the booms, some residents heard sounds like helicopter blades, as large pieces of metal spun through the air and crashed into the ground. Fishermen on foggy Toledo Bend Reservoir heard things splashing into the water all around them. One large object—estimated by some to be the size of a small car—hit the water at tremendous speed, creating a wave that nearly swamped several boats.

Sabine County sheriff Tom Maddox was at his Hemphill office returning phone calls after being out of town the previous week. It was his son’s birthday, and he planned to spend the day with his family. He finished his final call and phoned his wife to say he was on his way home. Suddenly, the building shuddered so violently that he thought the jail’s roof had collapsed. As the noise subsided, all five of his phone lines lit up. One citizen reported that a plane had crashed in the north end of the county. Another reported a plane crash in the southern end of the county. The next caller said that the gas pipeline running through the county had exploded. A fourth caller said there was a train derailment in the western part of the county, between Pineland and Bronson. Maddox couldn’t believe that these disasters were occurring simultaneously all over the county. What was going on?

Hemphill’s Pat Smith had just settled down with a cup of coffee and turned on her TV. She saw on the news that Columbia would be passing overhead on its way to Florida. She said to her dog, “We might see that!” As she sipped her coffee, she heard an explosion followed by constant rattling. She ran outside. Her dog was running around in circles, barking up at the sky. She saw smoke trails going in every direction. She went back inside after a few minutes and heard on the news that NASA had lost contact with Columbia . She felt a lump in her throat when she realized what she had just witnessed.

Columbia had come apart in a “catastrophic event” 181,000 feet above Corsicana and Palestine, southeast of Dallas, traveling more than 11,000 mph. As the vehicle broke up, lighter pieces decelerated quickly and floated to earth. Denser objects like the shuttle’s main engines continued along a ballistic path at supersonic speed until they impacted the ground farther east.

Each one of the tens of thousands of pieces of debris produced its own sonic boom as it passed overhead.

Wreckage of the broken shuttle—and the remains of her crew—rained down over Texas and Louisiana for the next half hour along a path that was two hundred fifty miles long. [3] NASA, Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report SP-2008-565 (Houston, TX: NASA Johnson Space Center, 2008), 1–29.

9:16 a.m. EST

Jerry Ross stood next to the crew transfer vehicle on the Kennedy Space Center runway. The flight doctors, nurses, suit technicians, astronauts, security, orbiter technicians, and Flight Crew Directorate managers on his team were responsible for helping the crew out of Columbia and removing some of the critical equipment from the vehicle soon after it had come to a stop. KSC security specialist Linda Rhode stood next to Ross on the runway. She traditionally challenged herself to try to spot an approaching shuttle in the distance before Ross saw it. The shuttle should just be becoming visible by now, still more than seventy thousand feet high and flying supersonically. Rhode and Ross scanned the skies and waited to hear the shuttle’s characteristic double sonic booms. These announced the shuttle’s arrival in the area, preceding the landing by about three minutes.

There were no booms at KSC this morning. People searched the skies for Columbia.

Columbia should have been lining up to land on Runway 33 at 9:12. At that moment in Houston’s Mission Control, Mission Operations representative Phil Engelauf received a cell phone call from someone who had seen video on TV of Columbia ’s plasma trail breaking into multiple streaks in the sky above Dallas. The breakup had apparently happened less than a minute after NASA lost communications with Columbia at about nine o’clock.

Engelauf and astronaut Ellen Ochoa walked over to Flight Director LeRoy Cain and spoke to him quietly. Cain collected his emotions. He said a silent prayer, took a deep breath, and instructed the ground control officer in Mission Control: “Lock the doors.” He commanded the flight controllers to preserve all their notes and the data on their computers. They were told not to make any outgoing calls.

At Kennedy’s runway, someone signaled Ross to step into the convoy command vehicle, where Bob Cabana had just received a call from Houston. After he heard the news, Ross stepped out of the van and said a prayer. He called the astronaut escorts for the crew’s families at the midfield viewing stands and told them, “We’ve most likely lost the vehicle and the crew.” He told the escorts to get the families onto their bus and away from the press as quickly as possible and take them to the crew quarters.

Ross called his associates Lauren Lunde and Judy Hooper at the crew quarters and instructed them to get the facility ready for the families immediately. Ross then gathered the rest of his team in the waiting Astrovan. They drove the eight miles south to the crew quarters as fast as the vehicle could go.

People standing at the runway could scarcely process their thoughts. They knew something was dreadfully wrong, but no one had any idea what had happened. The audio feed from Mission Control was the only source of live information, and it was silent.

The landing clock counted down to zero and then began counting up.

KSC director Roy Bridges suddenly felt his stomach drop, “like the Earth had just opened into a big void, and now you’re falling into it.”