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

Administrator O’Keefe appeared to be in shock. A roller coaster of emotions swept over him. He swung from elation at the prospect of greeting the crew to the very depths of despair as he looked at the crew families and realized the horror they were experiencing. He knew Columbia ’s loss meant that NASA’s aggressive launch schedule to complete the International Space Station was now rendered meaningless. He also realized that at that precise moment, the lives of the crew’s families in the bleachers would enter an alternative future that he could not even begin to comprehend.

All he could manage to say aloud was, “This changes everything.”

Standing next to O’Keefe, Bill Readdy was carrying a notebook that contained NASA’s “Agency Contingency Action Plan for Space Flight Operations.” Opening the notebook and reading the procedures from the start, Readdy told O’Keefe that he was declaring a spaceflight contingency. He officially activated NASA’s Recovery Control Center at KSC.

Bridges urged O’Keefe, “Sir, we really need to go to an area where we can get our thoughts together on what to do next.”

I was standing nearby. Still stunned, I told the VIPs to meet me in my office back at the Launch Control Center.

Ed Mango listened over the comm loop as LeRoy Cain instructed his mission controllers to lock the doors in Houston’s Flight Control Room, the first step in impounding all the data. Mango activated a similar procedure in KSC’s Firing Room. He instructed everyone to gather and record the data on their consoles, keep their logbooks at their desks, and not call anyone outside the room.

Staff in the Firing Room simply could not comprehend that the vehicle was gone. Feelings of shock and utter helplessness followed disbelief.

On the way back to my vehicle at the midfield park site, I phoned Mango and asked, “What do you know?”

He replied, “I don’t think it’s going to make it to the ground. I don’t know what happened. They had some interesting data from the left wing that seemed to be getting worse, and then they lost comm.”

I said, “The administrator will be there in ten minutes. He wants you to brief him on what you know.”

I then tried to phone my wife Charlotte at home. She didn’t answer. She was outside the house, hoping to hear the sonic booms and catch a glimpse from our yard of Columbia high overhead.

I left her a message: “ Columbia ’s not coming home. We don’t know where it is. It’s not here. I’ll call you later.”

With the declaration of a spacecraft contingency at about 9:16 a.m. Eastern Time on February 1, what would have been Landing Day became Recovery Day 1. NASA immediately needed to determine precisely where Columbia was and ascertain the condition of the ship and her crew.

For many of us at NASA, and for the residents of East Texas, our lives had just changed forever.

Accident Plus Twenty Minutes

In Tyler, Texas, Jeff Millslagle laced up his shoes for a training run for the upcoming Austin marathon. A rumbling sound startled him. As a California native, he at first thought it was an earthquake. But as the noise continued, he realized it was unlike anything he had ever heard.

Millslagle was one of the FBI’s senior supervisory resident agents in Tyler. His colleague Peter Galbraith phoned him and asked, “What the hell was that?” They speculated that perhaps one of the pipelines running through the area had exploded. It seemed the only likely explanation. It was certainly not tornado weather. No other natural phenomenon could have caused such a prolonged banging.

Millslagle phoned the Smith County sheriff’s office to see if they had any reports of unusual activity. They checked and phoned back, “It was the space shuttle reentering.” That didn’t seem plausible, since the shuttle’s sonic booms wouldn’t be audible at sea level until the shuttle was well east of them. The sheriff’s office called again a few minutes later. “The shuttle broke up overhead. There are reports that Lake Palestine is on fire.”

Millslagle turned on his TV and saw video of Columbia disintegrating. He immediately phoned Galbraith and told him they needed to meet at the FBI office in Tyler.

He arrived at the office five minutes later, still dressed in his running clothes. Special Agent Terry Lane phoned in from his home west of Nacogdoches. Special Agent Glenn Martin called in from Lufkin, Texas. Both reported what appeared to be pieces of the shuttle on the ground. The sheriff’s office phoned in and asked for guidance. Millslagle said, “Let me go home and throw some pants on, and I’ll drive down to Lufkin.” He called Lane and Martin and told them to meet him at the FBI office there. Galbraith offered to stay in the Tyler office and monitor the situation.

At Kennedy Space Center, the crowd at the Shuttle Landing Facility was struggling to comprehend why the space shuttle had not returned. Security personnel and the astronaut escorts quickly led the Columbia crew’s immediate families away from viewing stands—and the eyes of the press—toward a special bus that would take them to the privacy and safety of the crew quarters.

The remaining guests, some of whom were members of the crew’s extended families, were hurried onto buses and taken to the training auditorium in the industrial area of KSC about seven miles south of the landing facility.

Cell phones began ringing as the guest buses left the Shuttle Landing Facility. As word spread about what had happened, distressed passengers screamed and cried. Some demanded that the volunteer visitor escorts on the buses tell them what was happening. The escorts had no information to share. They were as confused and heartbroken as the passengers. [1] John Tribe, “Forever Remembered,” unpublished personal recollections on the STS-107 mission.

Ann Micklos was waiting at the SLF with the landing convoy to greet her former boyfriend, Columbia ’s Dave Brown, upon his return. She realized there was a serious problem when she saw the astronauts running toward the crew families’ bleachers.

Ann immediately called Brown’s parents from her cell phone. They were at home in Virginia watching the television coverage of the landing. The Browns were confused about the situation. They asked Ann if the shuttle was going around for another landing attempt. She explained that Columbia and her crew only had one chance to land. Her words caught in her throat as she told them it didn’t look like they would be coming home.

As shocked and distressed as the spectators, the landing and recovery convoy teams at the runway briefly found themselves uncertain as to what they should do. The checklists that had taken them to this stage of operations were no longer valid. No procedures covered what to do in a scenario in which the recovery convoy was deployed but the shuttle did not come down at the landing site.