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

Reality began to sink in as the rest of the recovery team returned to their hangar. Workers were told not to talk to the press. They were also instructed to lock up all hardware and paperwork to impound everything for investigation. [2] Kim Anderson email, February 4, 2003, accessed at www.ars-fla.com/Mainpages/Spaceflight/STS-107/KimAnderson-STS-107.htm . They huddled in the hangar’s foyer area. It seemed that everyone was crying and making phone calls to loved ones. Someone offered a few words of prayer.

Ann Micklos spoke up, sharing something that Dave Brown had told her before the mission. “Dave said, ‘I want you to find the person that caused the accident and tell them I hold no animosity. I died doing what I loved.’”

Managers in the Firing Room started phoning supervisors, telling them to report to work immediately. Many of the people they tried calling were already getting ready to leave or were on their way to KSC. They had seen the stunning video on TV and wanted to help however they could.

At NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base, California, Robert Hanley had just arrived at the standby landing team’s trailer and heard them discussing Houston’s inability to contact Columbia ’s crew. He and the team watched the minutes tick by on the clock, without any updates from Houston. Growing nervous, Hanley called his colleague Judy Hooper in the crew quarters at KSC.

“Judy! Where’s our crew?”

She replied, “I can’t talk now,” and hung up the phone.

Hanley instantly knew that something terrible had happened. Switching the television to CNN, he saw the pieces of Columbia fanning out like fireworks across the sky over Texas.

The room went silent.

Hanley looked at his team and said, “We lost the crew.”

He held his emotions in check long enough to walk into the bathroom. Then he fell apart. How could I lose my friends so close to home? His thoughts went to the crew families at KSC, the people that he had come to know so well during the crew’s training period. He normally would have been with them at the landing site. Now he was thousands of miles away, feeling helpless. There was absolutely nothing he could do.

The staff quietly cleaned up their paperwork. Hanley headed to the airport for what would feel like the longest trip home of his lifetime. Television monitors in the terminal at the Burbank airport replayed video of the accident again and again, while passengers went about their business in the terminal. Hanley wanted to stand on a chair and scream at everyone to shut up and think about what had just happened. He found a quiet spot where he could call his father. He cried with him on the phone until he regained his composure.

In Sabine County, Texas, Greg and Sandra Cohrs sat down to breakfast and turned on their television. Reports began coming in that Columbia had “exploded” over Dallas. Grass fires were springing up in the area. Greg said to Sandra, “I bet we’ll be involved in this before it’s over.” US Forest Service personnel, regardless of their job titles, typically were called in to help respond to all-risk or all-hazard incidents—wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and even terrorist attacks—in their local communities and across the nation.

Cohrs called the district fire management officer to find out if he should report for work. The officer said he was waiting for a call and told him to stand by. In the meantime, Cohrs prepared to do his usual Saturday yard work, but then a call back informed him that he would be on flight duty that day as a spotter.

Cohrs brought up the Intellicast weather radar website on his computer as part of his usual preflight routine. Despite the clear blue sky above, the radar image showed a wide swath of something in the air along a northwest to southeast track from Nacogdoches, Texas, through Hemphill and heading on toward Leesville, Louisiana. The largest concentration of radar returns was centered over Sabine County, and the cloud appeared to be slowly drifting north and east. He realized that the weather radar was picking up the debris from Columbia that was still falling to the ground. He took several screen snapshots of the radar display.

Accident Plus Thirty Minutes

Sean O’Keefe and the other senior leaders huddled with me in my small conference room on the fourth floor of the Launch Control Center. We turned on a TV and saw for the first time the videos of Columbia ’s plasma trail flashing and breaking up into smaller smoke trains.

Our hearts sank. We then knew for certain that Columbia was lost. There was no hope for her or the crew.

O’Keefe stared at the monitor. He put his hands on the table and said, “I wonder how many people on the ground we just hurt.”

Associate Administrator Bill Readdy formally activated NASA’s Contingency Action Plan for Space Flight Operations. Although it was rather general, the plan prescribed what NASA’s leaders needed to do immediately to bring order to an emergency situation. [3] Within hours of assuming the role of NASA administrator in December 2001, O’Keefe asked his senior leaders to brief him on what would happen if something were to go wrong. NASA formalized a new contingency plan in November 2002, and revised it in January 2003, less than a month before the Columbia accident. O’Keefe later said in an interview with Jonathan Ward, “When you’re in a situation like that, I don’t know many people that can stand there and be as ice-cold as it takes to actually think through the proper series of those kinds of events. You can tell the difference between those who have an organized way of proceeding, versus those that say, ‘What in the hell do we do now?’ The one thing I didn’t have to worry about on February 1, 2003, was what we were going to do next. The guy standing next to me on the runway has the binder that says, “Here’s the plan, and here’s how we do it, starting with: ‘Item 1. Here’s who we need to call and here’s how we’re going to set up a mishap investigation.’” Among other things, the plan called for the formation of formal task forces to respond to and investigate the accident. Over the ensuing weeks, this list would grow to include one independent review board and fourteen formal internal task forces, working groups, and action teams. [4] NASA, NASA Accident Investigation Team Final Report (Washington, DC: NASA Headquarters, August 22, 2003), iv. The fourteen organizations included the Columbia Task Force, the Headquarters Contingency Action Team, the NASA Accident Investigation Team, the Mishap Investigation Team, the Reconstruction Team, the Orbiter Vehicle Engineering Working Group, the Emergency Operations Center, the Data and Records Handling Working Group, the Early Sightings Assessment Team, the Systems Integration Working Group, the External Tank Working Group, the Space Shuttle Main Engine Working Group, the Reusable Solid Rocket Motor Working Group, and the Solid Rocket Booster Working Group.

O’Keefe left the meeting and phoned President George W. Bush, who was at Camp David. Bush’s first question was, “Where are the families?” O’Keefe was moved that the president’s primary concern was to ensure that the families were being cared for. Bush then requested to speak with the families later that morning to express his personal remorse and to offer condolences from the nation. He and O’Keefe agreed that they would wait to place the call until the families had time to absorb the emotional blows of losing their loved ones.

While O’Keefe was out of the conference room, Roy Bridges asked me, “Mike, what do you think happened?”