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

I replied, “The only thing I can think of is the foam strike.” I called for someone to bring us copies of the photos of the launch debris hitting the shuttle’s wing.

O’Keefe returned, and I passed around the photos. I said, “We don’t know if this is it, but there’s nothing else about this flight that stands out. This is the only thing I can think of as a potential problem.”

Everyone stared at the photos. Someone said, “Okay. Let’s file this away for now. Don’t jump to any conclusions.”

We then discussed who should lead NASA’s overall response to the accident and coordinate the various teams that would be responding from NASA’s centers. Someone suggested appointing Dave King, who had spent nineteen years at KSC in roles including launch director, director of shuttle processing, and deputy center director. King had just recently moved to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. O’Keefe and Readdy quickly agreed that King’s experience made him an excellent choice to lead the recovery effort.

King, at home watching television, had just seen the news that NASA had lost communications with Columbia . Barely half an hour after the accident, his phone rang. Bill Readdy was on the line.

“Dave, do you know what’s going on?”

“Well, I know something’s going on, but I don’t know what.”

“I need you to run the recovery operation. I need you to go find our friends.”

King instantly felt the heavy burden of the responsibility he was being asked to bear. Having been through the Challenger disaster and its aftermath early in his NASA career, he knew the things that could go wrong if the recovery of a ship and its crew was not handled properly.

King decided on the spot that he would do everything in his power to make this situation proceed better.

Five miles south of the Launch Control Center, Jerry Ross had raced back from the Shuttle Landing Facility to his office in the Operations and Checkout Building. He switched on the television to a news channel and saw the video of Columbia ’s breakup.

He met the crew families as they arrived at the crew quarters on the building’s third floor. He did not tell them what he had just seen on television. Rather, he did his best to make them as comfortable as possible.

STS-107 was Bob Cabana’s first mission as the head of the Flight Crew Operations Directorate. He had ridden out with the crew on launch day, and he had been eagerly awaiting their return on the runway. Now he had to face the hardest thing he had ever done—telling the families that their loved ones weren’t coming home. When he felt he had enough information, he and Ross joined the families in the crew conference room. Cabana explained to them that it was unlikely that any of Columbia ’s crew could have survived the accident.

Ross spent the next several hours trying to comfort the families. He had their luggage collected from their hotel rooms, and he made arrangements to fly everyone back to Houston.

Ann Micklos returned to her office near the Vehicle Assembly Building after the landing convoy demobilized. Someone called to ask if she wanted to go to the crew quarters to be with the Columbia families. While she appreciated the gesture and sympathy about the loss of Dave Brown, she knew that her situation was very different.

“I chose to stay in the office and to try to figure out what happened with what data we had,” she recalled. However, her coworkers could see that she was in shock.

After a while, they told her, “We’re driving you home.” She arrived to a house full of people to support her.

Things were going crazy in East Texas. In his office in Hemphill, Sheriff Maddox desperately needed to figure out what was happening in Sabine County. A deputy had just come on duty, and Maddox immediately dispatched him to the north end of the county. He phoned law officer Doug Hamilton from the US Forest Service and asked him to check on a possible train derailment near Bronson in the western side of the county. Maddox hopped in his car to head for the nearby natural gas pipeline. His dispatcher radioed him and said, “NASA just called and said it wasn’t a pipeline explosion. That was just the shuttle going over and breaking the sound barrier. You can go about your regular duties.”

Maddox drove over to Hemphill’s youth arena to see what was going on at the livestock weigh-in. People asked him what it was that had passed overhead. Maddox told them that it was the shuttle breaking the sound barrier. One woman said, “But they haven’t heard from it in fifteen minutes.”

Maddox knew something was wrong. He got back in his car. The dispatcher radioed that people were calling in from all over the county about items raining down from the clear blue sky, breaking tree limbs, and hitting the ground.

Phone calls began pouring in to the town’s volunteer fire department in addition to those coming in to the sheriff’s office. “There are things falling out of the sky!” “Something just hit the road!” Then news of Columbia ’s loss came through. The firefighters debated for several minutes about what to do. Volunteers started heading out to investigate the calls and secure the items being found.

Hemphill City Manager Don Iles arrived at the fire station as a radio report came in from a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officer on US 96 near Bronson. “There’s a big metal object in the middle of the highway. It gouged the road. I’m looking at it, but I don’t know what to make of it.”

The dispatcher asked if it had any identifying marks or numbers. The DPS trooper said, “Yeah, but it’s only partial.” He read back the numbers to the dispatcher, who then told him to wait. The trooper said he would stay at the scene by the object and keep vehicles from running over it.

A few minutes later, the dispatcher came back on and said, “I’ve just been in touch with NASA. Please do not pick up or touch any of the material, because it could be radioactive or poisonous.” There was dead silence on the other end of the radio as the trooper pondered his situation.

Doug Hamilton arrived at the site of the reported train derailment, about five miles from his house, but there were no trains in sight anywhere. He called back to the sheriff’s office and was asked to head to the wreckage sighting on US 96.

Sheriff Maddox and Hamilton met the DPS trooper at the scene. The metal object was the waste storage tank from Columbia ’s crew module—the first confirmed piece of the shuttle found in Sabine County.

With the nature of the situation now confirmed, the accident scene in Sabine County officially became a federal incident. Hamilton, as a federal law enforcement officer, was now the man in charge.

Hamilton photographed the tank, and he and the others cordoned off the area with crime scene tape. They recorded its GPS position and called it back in to the dispatcher. Maddox and Hamilton had no officers available to guard the wreckage. The three men drove off together in Hamilton’s government car to investigate the next reported sighting.

Someone overheard their radio report. When officials came back later in the day to retrieve the waste tank, it was gone. [5] “Grand Jury Indicts Man for Stealing Shuttle Toilet,” Lufkin Daily News (Lufkin, TX), May 8, 2003 ( www.lufkindailynews.com/news/newsfd/auto/feed/news/2003/05/08/1052368037.00303.3371.4691.html ). The tank was recovered on May 7 in a strange turn of events, and its alleged thief became the fifth person to be indicted in East Texas for stealing debris from the shuttle. Eyewitnesses to his arrest stated that, by day, he was involved in the search for crew remains. He then allegedly went back to bring debris home from the field at night, hiding items under clothing in his trailer. He also had a stash of pyrotechnic devices—he did not know what they were or how dangerous they were—under his bed. Rumor held that he had a romantic encounter with a female searcher, and when his wife learned of the affair, she notified local authorities of the stolen material in their home. Accused of withholding the “compactor tank assembly” from NASA’s recovery efforts, he was also indicted by a grand jury on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. In August 2003, he was acquitted of the theft charge in exchange for pleading guilty to the firearms charge.