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

Upon Dave Whittle’s arrival in Barksdale Air Force Base at 4:30 p.m., the base’s deputy commander introduced himself and took Whittle to the facilities assigned to NASA. He again promised the military’s full support for whatever the Mishap Investigation Team needed—office space, lodging, transportation, and so forth.

Now it was time to establish Whittle’s strategic command center at the base. He divided up the team into their areas of responsibility. By 5:30, the team’s flight surgeons were already meeting with Barksdale’s medical staff to arrange the handling of any crew remains that might be recovered and brought to the base. [19] Stepaniak, Loss of Signal , 34.

FEMA’s Scott Wells arrived and located Whittle, who was swamped with trying to establish order. Whittle challenged him: “Who are you, and what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m Scott Wells, and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. But I’m here!” That broke the tension. Wells immediately began assessing the situation to see what support FEMA could provide. Within hours, FEMA brought in computers and phone lines to enable Whittle’s team to begin tracking debris sighting reports.

MIT members set up the situation room. An airman brought in a set of sectional maps of East Texas and Louisiana and tacked them onto the wall. As debris reports came in, the locations were marked with color-coded pushpins on the map. Johnson Space Center and the Lufkin disaster field office were on the phone with the MIT almost constantly.

Whittle directed that every piece of debris be photographed in place and its GPS position recorded. The information would be entered into a computerized database to enable analysts to plot what debris was falling and where. This capability would be important in directing searchers to look for specific items or for crew remains. Whittle also required that everyone sign in upon entering Nose Dock 6, the aircraft hangar where the debris would be processed. This would ensure the integrity of the investigation’s debris accounting system.

Accident Plus Eleven Hours

A series of aircraft delays pushed the scheduled mid-afternoon departure of my Rapid Response Team from Kennedy Space Center to eight o’clock that evening. The C-141 cargo plane finally arrived, and we loaded everything through the ramp at the back of the plane. The seventy-nine of us buckled ourselves into canvas sling seats lining both sides of the cargo hold. Sitting on rollers mounted down the middle of the plane were two pallets of pre-packed supplies, safety equipment, protective suits for handling hazardous chemicals, and tools that might be needed by the first wave of recovery personnel arriving at a shuttle accident scene.

I tried to collect my thoughts about what our team would be doing once we reached Barksdale. The situation was changing so rapidly that I still had no feel for the scope of the task awaiting us.

As the leader, I felt the need to say something to the team over the plane’s PA system in this moment of sorrow and anxiety. I offered a few impromptu words that I hoped were comforting and motivational, but which I am sure were inadequate to convey the depths of the feelings everyone shared.

I was exhausted, numb, apprehensive—and flying off to lead a mission unlike any for which I had ever prepared.

I sat next to KSC security director Mark Borsi. We quietly discussed whether the accident might have been a terror attack. I was certain that it was not. Borsi agreed, saying that it would have been exceedingly difficult for a terrorist group to plant a bomb that could have survived launch and orbit and then be activated during the shuttle’s landing. The technical challenges of doing that were just too overwhelming.

A few minutes later, the pilot invited me, as the ranking passenger on board, to take a more comfortable seat up front in the cockpit. I accepted his invitation, but later regretted it. I wish to God I had stayed down in the cold and noisy cargo hold with my people.

A good leader should know better , I chided myself.

I looked around and noticed that there was another empty seat. I asked that astronaut Jerry Ross join us in the cockpit. Jerry had been dragged through the depths of hell that day, losing his friends and then having the grim duty of telling their families that their loved ones had perished. Jerry would normally have flown back to Houston with the joyful families and the crew after a successful mission. Now, as the designated Flight Crew Operations member of the RRT, he had a very different task.

I could only imagine what he must have been feeling.

The C-141 taxied out to the runway and lifted off into the darkness. Eleven hours after the accident, the KSC team was finally underway.

The people sitting in the cargo hold were still trying to come to grips with what was happening. Most of them had never been in a military plane before, and they were unprepared for the noise and cold. No one knew what to expect once they landed—or even exactly where Barksdale was.

We landed at Barksdale Air Force Base at about 9:30 p.m. local time—now more than thirteen hours after the accident. Everyone seemed tired and confused. I overheard the pilot and copilot debating about where they should park the plane. Neither of them had ever been to Barksdale.

Colonel McGuirk, the deputy base commander, met our plane and offered his support. “We’re going to stand up an ops center for you, with data lines and anything else you need.”

McGuirk had one warning for us: “When you walk out toward the hangar, there’s a red line painted on the tarmac and the taxiways. If you walk across that red line, be forewarned that there’s a very high probability that you will be shot.”

These guys meant business. The air force did not want anyone going near the B-52 bombers or their armament. For the civilians on the team, McGuirk’s admonition escalated the tension in what had already been a stressful day.

We boarded air force buses to Shreveport’s commercial airport, where we rented cars. We then drove to hastily arranged rooms at two nearby motels.

Accident Plus Fifteen Hours

During the course of the afternoon, partial remains of some of Columbia ’s crew members had been found along a fifteen-mile track from San Augustine County into Sabine County. The overall area in which the ship’s debris fell in Sabine County was twenty-six miles long, completely traversing the county and crossing the Toledo Bend Reservoir that lay along the Louisiana border. Using the debris sightings, the weather radar images he captured earlier in the day, and the location of three findings of crew remains that day, Greg Cohrs from the US Forest Service drew a line through the apparent centerline of the plotted points. It followed a track from west-northwest to east-southeast—from 298 degrees to 118 degrees. [20] Cohrs, “Notes,” 4. The Texas Forest Service generated a similar search line that evening for Nacogdoches County based on what their teams had tagged or collected in the field. [21] Jeff Williams, interviewed by Connie Hodges, Center for Regional Heritage, Stephen F. Austin State University, March 24, 2003, digital.sfasu.edu/cdm/search/collection/col/searchterm/audio/field/title/mode/all/conn/and/order/nosort .

At 11:30 Central Time, Cohrs recommended that Sabine County crews conduct grid searches the next day on either side of the centerline he had plotted, starting at the places where crew remains had been located.

Law enforcement officer Doug Hamilton hated calling off the searches for the night, knowing that there were still astronauts to be found. However, it was dark and cold, and everyone was exhausted. It was time to try to get a few hours of sleep. The incident command team agreed to convene before daybreak at Hemphill’s VFW hall.