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

She also told him about some wreckage in the neighboring, unoccupied property. Mango’s crew went to the spot and found a locker from Columbia ’s crew module. Some of its contents were intact.

After taking photos, the team got back in the helicopter and returned to Lufkin, arriving just after sunset. Mango was sobered by the quantity and extent of debris he saw from the air during his brief helicopter trip. Only about a dozen NASA engineers and technicians were in Lufkin at the time to help with debris recovery. Mango called Barksdale that evening and asked our team to send as many people as possible to Lufkin the next day to help with the debris search.

While Mango was investigating the sightings in Texas, Jerry Ross flew from Lufkin to Fort Polk, Louisiana, aboard another Blackhawk helicopter. US Forest Service representatives met him and drove him by Humvee deep into the forest. When he arrived, he instantly recognized parts of the powerheads of Columbia ’s main engines, still visible above the water filling in the craters. As the densest and heaviest components on the shuttle, the turbopumps had followed a ballistic trajectory at supersonic speeds from the time they broke away from the shuttle until they slammed into the muddy ground in the Louisiana forest. These components would later turn out to be the easternmost debris found from Columbia .

Ross and his guides examined two impact craters—one of which was located on the fourteenth fairway of the Fort Polk golf course—but were unable to visit a third site before darkness and rain set in. Ross flew back to Barksdale that night.

Jim Wetherbee knew that trying to find the remains of seven people in a ten thousand square mile accident zone was an intractable problem. The area was simply too big. Senior officials from Washington questioned why he had not immediately requested ten thousand National Guard troops to search for the crew. Wetherbee pushed back. It was impossible to bring in that many people immediately to search such a large area. There was no way to support them in the field even if they could deploy there. And ten thousand troops could not efficiently search that much land for crew remains and small pieces of equipment.

Wetherbee asked headquarters to be patient. If his team could find a way to narrow the search area, then he would request additional people as needed.

In the first day and a half, search teams spotted several hundred possible remains in the field. The vast majority later turned out to be from animals, but it would take several days for DNA analyses to confirm identification. Many of the suspected remains, though, were very likely from the crew. Wetherbee and Grunsfeld plotted their locations on a map. They decided to narrow the search efforts to an area sixty miles long and five miles wide, centered on the best-fit line of the suspected crew remains recovered on the first day. This would help them better target the search efforts of the National Guard units who were going to be deployed to the area starting the next day.

To help coordinate NASA’s participation in the intensive search activities in the areas where crew remains were turning up in the searches already being conducted by the local incident command teams, Wetherbee established forward execution posts in San Augustine and Hemphill. He assigned astronaut Brent Jett as his forward coordinator in the field to brief the local team leaders each day. [13] Stepaniak, Loss of Signal , 21. The working relationship with the local search teams assured that NASA could request resources or assistance in searching an area, but direction of the ground searches resided with the local incident commanders. [14] Greg Cohrs email to Jonathan Ward.

That evening, at the six o’clock status update to Dave Whittle and our team at Barksdale, Jerry Ross reported on his findings near Fort Polk. Bob Benzon of the NTSB agreed to conduct the follow-up investigation. We noted that the potential scope of the debris recovery operation was still growing. Possible debris sightings were being called in from British Columbia to central Florida.

The teleconference revealed the huge extent of the resources moving into position to assist with the search-and-recovery operations. Four helicopters would be available for searches the next day. Fifteen search teams would be deployed on Monday and thirty by Tuesday. Three hundred Texas Army National Guard troops were being deployed to the area for security and recovery of crew remains. The US Coast Guard deployed members of its Alabama Gulf Strike Team to Lufkin to assist with collection of potentially hazardous debris. Thirty-four additional personnel would be arriving at Barksdale from Kennedy Space Center late that night. Carswell Naval Air Station would be the temporary storage location for debris recovered between Corsicana and the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Other Texas temporary collection sites were in operation at Hemphill, Jasper, Nacogdoches, and Palestine.

The number one priority item for the debris search was the shuttle’s Orbiter Experiment system (OEX) recorder. The OEX system monitored and recorded hundreds of channels of data during the shuttle’s ascent and reentry. It was installed on Columbia to help characterize various physical loads on the ship, ranging from stresses and strains to temperatures and acoustics. It was the closest thing on the shuttle to the flight-data recorder found on all commercial airliners—and Columbia was the only orbiter instrumented that way. If it was intact, the OEX recorder might contain a data tape of Columbia ’s status during its reentry and up to the time that it broke up. This would be crucial to help us determine the cause of the accident.

The meeting closed with somber news. Two ambulances were en route to Barksdale carrying remains from at least two crew members. They were expected to arrive at eight o’clock.

The Lufkin leadership team’s teleconference with Texas Governor Rick Perry began at seven o’clock. Perry was upset that the state’s school grounds had not been cleared of hazardous materials, since schools were scheduled to open the next morning. He demanded all school grounds be cleared by midnight.

The NASA and FEMA representatives briefly muted the line in order to talk among themselves. There was no way they could reliably clear all the schools in the debris corridor—the full extent of which was still not known—by midnight. The FEMA representative came back on the line and told Perry, “We need to put together a plan. We’ll call you back in one hour.”

The leaders quickly decided to assemble teams of three or four people to visit the schools in Lufkin, Nacogdoches, and Hemphill to determine what material had fallen there and how long it would take to clean it up.

The crews fanned out and reported back as best they could—cell phone coverage being spotty or nonexistent in wide areas of rural Texas in 2003. Five schools in Nacogdoches were reported cleared of debris.

There was no definitive news to give to the governor at the nine o’clock update call. By ten o’clock, there was enough data to inform Perry that it was impossible to open all the schools in the area the next day. The team suggested that the most prudent approach was to keep the schools closed, at least on Monday. Perry agreed. The next day, the team would make a concentrated effort to collect all the debris from the schools in the recovery zone.

As midnight approached on Sunday, the first full day after the Columbia accident, Marsha Cooper and her fellow Sabine County searchers were exhausted. They had endured a physically demanding and emotionally draining day unlike any in their experience. But they knew that the remains of most of Columbia ’s crew members had yet to be located.