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

The crew members would all be going home.

Word about the final recovery came by radio to the other search teams in the field. When he heard the announcement, Mike Alexander broke into tears. “I just started crying out there in the woods. I couldn’t help it. I thought, We got closure now .”

Don Eddings returned to the command post from his air search that day to find people shaking hands and congratulating one another. He asked the ranger what was going on. “Didn’t they tell you? We found the last one today. It was one of the locations you called in.”

In the afternoon, Cohrs suggested to Brent Jett that Hemphill hold a memorial service for the crew. All of the Sabine County search teams had been in the field when the televised memorial services were held at other locations. The community wanted to pay its respects to Columbia ’s crew after working so hard to bring them home.

That evening, Jett asked Cohrs to walk with him to his car. The streets were already empty, the media having moved on several days ago to cover other stories. Jett told Cohrs how deeply he and NASA appreciated the work of Brother Fred Raney, Terry Lane, and Cohrs in helping to search for and recover his friends and members of the NASA family.

NASA’s Dave King knew his leadership team needed a break after twelve consecutive twenty-hour workdays, so on Wednesday he took them to dinner at an Italian restaurant near the Lufkin command center.

As they ate, King noticed a young girl looking at them from an adjacent table. She came over a few minutes later and asked, “Are you NASA people, and are you trying to recover the space shuttle? I just want to tell you how much I appreciate what you people have done for the space program and our country.”

He found it particularly poignant that this young girl had come over to them and said the words they most needed to hear at precisely the right moment. “That’s exactly what encourages you—the human piece of this thing,” he later said. “To have this little girl, who you look to as the future of this country, to come up and say that… it was unbelievably meaningful to us in that moment. We had all worked very hard and were all very tired, but something like that gives you a new shot of energy to go do what you need to do.”

Thursday, February 13, was the final day of the Sabine County incident management team’s formal leadership of the search efforts in the county. Responsibility would transition to a new leadership structure on Sunday, February 16.

In the meantime, the Hemphill camp worked a short day on Thursday, then took a well-deserved break to reflect on the events of the past two weeks. Search operations paused on Friday to memorialize the Columbia crew.

Mary Beth Gray of Hemphill’s flower shop prepared red, white, and blue wreaths for Columbia ’s crew members. Friday morning’s memorial service began at eight o’clock in the VFW hall, with a procession of people carrying the seven wreaths to the front of the room. Members of the incident command center spoke briefly. Brent Jett delivered the eulogy for his colleagues. He thanked the community for their efforts in bringing Columbia ’s crew out of the woods and back to their loved ones.

Minimal response to calls resumed on Saturday. The teams had not yet completed searching every square foot of the twenty-five-square-mile target area. Partial remains, somehow missed in one of the earlier searches, turned up over the weekend. But except for one small find on March 7—outside of the search area—those were the last remains of Columbia ’s crew to be located.

Sabine County’s citizens paused to reflect on the profound emotional and logistical challenges of the past two weeks.

It was impossible to determine precisely how much food had been donated or how many meals had been served at Hemphill’s VFW hall. Best estimates were that this relatively small community and a handful of volunteers had prepared and served thirty thousand to fifty thousand meals in two weeks. The community had donated more than $620,000 in services to the recovery—at no cost to the federal or state government.

No doubt Sabine County’s sense of personal ownership and connection to the search was in large part due to the crew’s coming to rest in the county. Had this been simply a hardware salvage operation, the local citizens might have been interested—but perhaps not so compelled to go to the lengths they did to help. But the presence of the crew and their worried and grieving friends made this a tragedy that touched every compassionate fiber of their being.

Many people in this deeply religious area saw it as divine providence that Columbia ’s crew came to Earth in their community. Had the accident occurred anywhere else, the outcome might have been very different. Here, the people kept what they saw and experienced out of the press. They enfolded the NASA family in a respectful, loving, and healing embrace, and they rose to address a national tragedy in a manner that is difficult for outsiders to fully comprehend.

“Texans are really just good people and will give you the shirt off their back,” said Jan Amen. “We might get a bad rap with this redneck thing, but we’re just down home good people.”

Every NASA employee and every person who participated in the recovery spoke of the miraculous, loving deeds performed by Sabine County’s citizens. Even the neighboring communities were astounded by the way the town rose to the challenge. Perhaps it was just the nature of small-town existence. Many residents played multiple roles as part of their everyday life, such as Brother Fred Raney being both the Baptist minister and captain of the volunteer fire department. In larger towns like Nacogdoches, the culture was such that it seemed more appropriate to have the formal organizations and their professional resources deal with the incident.

“It’s just people helping people—that’s what this small town is about,” said Roger Gay. “Everybody likes to help everybody else, and they don’t expect anything from it. It was an occurrence that happened, and we dealt with it the best way we knew how.”

NASA’s Dave King summed up, “The people of East Texas make you proud to be an American, because they sacrificed and gave everything they had to try to help us. It was unbelievable what they did for us.”

By the third day into the search period, while the crew recovery teams were desperately looking for Columbia ’s astronauts, we on the Mishap Investigation Team in Barksdale and Lufkin were still trying to get a handle on the size of the debris situation. I was acting as Dave Whittle’s right-hand man at this point, doing whatever I could to support him and manage the interfaces within NASA and with the other agencies. An incredible amount of activity was underway.