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

At the nine o’clock morning meeting on Monday, February 3, at Barksdale, Paul Monafo from Marshall Space Flight Center reported he was developing a fault tree, which was an analysis of how different basic events or failures might have combined to cause the destruction of Columbia . The NTSB urged people to keep an open mind and not discount any possibilities, no matter how improbable. Monafo, like many NASA managers, nonetheless believed the accident could not have been caused just by the foam impact during ascent. Many NASA managers held onto this opinion for days—even weeks—after the accident. It seemed impossible that a piece of lightweight foam by itself could have damaged the shuttle. There must have been something else involved .

We also began discussing how we might reconstruct Columbia ’s debris to determine the cause of the accident. Representatives of both Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center made the case for why their center should be the location for this important investigation. Ron Dittemore and representatives from Johnson Space Center lobbied to bring the debris to Houston for analysis. Johnson had the advantage of being close to the debris field and was home to the engineers with design knowledge of Columbia . On the other hand, Kennedy had an available hangar at the Shuttle Landing Facility that would be ideal for laying out Columbia ’s wreckage in a reconstruction process similar to that used by the NTSB for investigating aircraft accidents. More important, we said, our technicians were more intimately familiar with the flight hardware than were JSC’s engineers.

Fred Gregory, NASA deputy administrator and former shuttle commander, was in Barksdale for several days. I discussed with him the pros and cons of the two options. Not knowing at the time that I would later lead the reconstruction effort, I told Fred that I firmly believed that KSC was the better choice for the effort and asked him to support my suggestion.

I asked KSC’s safety manager Gerry Schumann to go to Lufkin to support Dave King. King wanted him to coordinate safety briefings for the press and also to ensure that people working in the field understood risks and how to avoid exposure to hazards. Everyone participating in the searches had to be briefed on the hazardous materials on the shuttle, as well as the other risks they might encounter in the field. The news would get out through the joint information center established at Lufkin—a clearinghouse for all the federal agencies on site to disseminate information related to the disaster. [1] FEMA, “FEMA Establishes Joint Information Center For Columbia Debris Search, Find, And Secure Mission At Lufkin Civic Center,” news release HQ-03-031, February 3, 2003.

We had quickly determined it was better to have Jerry Ross and Ed Mango run the debris collection process locally in Lufkin—close to the debris field—rather than remotely from Barksdale. Ross and Mango continued to set up our debris collection protocol. They ensured the local collection centers were on the lookout for items of particular importance. We hoped that at least one of Columbia ’s five onboard flight computers might have made it to the ground. The computers had limited battery power to retain data in memory, and we wanted to recover any data that might still be in the computers before the battery backup power failed. Hazardous items also needed to be removed from the field immediately.

Limited resources in the first several days of the operation meant that most debris items could only be marked, their GPS coordinates recorded, and then left in the field for collection later. If an EPA representative was on a search team, that person could examine an item in the field for hazardous substances and approve it to be picked up if it was not contaminated. We planned to deploy twenty-four NASA teams to the field to assist with debris collection.

Ross directed that any of the crew’s personal equipment items located during the searches be sent directly to him for examination. Over the course of the coming weeks, he saw kneeboards, checklists, and pieces of the flight suits from Columbia ’s crew.

At the collection and storage sites, there were not enough NASA resources to perform triage on the material coming in from the field. I called Denny Gagen at KSC and asked that he send more people to Texas as quickly as possible. In the meantime, collection centers had instructions to check each item for hazards, enter its brief description and GPS coordinates in the database, and then ship it on to Lufkin. From there, it would go by truck to Barksdale. Betty Muldowney—a quality control manager from KSC who came out with us on the first flight—was organizing the process for receiving debris at Barksdale, logging it, and transferring it to wherever it would be studied.

At 12:30, Administrator O’Keefe and Fred Gregory declared that the hangar at the southeast end of Kennedy’s Shuttle Landing Facility would be the location for examining Columbia ’s debris. Recovered parts of the shuttle were to be shipped there from Barksdale as soon as the hangar was ready.

We heard reports from California of three possible pieces of shuttle debris. In addition, someone reported a debris field near Phoenix. If these sightings checked out, we would dispatch recovery teams to both locations.

Our calls for more resources were yielding results, and the magnitude of the nation’s response to NASA’s need was incredible. [2] FEMA, “FEMA Continues to Coordinate Actions to Assist State and Local Authorities in Search, Find and Secure Mission for Columbia Debris,” news release HQ-03-030, February 3, 2003. An additional sixty people would be deployed from Kennedy by Thursday to help with debris recovery and processing. Ralph Roe said that he would be sending people from Houston to Barksdale to help identify “interesting” material. Later in the afternoon, Houston also committed to sending three teams to Lufkin to join the debris collection and identification effort. A twenty-five-member disaster mortuary team was headed to Lufkin to assist in working with remains of Columbia ’s crew. [3] FEMA, “FEMA Updates Search, Find and Secure Activities for Columbia Emergency [4:00 p.m. Release],” news release HQ-03-032, February 3, 2003. The FBI was deploying Evidence Recovery Team members to ensure that debris collection practices were consistent across search teams and collection sites. The Texas National Guard announced that they would deploy 477 troops to help with debris collection beginning the next day. The coast guard sent additional personnel from its Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Strike Teams to Lufkin. FEMA was establishing a third disaster field office at the Fort Worth Naval Air Station. And the EPA was analyzing water samples in Louisiana to check for contamination by shuttle debris.

Astronaut Jim Reilly visited Toledo Bend Reservoir with representatives from EPA, FEMA, and the coast guard. They searched part of the shoreline, near where fishermen had reported seeing objects impact the water, but they found nothing. [4] US Navy, Salvage Report , 1–7. Jasper sheriff Billy Rowles was managing the local water search effort. Boats and dive teams from the local law enforcement and the FBI operated out of the Fin and Feather Resort attempting to locate debris. Reilly reported that the water search effort needed to be expanded.

Meanwhile, other welcome resources appeared on the scene. The Blue Bell Company provided ice cream coolers at all of the command centers and field offices and kept them stocked, at no cost to the recovery operation. Community Coffee provided coffee machines at every one of the collection centers, also at no cost. The Salvation Army also provided meals for all of the personnel in the Lufkin command center. [5] Interviews with Dave Whittle and Larry Ostarly; Jim Wetherbee email to Jonathan Ward.