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

Nathan Ener [15] Ener later achieved notoriety for entertaining NASA workers with his intricately fabricated tall tales of “one-armed space monkeys” that had escaped from Columbia and were sighted running loose in the woods of Sabine County. At one point, Ener even took out an ad in the local paper seeking to purchase monkey traps. once again phoned the Hemphill command center to remind them about finding Columbia ’s nose cap the previous day. This time, he described the object in enough detail to attract immediate attention from the people taking the call. A NASA team came out to the site and confirmed that this was clearly a significant piece of the shuttle. [16] Starr, Finding Heroes , 69–72.

NASA permitted the media to cover the process of extracting the nose cap from the woods—one of the largest operations related to a single piece of debris in Sabine County. The state police blocked off Bayou Bend Road, requiring the media to park along Route 83. Marsha Cooper from the US Forest Service was assigned to take the media to the site. She deliberately led them on a circuitous route to confuse them and prevent them from easily finding their way back unescorted.

The original extraction plan called for lifting out the bulky piece by helicopter. Felix Holmes of the US Forest Service cut down some of the large trees surrounding the wreckage to give a helicopter a clear shot at lifting the nose cap and its supporting pallet out through the forest canopy. The weather would not cooperate, though, and a strong cold front and rain blew in shortly before the scheduled operation. The flight was canceled. It was too dangerous to risk the helicopter and the priceless piece of the shuttle by attempting to hoist the heavy object up through the trees in a high wind. Holmes cleared a path so that a four-wheeler towing a trailer could haul the nose cap out to a waiting tractor trailer for transport to Barksdale.

Meanwhile, Pat Adkins investigated a call reporting a spherical tank resting against a fence line. He realized immediately that it was still “hot”—its lethal contents of nitrogen tetroxide gradually seeping out and fuming upon interaction with the rain. The tank was too hazardous to approach, and the ground around it was contaminated. He placed a “crime scene” tape at a safe distance around the tank. He asked a Texas DPS trooper to keep watch over it—and stay upwind of the tank—until the EPA could decontaminate it and collect it.

NTSB investigator Clint Crookshanks was with a search team that found about one hundred pages of a manual in what had once been a three-ring binder. The cover of the binder was missing, but the pages appeared almost untouched and unburned. [17] Crookshanks and Benzon, “CAIB Lessons Learned Video Interview.” Other finds were not so well preserved. Once-pristine metallic components were now heavily oxidized, twisted, and scorched. Some of the debris resembled car parts that had been rusting in a junkyard for fifty years.

Many of the hundreds of pyrotechnic and pressure devices that had been aboard Columbia turned up along the debris path. Some were large, while others were as small as BBs—like the initiators for the inflation cartridges in the crew’s life vests. Everything had to be treated as hazardous, because they may not have been expended and might be damaged, which could cause them to go off without warning.

The various collection sites along the debris corridor checked in at six o’clock that evening. Ed Mango, Dom Gorie, and Jerry Ross reported from Lufkin that “a lot” of material was being collected. Teams had identified helium and gaseous nitrogen tanks in the field but had not picked them up yet. Some 70mm film had also been recovered. As teams filled their vehicles with debris, they drove the material to the nearest collection center for processing. Once a collection center received enough material to fill a semitrailer, the packaged items would be sent to us at Barksdale.

At the end of February 3, we had asked the debris collection centers to note how many items had been recovered that day, and, if possible, to describe what they might be. The next day, Lufkin requested specific GPS locations for the items collected. Several times each day over the next several days, the debris team in Lufkin relayed the information by phone to us at Barksdale, with verbal descriptions of significant items that had been recovered.

The problem was that each collection center—and in many cases each agency—was recording debris sightings and recovery in their own way. In the opening days of the recovery operation, information was being handwritten on forms and faxed to Lufkin. Sites with computers logged the debris with software ranging from makeshift Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to more sophisticated databases. The GPS locations of debris sightings—and even of crew remains—were being recorded inconsistently in the field, with some teams recording decimal degrees and others using degrees, minutes, and seconds, resulting in misunderstandings on the ground. To add to the confusion, the same piece of debris sometimes appeared on multiple databases identified with different key numbers. [18] Wetherbee noted in an email to Jonathan Ward that in the crew search operations, each error was corrected expeditiously based on the extensive experience and professionalism of FBI special agent Mike Sutton. Using Sutton’s detailed and extensive system for logging the reported data, the crew remains leadership team in the Lufkin command center was able to rectify all errors.

It was impossible for us to get consistent answers to basic questions, such as which items had been recovered and where, where they were being stored, whether the debris had been identified, and when it would be shipped to the processing site at Barksdale. It was particularly important for NASA to get firm answers on where items from the crew module were being recovered, so that teams searching for the crew remains could be more precisely deployed.

Database management and reconciliation was quickly becoming a nightmare. With tens of thousands of pieces of debris being found, we could soon lose control of the situation.

In response, FEMA created and fielded a new Shuttle Interagency Debris Database using the Geographical Information System, which could help generate search maps. The collection centers initially emailed back to Lufkin a spreadsheet at the end of each day. Later, a NASA team from Houston created a web-based method to simplify data input and to help document and validate the data. But while this effort was underway, the EPA continued to collect debris in the field and enter the information into its own database. [19] ESRI, “Recovery Enhanced with GIS.” The GIS and the EPA databases tracked different information. FEMA’s new Shuttle Interagency Debris Database (SIDD) tracked all reports. EPA was only tracking the items that had actually been recovered. FEMA and EPA resolved the situation by agreeing that reports would first be entered into SIDD. Once it was clear that the report was for a new item rather than for one that had already been entered, the information would be sent to EPA’s database. After EPA had investigated the sighting and collected an item, the information then went back to SIDD. The incident commanders could therefore use the data in SIDD to target search operations.

This challenge was resolved by working out how to pass information back and forth between FEMA’s and the EPA’s databases. An interagency team spent weeks working through the tens of thousands of records already entered to identify duplicate records and enter all the information into the new format. This was critical for targeting searches later in the recovery operation.