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

Hail Columbia . [34] Robert Crippen, remarks at the KSC Columbia Memorial Service, February 7, 2003, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubYGeGU8jOo .

Immediately after the service, Sean O’Keefe and Bill Readdy went to the hangar at the south end of the runway. Shuttle Test Director Steve Altemus, who was setting up the hangar and who would manage the daily activities of the reconstruction effort, showed them the facility and walked them through how NASA would examine and reconstruct Columbia ’s debris.

Search teams continued to explore areas in Toledo Bend Reservoir where debris might be underwater. They used side-scan sonar and aerial overflights to identify several sites for further exploration. [35] FEMA, “FEMA Updates Search, Find, and Secure Activities for Columbia Investigation,” news release 3171-13, February 7, 2003. Aerial spotters occasionally thought they saw things below the surface. Whatever the objects were, they were gone by the time the search teams reached the area. [36] Pat Oden email, February 8, 2003.

At five o’clock that day, the amnesty period for citizens to turn in space shuttle debris in their possession expired. About twenty people had taken advantage of the amnesty to return material to NASA. Anyone subsequently found with illegally removed shuttle material would be subject to prosecution.

Late in the afternoon, Pat Adkins investigated a call from someone who thought that they had located part of Columbia ’s side hatch. He met with Department of Corrections guards who were mounted on horseback. They had been searching the Indian Mounds Wilderness Area, near the reported locations of a car-sized object that crashed into Toledo Bend Reservoir and another large object that landed somewhere in the woods at the same time. The ground was muddy and waterlogged, and the area was thick with downed trees.

Adkins put on his backpack and said, “Let’s get started.”

The guards looked at him and said, “You don’t understand. It’s a mile and a half back in the woods. You’ll never make it in and out before dark. You’re gonna have to ride.”

Adkins was uncomfortable about riding horseback. The guards gave Adkins the gentlest horse they had—George, a gelding, more than twenty years old. Adkins mounted the horse and followed the guards back into the woods. George was apparently tired after a long day’s work. He stopped several times along the way to suck up muddy water from puddles. Then, realizing he had fallen behind the other horses, he would trot to catch up. Adkins had absolutely no control over him.

They came to a ravine, which the first three men jumped over on their horses. However, they cautioned Adkins, “You might want to get off of him.” It was too late. Adkins held on to the front and back of the saddle and managed to stay on when George jumped the ravine. The guards laughed uproariously. One of them said, “That was worth the trip today!”

They found the object, and Adkins dismounted to examine it. After he knocked some of the mud off of it, he realized that it was not part of the hatch after all—just part of the propulsion system. However, as he stared at it, he began to imagine it as a hatch and porthole. His thoughts turned toward Columbia ’s astronauts inside the crew compartment, and he broke down in tears.

After collecting his emotions, Adkins bagged the item and put it in his backpack. He rode George back to the road. Every time George trotted to catch up with the other horses, the heavy metal object in Adkins’s backpack flopped up and hit him in the back of the head.

On Saturday, February 8, NASA’s teams in Barksdale, Lufkin, and the Carswell Naval Air Station briefly stood down to attend memorial services for Columbia ’s crew.

Former astronaut Jim Halsell led the service at Barksdale. He was the Shuttle Program manager at KSC, and he had asked me early on what he could do to help. I requested that he arrange the memorial service for his fallen comrades, which he did with dignity and strength. Retired Admiral William Pickavance, now USA’s deputy director of Florida operations, brought with him from KSC the banner that decorated the launchpad gate before Columbia ’s final flight. Having the GO COLUMBIA! banner hanging on the wall in Barksdale was both a painful and poignant reminder for the workers who had cared for her at KSC and who now had to sift through her debris. [37] Interview with Larry Ostarly.

From Houston, Ron Dittemore issued orders for the investigation teams to take Sunday off and rest. We had endured a week filled with long days of emotionally and physically demanding work. Even though we were all exhausted and conditions were miserable, no one wanted to stand down. In Carswell, at the northwestern end of the search area, freezing temperatures, ice, and snow tormented people who were bone tired from having searched fourteen hours per day for the past seven days. And yet, the search teams still went out after the memorial service—just as they had every day for the past week—to look for and recover more debris from the shuttle. [38] Interview with Scott Thurston.

Meanwhile, imagery analysis of Columbia in flight was yielding tantalizing results. NASA was able to piece together nearly continuous video coverage of Columbia in flight from the coast of California until the shuttle broke up over Dallas, thanks to dozens of amateur videographers who provided their cameras and tapes to NASA. Almost from the moment the ship was visible over California, her plasma trail unexpectedly brightened on occasion—apparently as tiles peeled off from the ship. NASA was evaluating the remote possibility Columbia had collided with some sort of debris or a micrometeorite as it crossed California. [39] “NASA Studies Possibility of Space Junk Role,” Florida Today , February 6, 2003, 2S. We analyzed the weather radar along Columbia ’s flight path as she flew across the United States and determined that there was no correlation between the “debris shedding” events and the local weather.

Observers at the Starfire Optical Range at Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico, had obtained a puzzling image as Columbia flew past, about three minutes before the shuttle disintegrated. This disturbing photo showed apparent irregularities in the flow across the leading edge of Columbia ’s left wing and something—possibly debris or vaporized metal—trailing out behind the left wing.

The pilot of an Apache helicopter, who was returning to Fort Hood from a night training mission when Columbia broke up, recorded a particularly important video. Seeing unusual streaks in the sky ahead of him, the pilot trained his targeting cameras on the smoke trails. Realizing later that he had witnessed Columbia ’s disintegration, he personally drove the tape to Barksdale and played it for Dave Whittle and our leadership team. The tape itself was classified, but he allowed us to record portions of the video showing the breakup. With the detailed knowledge of the helicopter’s position at the time of the accident and the altitude and azimuth data on the video, we gained crucial information about the shuttle’s trajectory when it broke up, the dynamics of the disintegration, and the path of some of the major components after the shuttle came apart.

In another stunning development, we learned the “Flight Day 2” object detected by the Air Force was real . Something that was about the size of a laptop computer—with the radar characteristics of a piece of reinforced carbon-carbon—had drifted away from the shuttle on the second day of the mission. It added to the mystery of what had happened to Columbia . [40] Mike Leinbach believes that perhaps the foam strike on the wing displaced an RCC panel on Columbia ’s wing by compromising its support structure and pushing it back into the cavity behind the leading edge. From there, it could have eventually broken off due to thermal expansion and contraction as the shuttle moved back and forth between orbital day and night. He personally still finds this theory more plausible than the idea that the foam actually punched a hole through an RCC panel.