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

Material arriving at Barksdale from Texas was being prepared for imminent shipment to Kennedy. There were already 561 pieces of debris in Barksdale’s hangar, with many more on the way soon. Of the twelve thousand pieces of debris collected in the field so far, none provided obvious evidence of why the shuttle broke up. [41] “NASA: Search for Crucial Pieces Coming Up Short,” Florida Today , February 6, 2003, 4S. The reconstruction team would have to perform more exacting analyses to see what clues the debris could provide.

At the end of the first week of operations, the debris search area included sixty-one Texas counties, covering nearly thirty-three thousand square miles, and affecting more than seven million residents. NASA had three search teams at work in California, one in Arizona, and one in New Mexico. [42] FEMA, “FEMA Updates Search, Find, and Secure Activities for Columbia Investigation,” news release 3171-14, February 8, 2003. We had dubious reports of debris being found in twenty-six other states and Jamaica, Canada, and Grand Bahama. They seemed implausible, but they still needed to be investigated. [43] Shafer and LeConey. “Legal Issues,” 58–9. Phone calls and digital pictures emailed to the MIT closed most of these reports, as technicians were able to see that the material was clearly not related to the shuttle. Material might be in some of the reservoirs in Texas. The US Navy’s Sea Systems Command volunteered their services for search operations in the major bodies of water along Columbia ’s flight path. [44] US Navy, Salvage Report , 1–8.

Miraculously, no injuries had been reported from the shuttle’s breakup. About 130 people had gone to hospitals in the impact areas because of concerns about health issues. But nobody was injured by the debris, and no one had been admitted to the hospital for treatment. Only minor property damage to a few structures was reported. Had the shuttle broken up only a minute or two earlier, its debris would have rained down over Dallas, and the situation might have been very different. [45] FEMA, “No Injuries Confirmed Because of Fallen Shuttle Materials; Citizens Urged to Avoid Contact With Unfamiliar Objects,” news release 3171-15, February 8, 2003.

Citizens reported large pieces of debris in three ponds in Palestine on Sunday. NASA promised that divers would be sent to investigate as soon as the human remains operations were complete.

Local wireless companies had by now set up temporary cell phone towers at each of the debris collection centers. For the first time, the debris teams had reliable cell phone coverage—at least near the storage areas. United Space Alliance began issuing cell phones to everyone deployed to Texas for the recovery. This was an unusual practice in 2003, when companies typically only provided cell phones to senior executives. [46] Interview with Ed Mango.

FEMA’s Scott Wells publicly thanked volunteer agencies that had been providing coffee, meals, snacks, and morale-sustaining support that warmed the spirits of personnel in the field and recovery offices. Recognizing the tremendous progress made during the first week to bring the human remains and debris recovery operations under control, FEMA’s Deputy Director, Michael Brown, acknowledged interagency cooperation as the key to success of the recovery efforts to date. [47] FEMA, “FEMA Responds to Offers of Donated Goods and Services for Columbia Emergency,” news release 3171-16, February 9, 2003.

One of the crew remains search teams had found a cockpit window frame from Columbia deep in the Sabine County National Forest on Saturday, but they were unable to retrieve the heavy item. Gerry Schumann took the six members of his debris response team out to the woods to retrieve the frame on Sunday. After parking on the main road as close as they could get to the object’s GPS coordinates, his team had to trudge more than a mile into the woods to find the piece. The team spent nearly the entire day carrying the metal frame out of the forest—taking turns lifting it by its corners, setting it down when people got tired, and maneuvering it around briar patches. Eventually, the team wrestled it back to their truck.

Schumann was elated that his team successfully retrieved the item after such an ordeal. After delivering the window to the Hemphill collection center, he bragged about the accomplishment.

Don Eddings, Marsha Cooper, and several other US Forest Service people on hand at the command post seemed unimpressed. Eddings asked, “Was that you guys that brought that window in?”

Schumann said, “Yes! Great find. It took us all day to get that thing out.”

Eddings said, “All you smart-asses had to do was ask us. There’s a fire road near there. We could have drove you guys within fifty yards of it.”

Schumann initially felt both angry and deflated, like he had been made to look foolish and that he had wasted so much effort. When he calmed down, he realized this was a wake-up call. The NASA staff’s vast technical expertise was not always useful here. It was no substitute for the on-the-ground knowledge that the local residents had of their county, its forests, and its back roads. On such matters, he was completely ignorant.

There was no shame in asking for help.

From that time forward, Schumann did not hesitate to ask the US Forest Service personnel for assistance whenever he needed to get to a location deep in the woods. He and Eddings formed a fast friendship that persists to this day. [48] Interviews with Gerry Schumann, Don Eddings, Marsha Cooper.

The data team from Johnson and our debris team from Kennedy continued to clarify our roles and responsibilities regarding material recovered in the field. JSC agreed that after they had checked recording devices to see if they contained any data, the items would be sent onward to Kennedy for physical analysis. Crew photos and other audiovisual records would be considered unrelated to the reconstruction, and sent to the Flight Crew Operations directorate in Houston. Any recovered personal items, such as jewelry, were to be deposited with the FBI for secure storage, sent directly to the reconstruction hangar at Kennedy for processing, and then returned expeditiously to the crew’s families. Personal flight equipment (seats, buckles, pieces of suits, and so forth) were to go directly to KSC for processing, but would be retained by NASA for the investigation.

On February 10, we drafted a memo of understanding such that the Columbia Accident Investigation Board had to concur before any piece of Columbia was subjected to testing, particularly destructive testing. This ensured evidence was preserved for the accident investigation—which, Administrator O’Keefe and Admiral Gehman told the press, they expected to complete in about sixty days.

Every collection center had already sent—or was preparing to send—shipments of recovered material to Barksdale. One truck from Palestine carried 276 items. Another truck was en route from Nacogdoches with ninety-three items. More than eleven hundred were still in the hangar there, awaiting transport. A truck from San Augustine was bearing forty boxes of material, which included a hydrazine tank that had not been decontaminated, a laptop disk drive, the faceplate from one of the shuttle’s computers, a seat frame, one of the window frames, and a large piece of an external tank disconnect door. A truck was scheduled to leave Hemphill on Tuesday with more than two hundred items, including the frames to the six forward cockpit windows and a maneuvering thruster. Seventy-six packages of material, with nearly three hundred fifty items, were on their way from Jasper. One of these items was cockpit control panel A12, which came from the aft flight deck.