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

Although the Jasper collection center was full, very little additional material was being recovered nearby. We directed the Jasper site be closed once the last items in storage there were shipped to Barksdale.

The debris team in Lufkin brainstormed ways to locate debris from Columbia ’s left wing in the area around Carswell, near the western end of the debris field, since most of the ground search forces were committed to looking for Columbia ’s crew in Hemphill and San Augustine. Blimps, hang gliders, and powered parachutes were among the options discussed. The Civil Air Patrol had already made nine possible sightings from the air.

Teams from Alliant Aviation flew power-chutes (basically go-karts suspended from parachutes) over the debris field. On February 10, one group located a large piece of one of Columbia ’s main landing gear doors on the ground. They landed nearby and directed a ground search crew to the location near Nacogdoches.

That night, they reported the find to Jeff Williams at the Forest Resources Institute, who was attempting to use satellite imagery to assist in the search-and-recovery effort. Williams discovered that he was able to see the gear door through the treetops on a recent classified IKONOS satellite image of the area. Williams was subsequently able to use this knowledge and his image interpretation skills to guide searchers to particular areas, based on what appeared to be broken tree crowns and branches that he could discern in the satellite images. [49] Jeff Williams, interviewed by Connie Hodges.

Water search crews from the coast guard, FBI, and local police forces were still at work in Toledo Bend Reservoir and the Sam Rayburn Reservoir. [50] Greg Cohrs added in an email to Jonathan Ward, “Shortly after the disaster, heavy rains repeatedly occurred, flooding the Attoyac River and Ayish Bayou, and all of the associated tributaries and watershed of Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend Reservoirs. This flooding undoubtedly washed some debris away and covered other debris with water, probably hiding the items for a long time, if not forever.” Following up on an eyewitness report, an FBI dive team retrieved one of the shuttle’s landing gear brake assemblies from the water on the Louisiana shore of Toledo Bend. [51] US Navy, Salvage Report , 3–2. Astronauts had been guiding the dive teams, directing the search assets, and investigating reported sightings. The astronauts realized they were out of their element in managing such a huge effort and needed expert help to run the water search operation. After touring the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the previous day, the navy formally offered to lead the water search efforts. [52] US Navy, Salvage Report , 1–8.

Most of the possible debris sightings in California, Nevada, and Arizona had been investigated and closed out. No debris had yet been found west of Texas, even though amateur videos clearly showed as many as a dozen instances of pieces coming off from the shuttle between the California coastline and when it broke up near Dallas. [53] William Harwood, “NASA Works to Eliminate Failure Scenarios,” story written for CBS News Space Place , reprinted in Spaceflight Now , March 9, 2003, www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030308scenarios/ .

Questions began to arise on the appropriate level of effort to be spent recovering debris. Once the critical pieces of wreckage had been collected—and many still remained somewhere out there—how much more of Columbia needed to be recovered?

One of our priority pieces from Columbia ’s underside had arrived at Barksdale—the “sawtooth doubler.” This two-foot by two-foot plate—roughly in the shape of the orbiter itself—had been bonded underneath the orbiter and then covered with tiles. Because the shuttle’s skin was uneven where the doubler was mounted, the tiles covering that part had to be thinner than the surrounding tiles so that the exterior surface of the tiles was smooth. Thinner tiles might not stand up well to the heat of reentry, so it was important to assess the condition of this piece. It was one of the key items in the fault tree of possible failure modes.

Technicians and engineers at Barksdale saw the doubler was badly scorched and melted around the edges. Entirely by coincidence, one of the people processing the piece was the man who had installed it on Columbia in the first place.

It devastated him. Sobbing uncontrollably, this member of our KSC team held the piece in his hands and showed it to me. He was convinced that he was responsible for the loss of Columbia and its crew. Frank Travassos, a main propulsion system expert from KSC, and I took him outside. We tried to console him and reassure him that the accident was not his fault.

The next day, February 11, another key item on the accident fault tree had been recovered—a pyrotechnic device from the left landing gear. The pyro had fired, which would have occurred as part of the normal sequence to lower the landing gear. What we didn’t know was whether the pyro had fired before the orbiter broke up or afterward. One of the last signals received from Columbia indicated that the left landing gear was down and locked. We were almost positive that this was a spurious reading because of heat damage to wiring inside the left wing, but we needed to examine this physical evidence as confirmation.

Meanwhile, Ralph Roe from the Orbiter Project Office was already thinking about ways to test the stiffness of the wing’s leading edge reinforced carbon-carbon panels, another possible point of failure. He formed a team to investigate what kinds of changes to Columbia ’s exterior surfaces could create the subtle drag that appeared to be causing some unusual movement of the ship’s control surfaces before the orbiter broke up. Data showed Columbia ’s steering thrusters were firing continuously—apparently trying to counteract drag on the left wing—just before the orbiter broke up. Roe was also interested in determining what kind of environmental changes could cause a breach of the seal on the left landing gear door.

My boss at KSC suggested Ed Mango be formally freed up from reporting to Barksdale so that he could concentrate on his work in the field. In effect, this was already happening. Mango had quickly become a key member of the leadership team at Lufkin, and I easily agreed.

In another management move that day, I learned I was going home to KSC in the next few days. Shuttle Program manager Ron Dittemore, at Barksdale with Linda Ham for a tour of the facility, asked me to return to KSC as soon as possible to head up the reconstruction effort. I was excited to be able to take on a new challenge. Being at the center of the action and solving problems energized me. Barksdale was definitely on the periphery now, and things there had become relatively routine. KSC’s shuttle ground operations manager Dean Schaaf would be taking over for me. I knew I would be leaving things in good hands.

Later that day, I walked by the hangar where workers were carefully crating the shuttle material collected so far. They loaded the boxes onto two tractor trailers for transport to Kennedy Space Center. I watched the trucks pull away.

As I gazed at the wooden crates, a profoundly sad thought suddenly struck me: Columbia is going home in a coffin .

It seemed such a strange coincidence that the first pieces of Columbia herself would start going home to Kennedy Space Center on the same day that the last of Columbia ’s crew members also left Barksdale for their eventual return home.