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

The immediately recognizable piece of the shuttle evoked strong reactions in the NASA personnel. John Grunsfeld saw it on a visit to the Hemphill area. “He was obviously sobered by being in the presence of the item,” Greg Cohrs said. “Then he told me that he had been on the last flight of Columbia. ” [29] Cohrs “Notes,” 16.

On February 21, NASA’s Debbie Awtonomow came from KSC to manage Hemphill’s collection center. Pat Adkins and Gerry Schumann familiarized her with the area and then offered to show her the latest recovered items. Adkins raised the door at the back of the trailer. Awtonomow looked in and immediately saw the landing gear. The sight of the piece of the once-proud shuttle, now horribly wrecked and embedded with grass and mud, proved too much for her. She walked over to the ramp beside the truck and vomited. She broke into tears and cried for nearly an hour.

“In the back of your mind,” she later recalled, “you tell yourself that it’s just a dream, that this is not really happening. But to see this the first thing—reality hit real quick. It was like someone took a two-by-four and smacked me upside the head.”

Schumann and Adkins sat with her and comforted her. Adkins told her, “It’s not going to get any better. It’s good just to get it out of the way now. I understand.”

When she had finished crying, Schumann consoled her, “We all went through it. We all had our time that we had to break down and get it out of us, and then go on and do the job. Are you ready to go to work now?”

The long hours, tough physical conditions, and the emotional challenges of the work took their toll on our NASA workforce and the local officials. People burned out quickly. Personnel usually stayed on site for several weeks and then went home to rest and recharge. On average, between forty and fifty people rotated in and out of the area from KSC every week. [30] “KSC Managers Visit East Texas Recovery Team,” Spaceport News (Kennedy Space Center, FL), March 21, 2003, 1.

When Stephanie Stilson took over from Tom Hoffman at the Nacogdoches hangar in late February, she could tell at the moment she arrived that “Tom was definitely ready to go. You’re working sixteen-plus hours per day, seven days a week. You can’t do that for long periods of time and be as effective as you need to be.”

The collection centers moved into high gear as crews retrieved the debris that was tagged but not picked up in the first two weeks following the accident. By February 18, over four thousand pieces of debris had already been sent to KSC, and ten thousand more items were on their way to Barksdale from the collection centers. By March 4, the number of pieces of debris found had more than doubled. The combined ground and air searches were gathering a great deal of material that could prove important to the investigation. [31] “Primary Search for Columbia Material Passes Halfway Mark,” news release H03-117, March 25, 2003.

Each ground search team usually located and retrieved between two and fifty pounds of debris every day. [32] Interview with René Arriëns. Landowners were also still uncovering material on their properties. On February 13, a man plowing his field in Littlefield, Texas, north of Lubbock, found a small piece of tile. The “Littlefield Tile” turned out to be the westernmost piece of Columbia recovered—nearly three hundred miles farther west than any other item of debris—despite searches in every state between Texas and the Pacific Ocean. Columbia shed this piece of tile from its left wing about one minute before the vehicle completely disintegrated.

At the other end of the debris field, one of the space shuttle main engine turbopumps was pulled out of the mud at Fort Polk, Louisiana, on February 15. Another was found on March 30 and retrieved on April 1. Still traveling supersonically when they impacted the ground after the accident, the heavy pieces of machinery buried themselves fourteen feet deep. These dense engine components flew farther than any debris after the shuttle broke up, and their trajectory was unaffected by winds aloft. The path from the point where the shuttle broke up near Palestine to where the powerheads impacted near Fort Polk defined the initial centerline of the debris search effort.

In Sabine County, René Arriëns and Debbie Awtonomow responded one day to a report of a cassette tape stuck in the upper branches of a tree. Awtonomow first thought someone had thrown it from a passing car. Then it struck her: How could it have ended up in the top of a tree unless it fell from the sky? They retrieved the case and as much of the tape as they could. The case was scorched, but some of the tape appeared to be intact. It was a personal music cassette from one of Columbia ’s crew.

Some of the experiments from Columbia ’s Spacehab module survived reentry and made it to the ground. Pat Adkins responded to a call from a woman who found bags with aluminum cylinders hanging in the trees at a far corner of her property. On another occasion, Adkins wondered aloud to an EPA colleague whether any of the fish eggs on an experiment in the Spacehab module survived the accident. The EPA man blanched and said, “Oh my God, don’t tell me that! I can just imagine a fish species that isn’t native to Texas coming in and taking over.”

Back at the collection centers in the evening, NASA personnel sorted through the material collected during the day’s search. The initial triage consisted of segregating things into “definitely shuttle material” and “definitely not shuttle material” boxes. One piece of rusted steel in Sabine County appeared to be from a pickup truck. The man who first examined it tossed it in the “definitely not” box, because he did not believe any steel was on the shuttle. However, Arriëns knew the shuttle’s landing gear strut was made mostly of steel, and he recognized the mechanism right away. It turned out to be a critical find—one of the first pieces of the shuttle to be exposed to plasma during reentry. [33] Gerry Schumann said that Pat Adkins was renowned for his ability to identify just about any piece of debris. The collection team occasionally amused themselves by tossing random pieces of metal, such as tractor parts, into the box. Adkins would pick them up, turn them over once in his hand, and ask, “Okay, who’s the wiseass?”

Another piece that came in was a shard of something that looked like polished metal. No one could figure out what it was. Then the person holding it accidentally dropped it onto the pavement, and it broke. It was a fragment of glass coated on all sides with melted aluminum. Pieces with this kind of metal deposition would be crucial in reconstructing the sequence of events in Columbia ’s breakup. [34] Interview with René Arriëns.

Searchers near Powell, Texas, found one tile with puzzling orange deposits in jagged grooves on the surface of the tile. The markings did not appear to be reentry damage, but it was unclear whether the orange deposits were from foam that came off the shuttle’s external tank. Whatever the cause, it supported the hypothesis that something collided with the shuttle in flight, although the idea of a collision during reentry was later debunked.

NASA’s “fault tree” had been pruned by early March to the extent that there were now only ten different failure scenarios that might explain how heat had entered Columbia ’s left wing. The leading edge of the left wing was the primary focus, but engineers still could not rule out a burn-through from the bottom of the wing. More hard evidence was needed.

On March 19, firefighter Jeremy Willoughby was searching with the “Florida 3” fire crew, one of several crews from Florida deployed to an area in San Augustine County, Texas, where material from the shuttle’s crew module came down. Willoughby’s crew was walking that morning through a pine stand on a gradual slope, when someone saw a metal box on the ground next to a small crater, where it had impacted and bounced. “It was just laying there like, ‘Here I am!’” said Willoughby. The box was wrapped up and placed into the back of a pickup truck along with other items the crews found that morning.