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

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Michael Leinbach Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew
  • Название:
    Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew
  • Автор:
  • Издательство:
    Arcade Publishing
  • Жанр:
  • Год:
    2018
  • Город:
    New York
  • Язык:
    Английский
  • ISBN:
    978-1-628-72851-4
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Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Timed to release for the 15th Anniversary of the Columbia space shuttle disaster, this is the epic true story of one of the most dramatic, unforgettable adventures of our time. On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation’s eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach, Launch Director of the space shuttle program at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history. This comprehensive account is told in four parts: • Parallel Confusion • Courage, Compassion, and Commitment • Picking Up the Pieces • A Bittersweet Victory For the first time, here is the definitive inside story of the Columbia disaster and recovery and the inspiring message it ultimately holds. In the aftermath of tragedy, people and communities came together to help bring home the remains of the crew and nearly 40 percent of shuttle, an effort that was instrumental in piecing together what happened so the shuttle program could return to flight and complete the International Space Station. Bringing Columbia Home shares the deeply personal stories that emerged as NASA employees looked for lost colleagues and searchers overcame immense physical, logistical, and emotional challenges and worked together to accomplish the impossible. Featuring a foreword and epilogue by astronauts Robert Crippen and Eileen Collins, and dedicated to the astronauts and recovery search persons who lost their lives, this is an incredible, compelling narrative about the best of humanity in the darkest of times and about how a failure at the pinnacle of human achievement became a story of cooperation and hope.

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Columbia rolled out to launchpad 39A on Monday, December 9. She had not even left on her mission, but engineers were already discussing plans for how to refit her with a new air lock once she returned. They needed her to fly one support mission to the International Space Station (ISS) if NASA was going to meet the Congressionally committed assembly schedule.[7]

Once Columbia was at the launchpad, the flight crew returned for a training session the week of December 16, which culminated in the terminal count demonstration test (TCDT). I greeted the crew with my traditional, “Welcome to TCDT Week!” at the Shuttle Landing Facility runway after they flew in from Houston in their T-38 jets. This was often the first time I had the opportunity to meet the rookie astronauts on a crew. I wanted the astronauts to feel comfortable with me—the man responsible for their safety on launch day.

TCDT week was full of activities to help the astronauts practice for a launch and to familiarize them with the systems that would save their lives if anything went wrong. The crew donned the orange pressure suits they would wear for launch and landing. They practiced emergency evacuation from the shuttle, running across the swing arm on the launch tower to the slidewire baskets that would take them to the perimeter of the launchpad. There, they would enter an underground concrete bunker and await instructions from the control room. Positioned adjacent to the bunker was an M-113 armored personnel carrier for their use to escape the launchpad area. While they did not ride the slidewire baskets, each astronaut practiced driving the M-113.

The actual TCDT was a dry run of the final phases of countdown—without propellants in the tanks—with the crew aboard the shuttle and my launch team and me in the Firing Room at the Launch Control Center. The TCDT stopped at T minus five seconds in the countdown.

The crew then emerged from the vehicle, confident and ready to fly the mission. They posed on the launch tower’s highest access arm for a traditional photo with their shuttle in the background. Robert Hanley was at the pad, monitoring activities during the TCDT. He asked the KSC photographer to take a picture of him with the crew. That photo became one of Hanley’s most cherished keepsakes.

Traditions are an important morale builder in a program as long-lived as the shuttle. One TCDT-week tradition was for the Astronaut Office to host a dinner for the flight crew and some invited guests at the astronaut beach house, located on the shore a few miles south of the launchpad. It was an opportunity for the crew and about a dozen NASA and contractor managers from KSC to get to know one another and unwind a bit. Through the managers, the astronauts could pass along their thanks to all of the team members involved in checking out, preparing, and launching the shuttle.

NASA provided the food, which was always the same—barbecued smoked sausage and beef brisket, fried chicken, coleslaw, baked beans, potato salad with hard-boiled eggs, and bread and butter. A bowl of sliced jalapeño peppers was available for people who wanted to spice up their food. Dessert consisted of brownies. The crew personally provided the adult beverages; NASA couldn’t purchase those with government funds.

I found myself eating with Ilan Ramon. Seeing that he was mostly just picking at his food, I asked, “Are you all right? It doesn’t seem like you’re enjoying your meal.”

Ramon replied, “No, no, it’s very good. It’s not kosher… but it’s very good!”

Weather in the Houston area was stormy on Sunday, January 12, 2003, as Columbia’s crew prepared to fly from Houston to KSC. Rick Husband decided it would be safer and more comfortable for the crew to ride together in NASA’s Gulfstream G2 trainer airplane rather than flying out in four of their two-seat T-38 jets. Astronaut Jerry Ross flew out to KSC with Columbia’s crew. I met them at the Shuttle Landing Facility runway with my traditional greeting, “Welcome to Launch Week!”

One of my responsibilities was to give the crew a complete security briefing and review security procedures with them. The crew needed to feel absolutely confident about how we would keep them safe on launch day.

The space shuttle was a high-value and highly symbolic national asset, carefully protected by NASA and the US military. Sixteen months after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States was at war in Afghanistan, and we had an Israeli astronaut on the mission. STS-107 garnered the most stringent security ever implemented for a space shuttle launch.

Security at Kennedy was primarily aimed at protecting the public from NASA’s rockets, rather than the other way around. We established a three-mile “box” in the waters off KSC—an exclusion zone to keep aircraft and boats out of the launch path in case of an explosion early in a rocket’s flight. But now we also had to consider the very real possibility that the shuttle could be attacked.

If a plane or boat strayed into the restricted zone around KSC and the vehicle flight path during a countdown, we faced tough decisions. Was it a tourist who just wanted to take some photos up close? Was it a charter fishing boat that strayed off course and forgot to turn on its radio? Or was it someone trying to look innocent, only to then make a sudden hostile move? As the launch director, I had to decide in the moment whether to tell the crew to sit tight in the shuttle or direct them to make an emergency escape. Calling for the escape assured the safety of the crew but could damage the shuttle in the process, forcing a long turnaround before the next launch attempt.

To thwart potential terror attacks, we kept Columbia’s scheduled launch time a secret in the weeks leading up to the mission. We had even briefly considered a scheme dubbed Operation Yankee, which would have entailed a surprise liftoff one day in advance of a publicly announced launch date.

Finally, on Wednesday, January 15, we announced that “T-zero” for Columbia’s launch would be at 10:39 Eastern Time the next morning.

The highly publicized mission drew large crowds to the KSC area. NASA’s public affairs office requested that more spectators than usual be allowed on site. KSC security went into round-the-clock operations. VIPs and other spectators parked at the KSC Visitor Complex and boarded buses to the viewing stands. Crowd control and protecting the public were the order of the day. In case of a launch emergency, security would have to get all spectators onto buses as quickly as possible for their own safety.

As launch director, I usually pulled a twelve-hour shift on launch day. Officially, I had to be on duty as the shuttle’s external tank was loaded with propellants. That operation began at T minus six hours in the countdown, which was actually about nine hours before launch because of the built-in hold periods in the countdown. But there was always a weather briefing an hour before propellant loading could begin. The launch team needed to consider not only the weather forecast at KSC at the scheduled time of liftoff, but also the weather at potential trans-Atlantic abort landing sites in Europe and Africa. There was no use spending the time and resources to load the shuttle’s tanks if it appeared that weather restrictions would be violated at launch time. These weather forecasts were part of a larger meeting meant to ensure that everything was ready for fueling to begin and for the mission to fly. It made for a very long day.

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