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

Greg Cohrs and the FBI’s Terry Lane were riding around to check on the progress of the day’s searches in Sabine and San Augustine Counties. At the Magnolia Church staging area in San Augustine County, they looked in the back of a pickup truck holding material collected by the Florida crews. Cohrs immediately recognized what appeared to be an important piece of equipment, wrapped in a plastic bag. He thought it might be the shuttle’s Orbiter Experiments (OEX) recorder, but he was not certain. He asked the group supervisor what he thought it was, hoping the supervisor would voice the same opinion. However, the box looked a little different from the photograph that NASA had used to alert searchers, and neither the group supervisor nor his on-site NASA counterparts seemed overly excited about it.

Convinced that NASA managers would want to see the component immediately—whatever it was—Cohrs and Lane took possession of the box and drove it directly to the collection center in Hemphill.

At the collection center, Cohrs and Lane watched as the staff removed the box from its bag and cleaned it off. Considering the box had survived hypersonic reentry from two hundred thousand feet in altitude and had been exposed to the elements for seven weeks, it appeared to be in remarkably good shape. Even its government property sticker was still intact. Cohrs noticed only a few damaged places, such as where connectors had broken off of the back of the case.

Greg Breznik, the NASA coordinator at the site, looked at the box and phoned Dave Whittle at Lufkin. He told Whittle the location and the number on the side of the box. Whittle said, “I want it on my desk!”

A few seconds later, Breznik told everyone, “Step away from the box! It’s the OEX recorder!” With that confirmation, Cohrs and Lane returned to San Augustine to tell the Florida search crews the good news about what they had found that day. [35] Greg Cohrs emails to Jonathan Ward.

Upon hearing the news from Cohrs, Willoughby’s crew agreed among themselves not to reveal the name of the person who found it. They wanted to remember the important moment as an accomplishment shared by the entire crew. [36] Interview with Jeremy Willoughby; Greg Cohrs emails to Jonathan Ward. While several other searchers from the Western United States claim to have discovered the OEX box, Cohrs’s work plans from the day confirm that two Florida fire crews—Florida 3 and Florida 4—were working in the area the day the box was discovered. They found the box within an area that had previously been searched by the special team searching for a classified communications box on February 7. Cohrs did not realize this until he reviewed his notes several months later. [37] Greg Cohrs email to Jonathan Ward.

NASA immediately drove the box to the Lufkin search headquarters. KSC’s Jeff Angermeier was among the people there to witness the box’s initial inspection. Many of the other avionics boxes from Columbia were burned, melted, or smashed almost beyond recognition. In contrast, the OEX recorder was almost pristine, except for the missing front panel and the torn connector holes in the back. There was virtually no evidence of heat damage. The amazing condition of such a critical item was another of the miraculous events surrounding the Columbia accident.

That evening, seven thousand miles away, Operation Iraqi Freedom began with the “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad. MSNBC’s war coverage was briefly interrupted by news that NASA had recovered “ Columbia ’s black box” in the Hemphill area.

NASA shipped the OEX recorder to Imation Corporation on March 21 to inspect and clean the recorded tape inside the unit. Imation found that the tape had broken between the supply and take-up reels. However, the length of tape on the take-up reel implied that the recorder had started up as planned about fifteen minutes before Columbia began reentering the atmosphere. The tape was too damaged for any data to be retrieved at the point where the tape broke, which might have happened in the violence of the shuttle’s disintegration. With luck, however, the recorded data might be complete up to the moment where the shuttle came apart and lost electrical power.

Imation shipped the box to KSC on March 25, where the tape was duplicated. The box and copies of the tape then went to JSC for analysis by the data team. [38] William Harwood, “Recovered Data Tape in Relatively Good Condition,” article for CBS News Space Place , reprinted in Spaceflight Now , March 24, 2003, www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030324tape/ .

The last few seconds of telemetry received in Mission Control on February 1 indicated Columbia ’s crew likely knew their ship was in trouble in the final half minute before it broke apart. The data showed that Columbia ’s steering thrusters were firing to compensate for drag on the left wing, the ship was rolling, and the triply-redundant hydraulic system was losing pressure. All of those conditions would have set off alarms inside the cockpit. If the OEX recorder’s tape was readable, it would enable Houston’s data team to determine the condition of hundreds of the orbiter’s other systems throughout reentry, perhaps up until the moment the ship finally came apart.

The OEX recorder would not be able to tell NASA the story of what was happening to the parts of Columbia lacking instrumentation, though, such as the condition of the thermal protection system’s tiles and wing leading edge panels. And Kennedy’s debris team was still missing much of the physical evidence of what happened to the ship.

Coincident with the recovery of the OEX recorder, search operations reached the halfway mark on March 19, with 257,000 acres searched to date. More than 43,000 pounds of shuttle material had been recovered, representing 20 percent of the shuttle’s weight. [39] Texas Forest Service, “Space Shuttle Columbia Recovery Efforts,” internal memo, March 19, 2003. By March 24, more than 10,270 firefighters and their support staff had worked the search operation. [40] Texas Forest Service, “Columbia Disaster Response 2003: NWCG Resources Mobilized Through Texas Interagency Coordination Center,” March 24, 2003.

Solid progress was being made. And yet, the painstaking search of the debris field needed to continue for at least another month, until every square foot of the search corridor had been covered.

The wildland fire crews proved to be remarkably efficient at recovering Columbia ’s debris, working diligently and with great discipline. What may have started as a means for the crews to earn much-needed money in the off-season quickly turned into a profoundly meaningful experience. Working alongside the fire crews was also a life-changing experience for the NASA personnel, as they met men and women whose backgrounds were unlike any they had ever known.

Astronaut John Herrington was thrilled to work with the Native Americans who staffed many of the fire crews, particularly those from the Western United States. As an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation and the first Native American to fly in space, he felt a deep connection with these men and women.

Their attitude toward their search-and-recovery assignments fascinated him, particularly how each man or woman handled the pieces of debris they found during the searches. “These really rough, hard-core, no-nonsense, work-hard people would treat every piece they found with such reverence,” he said. “It wasn’t an inanimate object to them. Each item was very alive, very real. They understand that everything around us is a living, breathing being that we cooperate with. It made me appreciate my heritage, what these people sacrifice, and how special this experience was to them.”