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

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board wanted to maintain an on-site presence at the reconstruction hangar. I worked with them to determine where their offices would be located and how they would interact with the debris and the workers at the hangar. The CAIB set up in office trailers parked outside the hangar. This enabled them to observe what was going on, provided them private workspaces, and kept the Board from distracting our engineers and analysts who were trying to do their own work. This was not done to protect the information—it was to protect our people from having too many cooks in the kitchen.

We had an interesting relationship. If the CAIB wanted something, we were obligated to give it to them—but they could not direct our team. They could make requests, and we would fulfill the requests. The process seemed slow to them, but we did not drag our feet. We were doing it at the pace we were used to at KSC, which was meant to be methodical.

Greg Kovacs, a medical doctor and professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, came in toward the end of February as an advisor to the CAIB. He spent almost all of his time in the hangar with us, and he became a good friend and de facto member of our team. He jokingly observed that the “NASA approach to things is to put 50,000 people in a line and move forward an inch at a time.”

It did seem painstaking and slow sometimes, but we were following a basic tenet of the NTSB’s investigation procedures—to avoid speculating about the cause of an accident for as long as possible. The NTSB’s long experience proved that someone whose mind is latched onto a given theory will pursue that line of investigation and disregard evidence that points to other possibilities. That could lead to dead ends and wasted time. In the long run, the NTSB said, keeping an open mind as long as possible would actually speed up the investigation.

We learned and recited the NTSB mantra: “Keep an open mind. Let the debris tell the story. Collect the debris, and the debris will tell you what happened.”

In the end, the investigation concentrated on the problem areas identified in the fault tree. We knew the problem did not start on the right wing, so we didn’t spend a lot of time in detailed examination of the right wing. We knew where we had to concentrate our efforts, but being able to compare Columbia ’s right wing to its left wing was invaluable throughout the process.

The NTSB was initially concerned that our workers might be overwhelmed in trying to deal with the quantity of wreckage arriving from the field. However, this turned out not to be an issue. Because Steve Altemus set up and staffed the hangar and its receiving processes so quickly after the accident, the facility and its personnel were ready to go as soon as the first two truckloads of debris left Barksdale on February 12 and arrived at KSC on February 13.

Barksdale dispatched a shipment to us whenever enough material filled a flatbed or an enclosed eighteen-wheeler. In the first several weeks, shipments arrived at KSC every other day. Just one month after the arrival of the first truckloads of material from Barksdale, the hangar already contained 33,798 pieces of debris, totaling 43,200 pounds, and representing more than 19 percent of the shuttle’s dry weight. The frequency of shipments began to tail off slowly as recovery operations cleaned out the debris field—first to a couple of shipments per week, and finally only one truckload per week.

KSC security cars escorted the shipments, and NASA special agents alerted state police along the route that the trucks were coming through. All of the NASA centers asked to participate in the honor of escorting Columbia back to KSC. To share that solemn role among the centers, one special agent from KSC and one from one of the other centers usually staffed the escort vehicles. These special agents also personally carried any sensitive materials being sent to KSC, rather than leaving them in the back of a truck. It was an eighteen-hour drive from Barksdale, with stops only for food and fuel.

KSC security special agent Linda Rhode (whom the reconstruction team nicknamed “Agent 99”) accompanied one shipment back from Barksdale with her boss, Mark Borsi. “It was four o’clock in the morning, and it was pitch-black. I was driving, and we’d been spending probably fifteen hours staring at the back end of this truck,” Rhode said. “Somewhere along Interstate 10 in the Florida Panhandle, a law enforcement vehicle jumps between me and the truck and pulls it over.” Borsi got out of the car and told Rhode to stay put. She said, “The agricultural inspector was talking to the truckers and then got a radio call. I think he realized the error of his ways. He hopped in his cruiser and took off.”

“Truck day” was always a special day in the hangar. It was not quite a celebration, but every load of new material meant that we were getting closer to figuring out what happened to Columbia . The staff and I went out to greet the drivers and thank them for bringing the material to KSC. Drivers told us where the material had come from. For some personnel in the hangar, this was their primary news source about events in the field.

As the truck was unloaded, every item was “sniffed” to ensure that it was not contaminated by hypergolic propellants. Staff was on the lookout for crushed tiles and other friable items whose fibrous materials could cause respiratory problems. [8] Interview with Jim Comer. The processing centers in East Texas did their jobs well, because none of the material was contaminated by the time it arrived at KSC.

Materials were then triaged just inside the hangar from the parking lot. Every item arrived bagged (if it was small enough) or wrapped in cling-wrap plastic film, and carried a tag with an identifying number and the GPS coordinates where the piece was found. Quality assurance staff bar-coded, photographed, and cataloged each item into the database. Items that were related to payloads, fuselage, or internal structural items went to the appropriate engineering stations. Things that were obviously crew-related and debris from the crew module went directly to the crew module room. Other debris was examined to try to determine where on the shuttle it might have come from. Then it went into the bread racks or onto the floor grid as appropriate.

Identifying debris that may or may not have been from the shuttle proved an interesting challenge. One landing-gear strut was heavily oxidized and caked with mud when it arrived. “Before we got all that mud and crap off it, it looked like an anchor,” said Jim Comer. After cleaning it up, many people believed it was from a B-52 bomber that crashed somewhere in Louisiana or East Texas many years ago. On February 14, technicians pulled the endcap off to look for an inspection stamp inside the strut. Only then did we prove the piece to be from Columbia . [9] Interviews with Jim Comer and Jon Cowart.

Nearly half of the material that came back from the field was classified as “unknown” when it arrived at the hangar. These forty thousand pieces of Columbia were generally small, nondescript bits of hardware such as bolts, tubing, fittings, scraps of fabric, and wires. More than one dozen people in the hangar examined each unknown item to try to identify which system it might be part of. If the system could not be determined, then quality assurance classified the item by the material from which it was made—metal ceramic, tile, fabric, and so forth.

In a last attempt to identify the items, the reconstruction hangar held an “unknown party” in which all of the remaining unknown items were passed around for people to examine one final time. [10] Pam Melroy, in NASA reconstruction video. By the end of the hangar’s operation, only 720 items of the nearly eighty-four thousand pieces of debris remained formally classified as unknown.