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

The long association of KSC’s staff with Columbia made them the most knowledgeable people about the ship. However, they were also the most susceptible to emotional reactions to the sad state of the vehicle. “This was like burying a friend,” said astronaut John Herrington. “It wasn’t just going to a wreck someplace and picking up pieces of an airplane that you don’t have a connection to. These guys had touched every part of it in the processing facility or on the launchpad.”

Workers reacted emotionally to the recognizable structures of the shuttle that came back from the field. Among the first pieces to arrive were the metal cockpit window frames. Those frames normally held three thick panes of aluminum silicate glass and fused silica. The glass was carefully polished and protected before and after each mission. The windows were tough enough to withstand collisions with small particles in orbit. But now, all that remained of the thick glass was a few small shards stuck in the frames, along with bits of grass and dried mud. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! Why did this first piece have to be something that’s so related to the crew? Why couldn’t it be just a strut or something?’” said Ann Micklos. “You had seen the vehicle as a whole, and now you are viewing the parts in a manner you never dreamed of.”

The mood on the hangar floor could be very somber at times. Every once in a while, someone would recognize a piece from a system they had previously worked on and then would break into tears. People looked out for one another and took their colleagues outside to regain their composure. “It wasn’t just me, it was everybody,” said Micklos. There was no way to predict when or where it would happen—but at some point, even the most hardened engineer or technician would break down when confronting a piece of wreckage and thinking about what it represented to them personally and to the crew.

One technician who had spent his entire career working on the shuttle’s fuel cell power system was standing at the hangar entrance when a truck arrived with the broken, burned, and tortured cryogen tanks from his system. “He stood there in the hangar, looking out at the truck, and started to weep,” said Steve Altemus. “He just said, ‘Damn!’ and walked away.”

The crew module area was particularly tough to work in. Herrington described it as being “gut-wrenching,” to stand among the remnants of seats, control panels, tools, and other items that his astronaut classmates had worked with on their mission. “Seeing the damage they’d suffered—and how little damage other items had incurred—really struck me. It really hit home,” he said.

Our team leaders constantly monitored and tried to lighten the mood. When a large section of the air lock panel for the crew module arrived early in the reconstruction effort, people were concerned about how astronaut Pam Melroy would react to seeing this piece of the hardware. “I could see them looking at me, scared, thinking, This is gonna be horrible ,” Melroy said. “I just looked at them, and I could have kissed them! I said, ‘Look at the size of this piece! You’ve brought me this great piece, and I’m so happy to have it back!’ That set the tone, so that when they brought something in, it wasn’t, ‘Oh shit.’ It was, ‘Look at what we found for you!’”

No matter how hard people tried to keep the mood from becoming grim, things could change quickly and without warning. Jim Comer recalled examining with astronaut Marsha Ivins a contact lens case belonging to one of the crew. It was immaculate—without a scratch on it. Ivins laughed, “Hey Comer! This is what we need to build the next space shuttle out of!” And then a few minutes later, the two of them found the remnants of a cloth crew patch in which only the stitched border survived. The rest of the patch had burned away. Comer said, “We looked at each other and went, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

We decreed that the hangar would be closed on Sunday—no exceptions. We knew that the staff would need a day each week to recover and recharge. “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” Altemus said. “You’ve got to keep yourself healthy. That decision had a huge effect on the morale of the team, and we made fewer mistakes as a result.”

On March 3, 2003, barely one month after the accident, former astronauts Wally Schirra and Jim Lovell came to KSC to encourage workers who were still grieving over the loss of Columbia .

Both men were well acquainted with the risks inherent in manned spaceflight. Schirra commanded Apollo 7, NASA’s first manned mission after the fire that killed his friends in the three-man crew of Apollo 1. Lovell was commander of Apollo 13, when a deep-space explosion led to a harrowing several days in which the world watched anxiously and hoped that the crew would make it home alive.

Lovell said, “This is a risky business. Everyone I talk to says this should not stop the program—we should find out the cause.”

Schirra encouraged KSC’s team with Gus Grissom’s famous line, “Do good work.”

Lovell added, “We have a great program. Keep charging. Don’t give up.” [11] “Schirra, Lovell Cheer KSC Workers,” Spaceport News , March 21, 2003, 7.

The two astronauts also toured the reconstruction hangar. They thanked everybody for their devotion to the cause. It was as close to a pep talk as you can have in that kind of situation—almost like having your grandfather come and talk to you. It meant a lot to us.

Chris Chamberland and the KSC Web Studio produced a short video entitled Sixteen Minutes from Home: A Tribute to the Crew of STS-107 . It was so powerful that as soon as I saw it, I wanted every hangar worker on all shifts to get a copy of the DVD. One morning in late February, I asked everyone to stop working and gather around a large TV in the hangar. We all sat on the floor, arms around each other, and watched as the crew did their thing in the video. At the end, I told everyone to pick up a copy of the DVD and then return to work whenever they were ready. We needed a break. The sharing of the grief and watching Rick and his crew enjoying themselves in orbit were really good. It was important to remember our friends in happy times.

With the passage of time, our staff eventually became somewhat inured to working with the broken pieces of the shuttle. Their depression gradually morphed into scientific and engineering curiosity about how the shuttle had come apart and what the debris was trying to tell them.

Even the pieces of wreckage that were not directly related to the accident held mysteries for us. Why did one piece of equipment come back heavily damaged, while another that was sitting right next to it was relatively unscathed? Why did all the propellant and other tanks in the ship come back in such good shape? Why were the oxygen feed lines in the engine manifolds more decayed than the hydrogen feed lines?

Solving these riddles engaged everyone’s intellectual and engineering curiosity and kept us from dwelling too long on the tragedy represented by the debris of our beloved Columbia .

One day, a beat-up and torn stuffed dinosaur doll—yellow with purple polka dots—arrived in the crew module reconstruction room. Recovery workers in Texas thought there was a possibility that the crew might have flown the doll on the mission for a friend or family member. Robert Hanley knew what Columbia ’s astronauts had taken on the mission. “Some things you absolutely knew could not possibly be crew-related stuff, and they’d go into what we called ‘the East Texas trash box,’” he said. “We knew this dinosaur didn’t fly, but we decided to keep it in the room as our little mascot—kind of a joke.”