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

Pam Melroy cleaned up the room one day when Hanley was out of town, and she threw away the dinosaur. Hanley became upset when he returned and the dinosaur was gone. He scoured the trash boxes in the hangar and eventually located it.

Melroy felt guilty about inadvertently throwing away the doll, not realizing it meant so much to her team’s morale. When the reconstruction effort was over, and she and her team returned to Houston, she had the doll repaired and dry-cleaned. Her crew module reconstruction team created the Yellow Dinosaur Club, made membership cards, and even crafted a badge for the dinosaur. Melroy flew it in space on the STS-120 mission she commanded in 2007.

“It sounds silly, but it goes back to what you were clinging onto to make this tragic thing something you could cope with,” Hanley said. “The yellow dinosaur was just one of those things.”

One of my roles was to carefully control press access to the hangar. Administrator O’Keefe gave me complete latitude on how to handle it. I wanted first and foremost to ensure that the press would approach the situation with the appropriate seriousness, and that they would not sensationalize the wreckage on the floor. Our workers’ emotions were still raw after the accident, and the crew’s families were still grieving. I did not want premature speculation circulating about the cause of the accident until more debris and more data came in. Finally, I did not want the important work of the engineers and technicians to be disrupted by having “outsiders” constantly looking over their shoulders.

After a few weeks, I felt it was appropriate to begin showing the outside world the work that was going on in the hangar. The first press visit consisted of my opening the door to the hangar and letting the press take photographs from that spot, but no closer. For the next several press opportunities, I took them a few feet into the hangar to a small area near the nose cap and let them look around from that one vantage point. Finally, by early April, we had a walkway around the hangar roped off, and I permitted the press to walk around. We never allowed them into the crew module area. I also escorted tours of congressmen, senators, governors, and other dignitaries throughout the reconstruction effort.

The sight of Columbia ’s debris on the hangar floor and the smell of the charred materials never lost their emotional impact, especially for first-time visitors. Renée Ross came to the hangar to work with Pam Melroy in the crew module area. As they walked into the hangar on Ross’s first visit, Melroy was making small talk and asking about her trip from Houston. Ross, though, could not hear what Melroy was saying to her. “I just stopped,” Ross recalled. “The sight of the landing gear upside-down in the middle of the room, was just… I don’t know how to explain it. It was breathtaking. I just stood there and looked at it all. I knew the vehicle’s dry weight was 140,000 pounds. And there probably wasn’t 20,000 pounds worth of stuff on that floor.” Melroy kept talking, and then she suddenly realized that she was ten steps ahead of Ross. “She turned around to me and said, ‘I’m sorry. I forgot that you haven’t been here before. I need to step back and give you a few minutes.’”

No one was more surprised about the contents of the hangar than were the KSC workers who had been out in the field on recovery operations. The people in the East Texas collection centers had been compelled to get the recovered material to Barksdale, and then on to Kennedy, as quickly as possible, but they did not really comprehend what was happening with it after that. “We tried to ask for even one more day to do triage,” Ed Mango said. “But the pressure was to get that stuff out to Barksdale! We couldn’t understand why [the people in the hangar] needed it so fast.”

Mike Ciannilli said, “We had no clue what was going on back at KSC. The first time I went to the hangar, I was blown out of the water. I was just mesmerized by it.”

The sparse appearance of the shuttle on the grid gave the false impression that not much of the vehicle had been recovered. Only the items from the ship’s external surfaces were placed on the grid, which were some 2,700 of the 84,000 pieces of debris recovered.

Engineers in the hangar began their detailed analyses of the debris to search for clues about the cause of the accident and how the ship came apart. As the NTSB predicted, the debris told a compelling story. Engineers just needed to sift through all the evidence.

Various parts of the vehicle showed signs of one or more significant abnormal conditions—extreme heat, oxidation, and mechanical stress. Some damage occurred before the ship broke up, and some afterward. The challenge would be to tease out the sequence of events and determine what had caused the ship to break up, as opposed to the damage suffered after the catastrophic event.

The effects of the great heat of reentry were visible everywhere. Some heat-resistant tiles were badly slumped—their shape distorted by partial melting—indicating they had experienced much higher heat than they were designed to withstand in a normal reentry. Globs of metal were spattered on interior and exterior surfaces. We found soot on pieces of the left wing’s internal structure as well as on the left-hand OMS pod—a bulbous section under the shuttle’s tail covering the maneuvering system engines. One of the “elevon actuators”—which controlled a steering flap on the left wing—was pierced by a sharply defined hole, as though someone had applied a blowtorch to it. [12] Interview with Pat Adkins. Aluminum globules were also found inside the crew module, on pieces such as seat belt fragments. Heat damage inside the crew module was almost certainly due to melting after the accident, as the vehicle broke up and the pieces reentered the atmosphere at high speed.

Oxidation of metallic objects made them appear to have been left rusting in a junkyard for years. Oxidation could also cause the reinforced carbon-carbon panels on the leading edge of the wings to erode and lose their effectiveness.

Everywhere were signs of the tremendous mechanical stresses to which the orbiter was subjected. After the “catastrophic event” in which the ship first broke up, Columbia was shredded into ever-smaller pieces as it encountered the denser air of the atmosphere at high speed. “Broomstraw fracturing” provided evidence of aluminum being twisted under high heat and stress—creating the appearance of the metal delaminating, which was a phenomenon new to many of the engineers. [13] Interview with Jim Comer. Torsional forces exceeding 20 G had twisted and broken the seat frames in the crew compartment’s mid-deck.

Engineers and materials scientists went to work using sophisticated equipment to examine the debris that appeared to be directly related to the accident as their top priority. At the same time, people who worked on various subsystems that were not directly related to the accident wanted to see how their components had performed.

Finally, there was the sensitive issue about discovering how the crew module had reacted to the breakup of the shuttle and what the crew might have experienced before and after the accident. This effort was technically not related to the determining the cause of the Columbia accident. Pam Melroy and her team made persuasive arguments about the value to be gained in studying how the various systems in the crew module either protected the crew or failed to help them during the aftermath of the accident. The crew module team conducted at least three audits during the reconstruction process, touching every piece of material in the crew module room, ensuring that the GPS and other identifying information were entered correctly in the database, and adding descriptive keywords that would facilitate future database searches. [14] Interviews with Steve Altemus and Pam Melroy.