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

Incidentally, a few years after the accident investigation concluded, NASA was finishing up the process of addressing all of the observations and recommendations from the CAIB report. Melroy received permission to initiate a project to study the debris of Columbia ’s crew module, which would close out one of the CAIB’s observations. This study would provide detailed guidance for designing crew protection systems on future spacecraft.

To us in the reconstruction hangar, it often felt like the rest of NASA was focused on pursuing their own pet theories about what caused Columbia to disintegrate, rather than letting the debris tell its story through detailed examination.

Premature announcements to the press proved to be both unprofessional and embarrassing. A news release from the CAIB on March 18 said investigators believed that a carrier panel closeout tile might have fallen off of the shuttle’s left wing in orbit, which would have allowed plasma into the leading edge of the wing. [15] “Panel Confident of Finding Cause,” Florida Today , March 19, 2003, 2A. Steve Altemus said, “The problem is that the CAIB announced it but never talked to us about it.” After the story broke, NASA management called us to ask what had led to the CAIB’s conclusion. Altemus replied, “I don’t know, because the carrier panel is at my foot right now, so I know it didn’t come off in orbit.”

Some people said that the foam hitting the wing must have caused the accident. However, mission managers were reluctant to abandon the conclusion they reached during the flight—that Columbia could not have been mortally wounded by the foam strike on ascent. After the accident, they continued to insist that the foam could not possibly have caused fatal damage. Some people were convinced that one of the tires might have ruptured and blown open the wheel-well door. And others believed that Columbia had collided with something in orbit or during her descent.

The debris refuted many possible failure scenarios. One was that the left landing gear had accidentally deployed, rendering Columbia unstable during reentry. The condition of the left landing gear strut did not support that theory. The chrome on the upper surface of the strut would have melted away had the gear deployed and been exposed to the full force of the reentry environment. That chrome was relatively intact, so the gear could not have deployed. The outboard tires on the left side also showed much more evidence of heat damage than the inboard tires, pointing to a breach in the wing somewhere other than the wheel well.

Some tiles found early in the recovery period exhibited orange or brown streaks that appeared to be gouged into the tile surface. People speculated almost immediately about similarly colored insulating foam coming off the external tank and gouging the tiles. Or, perhaps, it was evidence of something else impacting Columbia during reentry. Analysis of the streaks in the reconstruction hangar instead showed that they were melted Inconel from the leading edge attachment fittings on the left wing. This was material from inside Columbia that had blown out through a hole in the wing and had been deposited onto and melted into the surface of the tiles. [16] NASA, Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC, August 2003), 75.

Another scenario that we needed to disprove was the potential involvement of terrorists. NASA management and the Department of Homeland Security considered this only a very remote possibility, but it had to be checked out. I did not want my team to be worried about possible terrorism, so I brought in the FBI undercover. The FBI special agents appeared just to be regular researchers looking at the materials. They swabbed various pieces and found no evidence of explosive residue anywhere on the vehicle.

I never told the team about their visit.

The Spacehab double module carried in Columbia ’s cargo bay almost completely disintegrated during the accident. Spacehab would normally never be exposed to the heat of reentry, so it was relatively unshielded except for thermal blankets. Even though the shuttle’s cargo bay doors protected it during the initial phases of reentry, the module was exposed to the full fury of heat and aerodynamic forces when Columbia ’s main structure broke apart. As with the interior of the shuttle’s payload bay, much of the module’s aluminum structure and its insulation blankets were melted or consumed in the heat and friction of reentry. The only major parts of Spacehab’s structure that survived the accident were two long Inconel rods—which were found almost completely intact—and pieces of the dense bulkheads of the module. [17] Interview with Marty McLellan.

Many of the science experiments were destroyed outright during Columbia ’s disintegration and reentry, and others were badly damaged. Those that survived were mostly the ones that the crew removed from Spacehab and stowed in the orbiter’s crew module lockers prior to reentry. Some searchers had found canisters or bits and pieces of experiments in the field. Pat Adkins, for example, found a bag of thick, creamy material with a plunger mechanism attached to the bag, which had been part of the “OSTEO” medical experiment to study bone cell growth. Electronic data for some experiments had been transmitted back to Earth during the mission, and a few data tapes partially survived the breakup.

One experiment caused a rare celebration when our workers examined it in the reconstruction hangar. Searchers found a thermos bottle-sized container from an experiment involving a colony of nematodes—small roundworms. The container had been inside one of the lockers in the crew module, so it was relatively well protected until the locker hit the ground. We were amazed to see living nematodes inside the container when it was opened in the reconstruction hangar. Nematodes have a short life span. Because this finding was several weeks after the accident, these were likely the descendants of the original animals in the experiment. Nonetheless, there was joy in the hangar at finding something alive—passengers of Columbia who survived the accident. “You look for the glimmer of hope where you can find it,” said Spacehab’s Marty McLellan.

A thorny legal issue arose regarding if and how material from scientific payloads in the orbiter should be returned to the researchers. Payloads and experiments on a shuttle mission technically belonged to the scientists—the principal investigators who designed and funded the experiments. However, NASA impounded all of the more than 2,200 pieces of recovered debris from Columbia ’s experiments. NASA’s primary concern was to prevent anyone from selling the recovered debris as memorabilia to recoup their lost investment in the experiment. NASA established a process to allow the payload customers to petition for access to the experiments to recover scientific data. Both NASA and the CAIB had to approve the request. Most of the science recovery operations took place at the reconstruction hangar. [18] Shafer and LeConey. “Legal Issues,” 56–7. The materials were then returned back to NASA custody.

All told, nine of the eighty experiments carried by Columbia were found inside metal boxes. Scientists who opened the containers believed that at least five of those experiments would yield usable data. [19] “Student Science Project Survived Shuttle Disaster,” CNN, May 24, 2003. Quoted in Liston, Chronology of KSC for 2003 , 111.

Initially, the reconstruction team planned to lay out the pieces of wing tile on the grid on the hangar floor. Weeks into the process, engineers realized that having a few tiles laid out on the floor, still inside their collection bags, was not going to provide the big picture of how the left wing failed.