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

Many people who were required to rotate out before the recovery operation ended were upset about leaving the work unfinished. Greg Cohrs said, “I felt such a tremendous, intense sense of obligation to complete this mission that I requested—nearly begged—to be able to stay on.”

USA’s Linda Moynihan said, “It was like when a soldier’s time is up and he leaves his buddies there in the war zone. You feel like you left your friends there and your responsibilities behind.”

Brother Fred Raney occasionally counseled NASA workers—people who were so driven to perform meaningful work in service of Columbia and her crew that they could not bear to leave before the task was completed. Raney said, “I talked to one man who was literally in tears because he had used all of his vacation and sick time, and he had to go back to his job in Houston.”

The astronauts who participated in crew remains recovery were required to meet with a counselor at the end of their time in the field. [3] Interview with Jim Wetherbee. Astronaut Dom Gorie said, “We’re often accused, as test pilots and military people, of being over-compartmentalizers. We compartmentalize so well that some people can’t really see the human element behind things like this. And I’ve often been asked, ‘How could you fly the next day, after you lose an F-18 in the Gulf War?’ It’s because you have to compartmentalize. We had to do that. But it’s pretty tough when you get asked to go out and pick up remains [of] your friends, or from the shuttle that was carrying them. And the way to get through that was trying to stay focused on what the endgame was.”

“We all knew Columbia ’s crew,” Gerry Schumann said. “We knew them by their first names. We knew their wives, their husbands, and their families. That was the toughest part—recovering remains of a crew that you knew.” Schumann lost himself in his work, pulling seven-day weeks for several months. “It was easier for me to continue working than to take any time off and think about everything,” he said. “One day they made me go buy a fishing pole, and dropped me off at a lake to go fishing. I sat there for about half an hour and said, ‘Okay, I’m ready to go back.’”

Counselors visited the US Forest Service fire crews at their camps to talk to searchers who needed help dealing with the nature of the accident, the intensity of the work, and being so far from home. At one morning’s briefing in the Hemphill area, one of the Forest Service leaders introduced the counselors to the broader leadership team. He then turned to Schumann and said, “Gerry, they’re here to see you.”

Schumann was irate. He refused to speak with them or even acknowledge their presence for the week they were on-site. “The big joke was—when we left Texas, the team gave me a stack of a hundred business cards they’d collected of counselors I could talk to,” Schumann said.

After the camps shut down, the last KSC contingents from East Texas and Barksdale returned home on two chartered planes out of Shreveport, one led by Ed Mango and one by Jeff Angermeier. Mango thanked everyone for their sacrifices. Then he cautioned them to remember that their families had not shared the experience. Their families would not be able to fully comprehend the intensity of what the searchers had endured. Mango reminded his group, “Our families all had normal lives. Our lives are the ones that really changed. We are the ones who are going to look at life differently now when we get back. We can’t expect them to understand.” He also informed the group about some of the statistics regarding the results of the recovery operations, so that the people could start to get a feel for the overall size of the effort of which they had been a part. For some people, it was the first time they had heard the magnitude of the accomplishment.

The workers’ families greeted everyone on their arrival at Kennedy’s runway. Mango likened it to a homecoming after an overseas combat deployment. The atmosphere was festive. Several astronauts with their T-38 jets were on hand to thank the families and welcome the staff home again.

The shock of immersion back into “normal life” and the less hectic work pace allowed months of pent-up feelings to surface. Grief, guilt, and anger were the predominant emotions. “The toughest time for me was the first week of May after we came home,” René Arriëns said. “You just kind of started to take in and absorb everything that happened over the last three months. I spent about a week being an emotional wreck.”

Gerry Schumann’s wife Gail said, “He was angry when he came home. He was just not the same person that went. He was very, very angry for many years.”

Gerry said that when he went back to his office the day after returning from Texas, his boss was “…sitting there with his feet up on his desk. I lost it. I cussed him out. Then I left for two weeks and didn’t ever want to come back.”

Schumann was ordered to attend counseling, as were many other people who returned from the field still traumatized by what they had experienced. It took four months before he was even able to sit down with his wife to talk about what he was feeling. His anger was focused on his boss, himself, and then with the whole NASA system—for failing to speak up or do something to prevent the accident. “We were focused on the only job we had, which was to make sure that the vehicle was safe to fly, and if something else happened out there with the operation itself, that wasn’t our problem,” Schumann said. “When you look at it in hindsight, what would it have taken for us to say something?”

People berated themselves for real or perceived missed opportunities to have spoken up, asked difficult questions, or done something differently. Whether it would have changed anything is another matter. The CAIB’s report on the accident noted that NASA’s culture made it extremely difficult to raise concerns that would have been listened to. That was clearly the case in the questions raised during the Mission Management Team discussions about the foam strike.

I know from personal experience that it took big balls to bring something up at any of those meetings, even if you damn sure knew you were right.

Second-guessing one’s actions was not limited to the NASA family. Jeff Williams, who generated maps for the search effort, said, “I’m not the only one who could only sleep three hours per night. I woke up and started thinking about all the things I could have done, should have done, would have done.” [4] Jeff Williams, interviewed by Connie Hodges.

The trauma of being involved in recovering the crew’s remains haunted the volunteers and the searchers in the US Forest Service for months afterward. “After it was over, the astronauts came to town and wanted to visit with people. I didn’t want to talk to them,” said Marsha Cooper. “There was something I was dealing with, and I just didn’t want to get close to them. I would have lost it. I wasn’t ready. Felix Holmes and I talked a lot after it was over. He called me one day about a month or so after it was all over, as he was just going down the road. He had finally lost it. We all had a breaking point. We just didn’t know when it would come.”

On March 31, Kirstie McCool Chadwick, sister of Columbia pilot Willie McCool, and I were special guests at the Florida Marlins home opener game in Miami. Huge Challenger and Columbia plaques decorated the right center-field wall. We came walking out from behind one of the outfield walls and received a standing ovation. People were hollering down from the stands, “Thank you!” It was great to see that the folks in Miami recognized what was going on up in Brevard County.