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

All told, the Columbia recovery, reconstruction, and investigation cost two lives and $454 million. Of that, FEMA spent $302 million for public safety and the search operations in Texas and Louisiana. NASA’s $152 million share of the cost included the recovery and reconstruction of the debris and the funds needed to support the CAIB’s investigation. [4] “Inquiry costs taxpayers $454 million,” Florida Today , August 26, 2003, 1A, 5A.

As a sidebar to the investigation, the CAIB quietly asked us to determine if there might have been an opportunity to launch a rescue mission to save Columbia ’s crew, had we known that the ship was doomed. At the same time, they asked engineers in Houston if there might have been a way for Columbia ’s crew to repair her wing with materials on board the ship. Admiral Gehman deliberately waited until May to request the analyses to allow emotions to cool down following the accident. We had already conducted our own internal studies before Gehman’s request.

When Columbia launched on January 16, her sister ship Atlantis was in the Orbiter Processing Facility hangar. She was almost ready to be mated to the external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters that were already stacked in the VAB. Could we have gotten Atlantis off the ground in time to save Columbia ’s crew?

After the accident, I studied how we could have accelerated processing activities and eliminated tests without jeopardizing the safety of Atlantis and her crew. For example, we could skip the terminal countdown demonstration test and the cryogenic fuel loading tests, shaving several days off the schedule.

My analysis showed that the rescue scenario was feasible from the KSC processing and launch perspective—but only if we got the “Go” by January 23. For that decision to be successful, we would have already needed to be in high gear immediately after learning about the foam impact on Columbia ’s wing—significantly altering the crew’s on-orbit activities starting on January 20. NASA would have needed detailed images of the wing from America’s intelligence assets, or would have had to send some of Columbia ’s crew outside to inspect the wing. That space walk would have needed to happen on the second or third day of the mission—a completely unrealistic assumption given mission timelines and goals. For all intents and purposes, the mission would have been over at that point, whether or not the wing was actually damaged.

With the ship confirmed to be mortally wounded, mounting a rescue mission would have been a mammoth undertaking and a very risky proposition. Knowing that foam from the external tank had doomed Columbia , would we dare to launch Atlantis with an identical external tank, possibly one with the same fatal flaw? If Atlantis were also damaged during ascent, we would have lost two shuttles and two crews.

This would not have been solely a NASA decision. President Bush would have needed to be involved in the process, and there would have been very little time for debate.

Columbia ’s crew would have been told to shut down all noncritical activity on the ship and sleep extended hours to prolong the cabin’s carbon dioxide removal capability while awaiting the rescue. They would also close down the Spacehab module, effectively ending Columbia ’s science mission.

Meanwhile, the rescue mission crew would rehearse procedures in Houston for rendezvousing with Columbia and transferring her crew to Atlantis . At KSC, a “full court press” of round-the-clock activity would put Atlantis on the launchpad no earlier than January 31.

The earliest possible launch date was February 11, assuming that Atlantis would not be equipped with its remote manipulator arm. If the arm was going to be installed—and it was almost certainly needed for the rescue mission—the earliest launch date slipped to February 13.

If all went well, Atlantis would have rendezvoused with Columbia and kept station with her, with the ships’ open payload bays facing each other. The rescue crew of four would run a tether between the two ships, and then bring Columbia ’s crew over to Atlantis , one by one.

Once the transfer was complete, Atlantis would head home with eleven people. Four of them would have to be strapped to the deck in the crew module during reentry, since the shuttle only carried seven seats. NASA would command Columbia to reenter the atmosphere, timing the maneuver to have the ship burn up over a remote area of the South Pacific.

If everything went according to plan, Columbia ’s crew would have had about a two-day margin in their consumables. They would have been in orbit almost a month by that point.

Everything hinged on making the momentous decision on January 23, following the decision to conserve the air scrubbers on the fourth day of the mission.

And remember that the request for intelligence imagery surfaced on January 22. Even if the request had been approved at that point, we wouldn’t have had the pictures in time to make an informed decision. Furthermore, the reduction of the crew’s normal activities to conserve consumables would have made a space walk unfeasible in the first place.

It had been already too late for a rescue.

Repairing Columbia in orbit was an even more uncertain proposition. The crew lacked suitable repair materials or equipment. Columbia did not have its remote manipulator arm installed, which would have been needed to support astronauts during a space walk. Even if by some miracle the crew could pack the hole in the wing with ice and fashion a metal cover for it—two options that engineers explored—it appeared highly unlikely that this would sufficiently protect the ship during reentry.

When we saw the analyses, there was no grumbling, but there was grief. We couldn’t save the ship. Columbia was doomed, no matter what. Maybe we could have saved the crew. But there were so many what-ifs and assumptions, so many things that had to go completely differently from the very first hours of the mission. Would it have been successful? I don’t know. We never even had the chance to try.

As much as it hurt people to think about the remote possibility of saving Columbia ’s crew, the study helped prompt discussions on how to save a future crew of a damaged shuttle.

Missions to the ISS had the advantage of delivering the crew to a place where they could wait for a subsequent mission to retrieve them or go home via the Soyuz. Assuming an injured shuttle could dock to the ISS, its crew could await a rescue mission for ninety days or more. This “safe haven” capability was one of the key factors that led NASA to approve the resumption of shuttle flights. [5] Wayne Hale notes to Mike Leinbach.

The issue was more problematic for servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is in a different orbit than the ISS. [6] Hubble orbits at 28.5° inclination and 335 miles altitude; the ISS orbit is 51° inclination and 250 miles altitude. Because of the laws of orbital mechanics, the amount of fuel needed to move the space shuttle between the orbits of Hubble and the ISS was far greater than the orbiter could carry. The ISS could not be a safe haven for a Hubble mission. Without a rescue capability, Sean O’Keefe felt that the risks to human life did not justify prolonging Hubble’s life by a couple of years. On January 16, 2004, he canceled the final planned Hubble servicing mission. [7] Space Telescope Science Institute, “Servicing Mission 4 Cancelled,” status report January 15, 2004, www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=11615 .