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

Cryos (short for “cryogenic gases”)—gases that have been supercooled to the point that they have become liquefied. The shuttle’s main engines burned liquid hydrogen as fuel (stored at minus 423°F) with liquid oxygen (stored at minus 297°F) as the oxidizer. Both propellants were carried in the shuttle’s external tank. The orbiter itself carried smaller tanks of liquid helium to pressurize the maneuvering system propellant system and liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen that were used by the shuttle’s electricity-generating fuel cells.

DPS—Texas Department of Public Safety.

Elevon—a control surface combining the functions of an elevator and aileron. There were two elevons (inboard and outboard) on the back end of each wing on the shuttle.

EPA—the US Environmental Protection Agency.

External tank (ET)—the only nonreusable part of the shuttle. The external tank contained the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen powering the space shuttle’s main engines during ascent to orbit. The tank was covered by a layer of orange-brown, sprayed-on insulating foam, which kept ice from forming on the tank.

Extra-vehicular Activity (EVA)—a “space walk,” in which an astronaut leaves the protective confines of the spacecraft to work outside in the vacuum of space.

FEMA—the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Fire crews—teams of twenty men and women contracted by the US Forest Service to fight wildfires and respond to other natural and human-caused incidents.

Firing Room—one of four control rooms in Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Control Center in which the launch team ran the testing, countdown, and launch of a space shuttle mission.

Flight Director—the leader of the flight control team in the Mission Control Center, with overall responsibility for mission operations and decisions regarding safe flight. The flight director assumed control of a mission upon ignition of the solid rocket boosters at T-0.

Grid search—a technique for systematically searching an area. Searchers space out abreast at a prescribed interval and walk forward together, each person scanning the ground around them. When they reach the assigned distance from the starting point, the line pivots around one of the end people, and the group walks in the other direction. Grid searching increases the likelihood of finding a missing person or object, since it ensures that every square foot of the search area is covered.

Heatshield—the protection system around a spacecraft that helps it survive the heat of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. The heatshield system of the space shuttle included silica tiles on its underside, reinforced carbon-carbon panels on its nose and wing leading edges, and quilted silica and felt blankets on areas not subject to high heating.

Hypergolic propellants (also called “hypers”)—chemical liquids used to power the orbiter’s onboard maneuvering system rocket engines and thrusters. Hypergolic chemicals ignite instantly when the fuel and oxidizer come in contact with each other. The shuttle used monomethylhydrazine as fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidizer. Both chemicals are extremely toxic, both through inhalation and contact with skin, and cause death with even very limited exposure. Tanks of both propellants were located in various places throughout the orbiter.

Incident command system (ICS)—a standardized process for command, control, and coordination of multiple agencies in response to an emergency situation.

Incident Management Team (IMT)—a group that responds to an emergency using the incident command system framework. IMTs are “typed” according to the scope and complexity of the incidents they are certified to manage.

Inconel—an alloy of nickel, chromium, iron, and other metals used for spacecraft parts subject to high-temperature and/or high stress environments.

International Space Station (ISS)—a microgravity and space environment laboratory in low Earth orbit, funded and manned by the United States, Russia, Japan, the European Space Agency, and Canada. It has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000, recently by six astronauts at a time. Major assembly of the ISS occurred between 1998 and 2011 with unmanned vehicles delivering the Russian segment modules and the space shuttle delivering the components for the US side of the ISS.

Johnson Space Center (JSC)—NASA’s center in Houston, Texas, which is home to the astronaut corps, the engineers who designed the space shuttle, the Space Shuttle Program Office, training facilities, and the Mission Control Center. Often referred to simply as “Houston.”

Kennedy Space Center (KSC)—NASA’s principal launch facility located on the Atlantic coast of central Florida, which prepares and launches manned and unmanned spaceflight missions.

Launch Control Center (LCC)—a four-story building at Kennedy Space Center that serves as the hub for conducting NASA test and launch operations. The LCC has four Firing Rooms, computer and communications systems support areas, as well as offices and conference rooms.

Launch Director—the head of the launch team at Kennedy Space Center, responsible for making the final “Go for launch” decision.

MADS recorder—see OEX.

Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC)—NASA’s center in Huntsville, Alabama, which designs the propulsion systems for NASA’s manned spacecraft.

Michoud Assembly Facility—NASA’s facility near New Orleans, Louisiana, where the space shuttle’s external tanks were built and tested. The tanks were shipped by barge from Michoud to Kennedy Space Center.

Mishap Investigation Team—a multidisciplinary NASA internal team responsible for debris recovery, protection, and impoundment immediately after a spacecraft accident.

Mission Control Center—the building at Johnson Space Center housing the flight control room where flight directors and flight controllers managed a space shuttle mission from launch until landing.

Mission Management Team (MMT)—a group of managers from all aspects of the Shuttle Program throughout NASA and its shuttle contractors. The MMT held reviews to clear a shuttle mission for launch and was supposed to meet every day during a mission to keep leaders informed and, if necessary, debate risks and solutions to issues occurring before or during the flight, especially those outside documented launch or flight procedures.

NTSB—the National Transportation Safety Board.

OEX—the Orbiter Experiments recorder, akin to an airplane’s flight-data recorder, which recorded on magnetic tape the state of hundreds of pressure, temperature, motion, and other sensors inside Columbia . Also called the Modular Auxiliary Data System (MADS) recorder.

OMS pods (pronounced “ohms”)—removable flight structures on each side of the aft end of the orbiter’s body, at the base of the vertical stabilizer (tail), containing the Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engines and maneuvering thrusters.

Orbiter—the winged vehicle at the heart of the Space Transportation System. The orbiter was about the same size as a DC-9 or MD-80 commercial airliner. It took off like a rocket and landed like a glider.

Orbiter Processing Facility—one of three specially outfitted hangars near Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building in which orbiters were maintained, repaired, and configured for upcoming missions.

Payload bay—the cargo compartment in the middle section of the space shuttle. The payload bay was fifteen feet in diameter and sixty feet long—about the size of a school bus. The shuttle could carry up to sixty thousand pounds of payload into Earth orbit.

Plasma—the “fourth state of matter,” a superheated gas with approximately equal numbers of positively charged ions and electrons, created during reentry as a fast-moving spacecraft compresses and superheats the surrounding atmosphere.