On a shelf in my office sits a model of the space shuttle Columbia. I built it 15 years ago, after it became the second of the orbiters to be lost in service. I was skiing on that cold Saturday morning in February 2003. When I took a break and came into the base lodge, I saw people glued to the televisions around the bar area. As I asked what happened, I was quickly informed that we had lost another shuttle, 17 years after the Challenger was destroyed on takeoff. This time, Columbia was torn apart at the end of her voyage, just 16 minutes from landing at her home base at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
In conjunction with the 15th anniversary, Michael Leinbach, the former launch director of the space shuttle program at KSC, has released a new book, Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew, that details the disaster and its aftermath. In it, he describes the emptiness he felt as he and the shuttle reception crew and family members waited near the runway, watching the arrival clock tick down and listening in vain for the sonic booms, which had heralded every previous shuttle arrival. For Leinbach, that was his first indication that something had gone very wrong.
He then details the actions that were taken in those early hours to mobilize resources, as reports of debris falling on Texas and Louisiana began filtering in. The first objective was to recover the crew, and members of NASA’s astronaut corps immediately headed into the area, several hours from the agency’s Houston base, to lead the teams that responded to reports of human remains. After all seven crewmembers were accounted for in the following weeks, the recovery effort turned to the monumental task of collecting and cataloguing the debris. Teams of volunteers, along with thousands of members of various governmental agencies, methodically searched for weeks through an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware, walking virtually arm-to-arm through brush and brambles that shredded clothing and skin, scouring the countryside for pieces of debris.
Sonar and dive teams searched lakes and reservoirs along the 250-mile debris field across East Texas and into Louisiana, which followed the doomed shuttle’s final trajectory. The engine powerheads, which were the heaviest components, flew the farthest east. When they impacted the ground, still traveling at supersonic speeds, they buried themselves 14 feet into the earth. In the end, more than 80,000 pieces of the shuttle were recovered, totaling approximately 80,000 pounds, approximately 40 percent of the shuttle’s dry weight. The location of each piece, some as small as a fingernail, was painstakingly recorded.
It was that debris that told the grim tale of the disaster. While images from the shuttle’s takeoff showed a large chunk of foam detaching from the massive liquid tank that fueled Columbia’s engines on liftoff, and striking the shuttle, few believed that the foam could have caused enough damage to imperil the spacecraft. Foam had struck the shuttle before, including one memorable occasion in which Atlantis had had some heat tiles displaced, yet it was able to carry its crew home. It was that pervasive “can-do” atmosphere that prevented the mission controllers from seriously evaluating what turned out to be a fatal threat.
As the debris was recovered and in some cases decontaminated, it was packed and trucked to KSC, where a vacant, remote hangar was commandeered to lay out the parts and reconstruct the accident. Since every single one of the thousands of tiles that made up the shuttle’s heat protection skin was individually shaped and numbered, investigators were able to identify those on the left wing, where the foam was suspected to have impacted. Many of those tiles were spattered with melted metal from the inside of the shuttle’s wing structure. In some cases, the layers in which the types of molten metal was deposited, gave mute testimony to how the wing failed.
In an attempt to validate whether the foam strike could have caused the fatal blow, the scientists removed the corresponding space-weathered, reinforced carbon carbon leading edge panels from Columbia’s surviving sisters and used a compressed air cannon to fire foam at them at the speed the foam was believed to be traveling at the time it impacted Columbia’s left wing during takeoff. The resulting impact test blew a 16-inch diameter hole in the protective structure. As Columbia entered the atmosphere, superheated plasma entered the wing through the opening, and like a blow torch, melted the wing from the inside out, and cut the main wing spar. The resulting pressure blew vent openings in the left wing, and as the heat cooked it from the inside out, caused the adhesive on the underside of the tiles to fail. Those were among the western-most debris found, as they peeled off early in the disaster sequence, while the orbiter was still largely intact.
In the post-accident reports, investigators discussed whether the damage could have been repaired in space had the crew been aware of it. No protocols for such a repair existed at the time. Another avenue explored whether the crew could have survived in orbit long enough for another shuttle to be launched and rescue them. Both plans became standard procedure when the space shuttle program resumed more than two years later with the launch of Discovery on July 26, 2005. Improvements included better evaluation of the foam insulation on the liquid fuel tank, and once the shuttle reached orbit, a detailed camera examination of the wing leading edges, using the craft’s robotic arm (which Columbia was not equipped with on its final mission). A wing repair patch kit was developed, and for subsequent missions, a shuttle and crew were standing by on alert in case of any damage discovered.
The space shuttle was revived due to the need to complete the aggressive construction schedule for the International Space Station, but the Columbia disaster was in essence the program’s death knell. The 135th and final mission was flown in July 2011, and the four surviving orbiters were decommissioned and put on display at KSC (Atlantis), the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center (Discovery), the California Science Center (Endeavour), and New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum (Enterprise).
As for Columbia herself, rather than entomb her wreckage as NASA chose to do with Challenger, the recovered debris—with the exception of the cockpit window frames, which are now on display at the KSC Visitor Center as a memorial, along with a chunk of Challenger’s fuselage—is now stored in a specially modified, access-controlled area at KSC and is used on occasion by academia for structural and materials research, having endured some of the most torturous conditions known. In essence, Columbia is still contributing to its mission of scientific discovery.