Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

This month, we’ve been looking at the stars, first with Hidden Figures, which got us up there, then with Packing for Mars, which explores the science behind our trip to space. This week, we look at what happens when the journey goes catastrophically wrong, with Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew by Michael D. Leinbach and Jonathan H. Ward. So let’s do this.

NASA’s shuttle program was the next generation after the Apollo program shut down, and the shuttle program had five shuttles, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavor, and all of them were designed and intended to orbit earth and conduct scientific studies in space and assist with building the International Space Station. Columbia was essentially the flagship, she was the first of the fleet, and the others were designed off of her.

Now, Challenger quite famously exploded shortly after launch on what would have been her I believe 7th mission, with no survivors among the crew. And the authors of this book touch on Challenger. I mean, they pretty much have to, given that of five ships, two ended catastrophically, it had to be addressed. What happened to Columbia was…vastly different.

So, on January 16, 2003, Columbia launched on what would have been her 28th mission. Shortly after the launch, an analysis of launch footage showed a large piece of foam, “about the size of a suitcase,” breaking off the fuel tank that had just been jettisoned, and striking the left wing of Columbia. Now…its hard to imagine a piece of foam could cause a problem. Its…It’s foam. Fairly lightweight. How much damage could foam really do to the reinforced carbon carbon edge of the wing?

And even with that thought in mind, NASA asked the CIA if it would be possible to use CIA satellites to take images of the Columbia’s wing to assess the damage. The CIA said sure, but please send the request through proper channels. Which…look, I get it. If the CIA guy running the satellite breaks off his assigned task to take these pictures WITHOUT authorization, then at best he could just lose his job. At worst, he could be accused of being a foreign asset and shoved into a deep dark hole next to Robert Hansen and Aldrich Ames. So I don’t blame the CIA guy for requesting official channels to take the images.

But NASA took the inexcusable stance of “Prove to me it’s NOT safe.” And that’s a direct quote from the book. Author Michael Leinbach was the pre-orbit Mission Management Team lead…I think that’s right… so you get a sense of the bitterness he must have felt 16 days later when the proof, as they say, was in the pudding.

So February 1, 2003, NASA has the landing pad at Kennedy Space Center lined up, families of all the astronauts waiting on the ground for Columbia to line up on her landing zone. When the shuttles return, they hit the atmosphere so fast they create a streak in the sky that’s visible to the naked eye as they use a combination of gravity and technology to gradually slow the ship from like 15000 mph to something a little more…moderate…for the landing. And as the shuttle enters into Florida airspace, sonic booms were the norm as various sound barriers are broken.

As the 9am EST scheduled landing drew closer with no sonic booms, the anxiety started to build. And the countdown clock for landing timed down to zero, then began counting forward….which had never happened in the history of NASA. And the crew at KSC knew something had gone drastically wrong.

While KSC is preparing to receive Columbia, Columbia was passing over California. At that same time, Houston’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) began receiving unusual telemetry readings from Columbia. Various  sensors on Columbia started going haywire, kicking back odd readings. At 8:59:32 am EST, Commander Rick Husband’s communications cut off mid word.

Meanwhile, nearly 1000 miles west, in east Texas, the people THERE were experiencing the expected sonic booms. Not just the booms, but they FELT the booms, which is not normal. And since they didn’t know what it was, they fell back on their own experiences, and the county sheriff’s phone lit up with calls that there had been a train derailment, gas main explosion, a nuclear explosion, that two planes had collided overhead, that there had been an earthquake or a tornado.

And then the residents in east Texas turned on their televisions, and realized what they had experienced, was the death of Columbia, as she literally disintegrated in the atmosphere above their heads.

Now, as I said last week, NASA actually has a pretty outstanding safety record. Which might explain the complaisance of “Prove it it ISN’T safe.” Having said THAT, NASA actually did have protocols in place for accident, and those kicked into gear immediately. One of the big ones, which I feel should be adopted by all agencies everywhere, is that NASA is not allowed to investigate itself. So they reached out to who would be good to investigate what happened and came up with Admiral Hal Gehman to chair what would become the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. This happened within 90 minutes of the accident. He would be joined by other relevant experts, none of whom worked for NASA but could all contribute valid knowledge to the matter at hand.

In East Texas and Louisiana, the pieces were coming to earth. Surprisingly, and luckily, no one on the ground was injured. There was I think some minor property damage, mostly in the form of the bigger pieces hitting earth at like Mach 18 and gouging large divots in the earth. No joke, there were several key pieces that they only figured out where they were, by noting the splash of mud on trees and then digging for them.

Of course there were some…blessedly few…scummy people who would pick up whatever pieces they could find and try and auction them on eBay. The FBI shut that shit down immediately. Which I am ok with. The official reason is that the shuttle was property of the US Government. Unofficially….I mean, what if the auctioned piece had been EXACTLY the piece needed to show what happened? WTF is wrong with people? Ultimately, the US District Attorney ended up offering amnesty to anyone who returned a piece of the shuttle by X Date. And they did have pieces returned in that fashion. I think ultimately, no one was prosecuted.

On to the search efforts. The mobilization was instant and massive. The people locally came out in droves to assist with the immediate recovery. NASA had three priorities. First was to secure any possible hazardous material for the safety of the communities they were in. Second was to recover the bodies of the astronauts. And there was no question of survival. It just physically would not have been possible. More on that in a bit. Third was to recover as much of the shuttle itself as they could.

And they succeeded. On all counts. Within 10 days they had recovered all the bodies. And it was respectfully handled too. When remains were found, law enforcement officers would stay with the body until the astronaut recovery team could arrive. They had a local reverend attend and since the bodies were literally unidentifiable on the ground because of the damage done in falling from 40 miles up or however high it was, the reverend repeated prayers in the Christian faith, Judaic faith, and Hindu faith, as there were members of each of these faiths among the fallen crew. And then the remains were taken to a local morgue until they could be transported for autopsy and burial.

As the immediate residents of the flight path had to return to work, fire crews from around the country were brought in to take over the grid searching. The fire crews were largely composed of Native Americans, who did such an outstanding job in their search that they were finding pieces as small as a thumbnail, cataloguing, and collecting it. For months the search went one, by land, water, and air. Ultimately air searches were halted when one of the search helicopters crashed, resulting in two more fatalities to the Columbia story.

In all, 25,000 people would come together to search an area I believe they said roughly, 10,000 square miles, and would recover 84,000 individual pieces of the shuttle, ranging in size from an office desk to, well, a thumbnail.

And as these pieces were collected, they were shipped back to KSC for reassembly, to determine what exactly happened. And while many of the searchers and investigators may have suspected the foam strike as the cause, they were careful to run down ALL possibilities, following the National Transportation Safety Boards guidance of not drawing conclusions until all evidence has been reviewed.

And over the course of the investigation, it became very clear that the problem started in the left wing. This again does not necessarily mean the foam strike caused the problem, not yet, just that SOMETHING caused a crack in the reinforced carbon carbon that allowed plasma to enter and basically start melting the glue that held the other RCC plates together. This ultimately caused the shuttle to fail. And this is what most people don’t understand. I was talking to my husband about this book and he said something about the shuttle exploded and no…an explosion may have been kinder. An explosion would not have given the shuttle crew a chance to realize something was wrong. The shuttle literally disintegrated around the crew. And based on the position of several switches found on a partially intact panel, there’s no doubt that in the end, the crew knew they were in trouble.

The good news there is, they would have only had about 30 seconds of realization, before they blessedly passed out from rapid depressurization at high altitude. And I say this is good news because of how the crew died, which was not included in this weeks book. Bringing Columbia Home was about the massive recovery effort, the 25,000 people who came together to help, the volunteers who manned the food kitchens to keep the searchers fed, the people in the various towns along the flight path that opened their homes, literally housing and doing laundry for the searchers so that the searchers only had to focus on recovery.

So, jumping back briefly to last weeks book, In Packing for Mars, Mary Roach discusses Felix Baumgartner’s very famous Red Bull skydive, where Red Bull ballooned him up to 24 miles up, so he could jump, with a parachute. On the way down, he broke the sound barrier. It was an incredible marketing stunt that went viral on youtube. Except, as Roach points out, Astronauts are not skydivers.

When Columbia began breaking up, she was 40 miles up, not quite double the height of Baumgartner’s jump. As she began her descent and the crew was literally ripped from the crew cabin, they experienced shock waves which were created by the pieces of the shuttle around them, so that the crew members themselves disintegrated, just as their ship had done. The closest analogy here on terra firma is jetskiing behind a  boat. Your skiis are going to hit those waves created by the boat. But at 3400 miles per hour. The good news is, the crew had long passed out before that first shock wave hit, and literally scrambled their brains.

Even if the crew had had parachutes, they would not have been alive to pull the rip cords.

Back to Bringing Columbia Home. Once they had narrowed down damage to the left wing as the cause of the crash, the investigation team had to know if the foam strike had caused the damage, or something else. So they had a testing facility, I don’t recall which one but it is in the book, try and mimic the foam strike. They knew from the video footage and time of strike, that at that point in the flight, Columbia was traveling at about 1500 miles per hour. When the fuel tank was ejected and the foam piece broke off, it immediately lost speed, but still would have been traveling at about 1,000 mph when it hit the shuttle. The testing facility was able to nearly duplicate the fractures found in the wing plates by firing foam at the test wing at 500 mph. So there is no question this was the source of all the sorrow.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board ultimately determined that NASA’s culture had made it difficult to raise concerns vis a vis when they noticed the foam strike, no one wanted to discuss the possible ramifications with the higher ups. The report blamed the White House and Congress for cutting NASA’s budget so that corners were cut on safety…prove to me its not safe, right?

The report cites how known concerns are never fully addressed, going all the way back to Challenger and Apollo 1. Foam shedding from the tanks had happened repeatedly over the years, and basically its only with the grace of God that it hadn’t hit a shuttle before.

The board also asked if rescue would have been possible. The short answer is no, and the authors lay out why in the book, and has maddening as it is, you have to accept their reasoning. It’s very easy to armchair quarterback it from twenty years later and having NO experience with the technology and bureaucracies at hand, with all the wisdom of Captain Hindsight. But no, rescue would not have been feasible, even if we had KNOWN it was an issue.

But NASA did make changes. When they finally launched their next orbiter, they had a back up shuttle prepped and ready to launch, in case rescue was needed. It was not. The remaining three orbiters flew additional missions until the orbiter program retired in 2011.

This book was heartbreaking to read. Literally, I cried every day. It was very well written and moving in the care it showed for the subject matter, not just Columbia herself, but the loss of life. And not just the crew, but the two searchers who died while trying to help. At it’s absolute core, this book is about humanity, and humanity coming together to do the right thing. Even though it was the hard thing. Its about human connection. And faith. The profound faith of the crew of Columbia, and of the searchers who worked so hard to bring them all home.

Review is up at YouTube and Rumble.