Riding Rockets

STS-93 and STS-112 were saved by system redundancy, but there was another recurring problem on shuttle launches for which there was no redundancy to provide protection. Insulation foam was shedding from the gas tank and striking the orbiter. The phenomenon was first noted on STS-1 and was subsequently documented by photo imagery on sixty-four other shuttle missions. Hank Hartsfield and Mike Coats had observed it on our Zoo Crew flight in 1984. This foam-shedding anomaly was a violation of a design requirement, just as the pre-ChallengerSRB O-ring erosion had been a design violation. Nothing was supposed to hit our glass rocket, not even something as seemingly innocuous as the foam from the ET. But as hit shuttles kept returning to the Earth safely, engineers became ever more comfortable with accepting the design violation as nothing more than a maintenance issue—the foam strikes were requiring a handful of damaged tiles to be replaced between missions. The “normalization of deviance” phenomenon that had doomedChallenger in 1986 had returned to infect NASA and blind management to the seriousness of the foam loss problem. On January 16, 2003, eighty-two seconds into the flight ofColumbia, a briefcase-size piece of foam, weighing approximately one and a half pounds, shed from the ET and struck the Achilles’ heel of the shuttle heat shield, one of the wing leading-edge carbon panels. The impact blasted a hole of indeterminate size in that carbon. The damage had no effect on ascent andColumbia safely reached orbit. The site of the impact was not visible from the cockpit windows and the crew remained oblivious to the fact that their shuttle was mortally wounded. It could not survive reentry.

On the ground NASA engineers were aware of the foam strike—KSC cameras had recorded the incident. But these same engineers had no idea what, if any, damage had occurred and sinceColumbia was flying without a robot arm, they could not direct the crew to remotely survey the site (as we had been able to do on STS-27). A handful of engineers requested their management to ask the Department of Defense to use its photographic sources to acquire images of the impact site. Had these photos or a crew spacewalk determinedColumbia could not survive reentry, there was a reasonable chanceAtlantis could have been hurriedly readied for launch on a rescue mission. TheColumbia crew would have then donned spacesuits and transferred toAtlantis, andColumbia would have been abandoned in orbit. But key managers dismissed the photo request and never ordered a spacewalk. On February 1, 2003,Columbia would burn up on reentry, killing her seven-person crew.

I was in northern New Mexico at the time of the disaster, visiting my daughter and her family. Had I known of the reentry trajectory, I could have stepped outside and watchedColumbia pass nearly overhead. But I was not an eyewitness. I received the news from TV: “The space shuttleColumbia is overdue for landing at the Kennedy Space Center.” Images ofColumbia ’s fiery destruction soon followed. As I watched them I couldn’t help but visualize what the crew had experienced. I had no doubt their fortress cockpit had kept them alive during the out-of-control breakup of their machine. Just like theChallenger crew, they were trapped. Their backpack-parachute bailout system was useless at the extreme altitude and speed. And I couldn’t help but visualize the families. They would have been waiting at the KSC Shuttle Landing Facility, giddy in anticipation of having their loved ones safely on the ground and in their arms. They would have been chatting happily about the parties and postflight trips that were planned. Then an escort into widowhood would have come to their side to tell them the news. Their husbands and wife, fathers and mother would not be coming home.

I wasn’t affected byColumbia ’s loss as deeply asChallenger ’s. I had only a passing acquaintance with a few members of the crew. But I was still heartbroken. I stepped from my daughter’s house, walked into the adjacent desert hills, and began my prayers. Even as I was saying them, atoms ofColumbia and her crew were quietly and invisibly settling to Earth around me.

The final report of theColumbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) would read remarkably like theChallenger report issued seventeen years earlier. In fact, in some key paragraphs of their document, the CAIB could have plagiarized the Roger’s Commission report nearly word for word. The only edits required would have been to substitute “External Tank” for “Solid Rocket Booster” and “foam-shedding” for “O-ring erosion.” Workplace cultural issues, including overwhelming pressure to keep shuttle launches on schedule, had, again, resulted in NASA mishandling repeated evidence of a deadly design flaw.