Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew. Michael D. Leinbach and Jonathan H. Ward. Arcade, 2018
(Not a book about religion, but a book I found worth reading.)
On January 16, 2003, Michael Leinbach was the launch director for STS-107, the 113th space shuttle launch. On February 1, he was among those waiting in vain at the Kennedy Space Center for the return of Columbia. And by that evening, he was in charge of NASA’s Rapid Response Team as they began the enormous task of bringing Columbia and her crew home.
This is mostly a book about people. It touches on the debates surrounding Columbia’s last mission and what could or should have been done differently, but it’s mainly a story of the people who went out into the wilds of east Texas, battling terrible weather, difficult terrain, briars and stump holes, snakes, and their own emotions in order to find the remains of the crew and enough of the wreckage to keep the public safe and, if possible, to determine what had caused Columbia to come apart.
The search involved grid-walking–walking lines, with searchers ideally spaced evenly–across an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. The original searchers were a combination of local volunteers, law enforcement personnel, and NASA employees (many of them on their own time). Eventually, the search was largely turned over to Forest Service Incident Management Teams (who do much more than fight fires). All of these people had to come to emotional terms with what they were doing.
Perhaps the group of people with the hardest jobs were the astronaut corps. Whenever crew remains were found (the authors quite rightly don’t go into much detail about the condition of remains, but it’s clear that the bodies of at least some of the crew were broken apart on re-entry), an astronaut always went out on the recovery team. But no one had an easy job.
The support of the local townspeople is one of the highlights of the story. Whatever they could do for the searchers, they did–feeding them, giving them places to live, and in general letting them know that they appreciated the task the searchers were doing.
As the recovery effort wound down, the focus of the investigation switched to reconstruction of Columbia. Reconstruction, not rebuilding, because Columbia obviously would never fly again. But arranging recovered debris (by weight, they recovered about 38% of the shuttle and contents) according to where it had come from on the shuttle, the investigators were able to determine with great confidence what had destroyed Columbia.
The process of reconstruction was an emotional one as well. Many of the people involved in identifying where a scrap of debris had come from had spent their entire careers working on Columbia, and seeing it in pieces brought them to tears.
Yet the story is not a grim one. It is a story of people faced with a tough job and doing it anyway. It has its moments of humor, such as this tale from the early days of the search:
After Sowell’s crew found its first object of the day, his three new elderly volunteers broke from their positions to examine it. They argued over whether the object was a piece of the shuttle, because it appeared to have rust on it. Sowell began to lose his temper. “Look, guys, we’re not a bunch of rocket scientists here. You need to get back into line!” To his surprise, one of the men told him that, in fact, they were rocket scientists–retired Apollo-era NASA employees.
The last part of the book describes the long-term storage of Columbia wreckage in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, where it’s accessible to researchers. It also touches upon the winding-down of the shuttle program and the loss of institutional knowledge that came with it.
The link above is an Amazon affiliate link, but if you want to get the book elsewhere, that’s fine with me.
Cogitans Clare 