Submitted March 23, 2003, 10:29 PM
What were your thoughts and feelings when you heard that Columbia was lost?
In a terrible coincidence, I was at the Kennedy Space Center, waiting to watch Columbia land, when the accident occurred. I was with a friend whose company had a payload on STS-107. Personally,
I did not know any of the crew, but one of the guys from the company worked with Kalpana Chawla, and afterwards all he could say over and over again was, "She was such a nice girl." The night before the
landing, another guy had downloaded a picture from the Web of a candid shot inside the Columbia middeck that caught a glimpse of their payload. On the right was K.C., and we all remarked on how radiant and beautiful
and happy she looked.
On landing day, we were in a bus heading from the KSC HQ building to the SLF. There was this guy behind us from New Zealand who kept raving about how exciting the landings were, as cool as the launches he said. When I saw that the
landing convoy vehicles were right in front of our bus, my friend was literally jumping up and down in her seat. We pulled into the SLF area, got off the buses, and headed for the viewing bleachers.
There were three of those, two for invitees and a third separate one for the crew families. There was a countdown clock that was ticking down to the time of the expected touchdown. There was also a loudspeaker broadcasting the voice of the PAO person from JSC. At around five
minutes to nine, they said they had just crossed the coast of California. We went over to the NASA Exchange table to buy some stuff. When we returned, it was around 9:00 AM, the countdown clock said 16 minutes to landing...and the PAO guy was saying that they had no voice
comm or tracking data from the orbiter. The countdown clock kept ticking down, but still no orbiter. People were expecting to hear the double sonic boom announcing arrival, but there was nothing. Some people thought they saw something, but it turned out to be a bird.
Sean O'Keefe was with the families. At about ten after, I saw some people talking to him, and then suddenly he took off. The clock was now rapidly approaching zero, and with the PAO guy still saying that they had no contact with the vehicle and that the flight controllers were now
on contingency procedures, we knew that something was very wrong. Shortly afterwards, I could see some of the crew families being taken away.
Finally, the clock counted down to zero. Still no Columbia. The clock started counting _up_ from zero. About a minute or so later, somebody came onto the loudspeakers to ask all of us to return to the buses. We did so, but it meant walking between our bleachers and those of the crew
families towards the parking lot. As we walked through this gap, we looked over at the crew families and I could see that many of them were in tears. Some were holding hands and praying.
We got back on the bus, but we were told absolutely nothing as we pulled away for the drive back to the HQ Building. As the bus started to move, everybody who had a cell phone whipped it out and started frantically calling anybody they could think of, looking for any piece of information. During the trip back to the building, bits and pieces of
information/speculation began to filter in. Somebody said that Columbia had landed in a cornfield. Somebody else said that his/her sister/brother/colleague/spouse/father/mother said that they had seen on Fox/CNN/MBNSC that the vehicle had broken up somewhere over Texas. As a
clearer picture of what had happened emerged, all of us on the bus fell silent and got very upset. Many people were dabbing their eyes.
There were TVs in the HQ building, so when we got back we finally found out exactly the enormity of what had happened.
The next couple of hours were like a daze. NASA ordered that everything was to be sealed and impounded for the investigation. So, I went with my friend and the team back to their labs in the Operations and Checkout
building next door. I helped them clear out personal effects from the labs; everything else was to be left in place and the door locked. Next, we photocopied any documents they thought they might need, as notebooks and other documents also had to be left in the labs. By around 2:00 PM, there was nothing left to do, so we left the base.
As we walked out of the O&C Building, I looked up at the sky. It was a beautiful, beautiful crisp blue Florida sky, perfect, with just a few puffy, perfectly white clouds hovering overhead. And I could not help but think, how could something so terrible happen on such a beautiful
day?
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If you are old enough to remember, please compare your responses to other important moments in space travel like the Challenger disaster and the moon walk.
I am old enough to remember the Challenger disaster, and my response at that time was actually quite similar to that I experienced with Columbia. That feeling was of disbelief that something catastrophic could happen to the Shuttle. I heard about Challenger while at my locker in junior high school after lunch. As I was dialing the combination, the bad kid in the school (ie. the guy who does all kind of mischief but never seems to get caught) came running down the hall screaming that the Space Shuttle had exploded. Considering the source, I didn't find it credible at the time, but as the afternoon wore on and I started hearing more and more rumors from other students I started to have doubts. The odd thing was, it never occurred to me that "blew up" could literally mean that. I kept thinking that perhaps the Shuttle had been struck by lightning, or there had been an on-board fire, or they had lost a main engine, anything but a total destruction of the vehicle. Flashforward to Columbia, as an adult and as an aerospace engineer, still the thought of a catastrophic accident really didn't enter my mind when I was at the SLF. Intellectually, I knew that it was impossible for the Shuttle NOT to show up...it was an unpowered glider, falling from space, it HAD to arrive. The loss of voice comm I could attribute to either a brief ionization blackout somehow not covered by TDRS, but even when the PAO announcer siad that they had no tracking data, still the thought never really came to my head that the vehicle could be lost. My mind was simply a blank. In both cases, the irrational part of my mind saw the Shuttle as being something invincible, that it would not just "blow up" or disintegrate. That's not something that is easy to get over.
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Have your views of space travel changed over time?
In the details yes, but my general view of the need for the human race to continue journeying into space has not changed. Indeed, after both accidents the conviction grew stronger. The future does not belong to the fainthearted, it belongs to the brave.
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