Editor’s note: Reporter Kevin Spear was part of the Orlando Sentinel’s coverage team for the Space Shuttle Columbia accident, which occurred 20 years ago this week on Feb. 1, 2003. He offers this first-person perspective on how the Sentinel reported the space tragedy.
My 5-year-old was playing basketball in a downtown Orlando gym on Feb. 1, 2003, when a lady climbed the bleachers chatting with someone about cookies she had baked and brought.
Then, she said: “Did you hear the shuttle burned up?” That was a jolt. I had no idea. My chunky cell phone wasn’t smart back then. But I instantly figured on months of furious journalism ahead.
Following the shuttle Columbia disaster that day, the meaning behind “burned up” would evolve stunningly. A 1.7-pound chunk of foam the size of a suitcase broke off the shuttle’s external tank 82 seconds after liftoff Jan. 16. The debris knocked a hole in the thermal armor along Columbia’s left wing. During re-entry 16 days later, hot gases invaded the wounded wing, destroying the space plane less than 20 minutes before it was to touch down. All seven of the crew died.
In the Orlando Sentinel’s coverage, the crash’s explanation was meticulously unpacked for technical, political, malfeasance, human, historic and other dramas.
The paper chronicled events from the shuttle’s catastrophic launch from Florida to its fiery plummet over Texas. It shadowed search and body recovery. It investigated the investigators. The paper wrote on the large lives of the dead astronauts and probed the shuttle’s high performing but vulnerable components. And it provided extensive meaning for findings that NASA had gutted its safety culture 17 years after seven astronauts perished in the Challenger disaster.
Intending to be the paper of record, we went toe-to-toe with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post and landed many of the punchiest stories. Soon, the disaster was eclipsed often by the Iraq War, yet we kept on.
In the coming months, I would work in eight cities from Palo Alto, Calif., to Titusville and from Colorado Springs, Colo., to San Antonio, Texas, churning through tens of thousands of dollars for travel. If the paper spared any expense, I wasn’t told.
Dozens of Sentinel reporters were assigned to the Columbia story for days, weeks or far longer. A lot of us had covered launches and knew that flights were laced with risk from liftoff to landing.
That was a naive, understating impression. The NASA investigation board and the Sentinel’s probe unveiled jaw-dropping dangers that NASA had recognized, experienced, left unsolved and normalized. Repeated negligence, with Challenger and Columbia, had killed 14 accomplished people.
Rick Husband, Columbia’s commander who became a hotshot pilot in his teens, seemed like a pretty good guy when I attended Sunday service at his Amarillo church the day after the accident. Hearing his recorded voice with startling fidelity, he modestly recalled in Texas Panhandle drawl how he became an astronaut.
From a Sentinel story: “A shuttle has 2.5 million parts. It accelerates to 17,400 mph in 8.5 minutes, withstanding temperatures ranging from the minus-423 degrees of liquid hydrogen fuel to the 6,000-plus degrees within engine combustion chambers. Then, after orbiting in the vacuum of space, it endures temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees on its way to landing on Earth.”
Intended as an orbital truck, shuttles had big wings and tails jutting into harm’s way. They had giant payload doors. The vehicles were strapped to the sides of 150-foot fuel tanks and furiously unstoppable solid rocket boosters. The space planes were sitting ducks.
Shuttle perils weren’t just to astronauts.
The Sentinel started one of its deeper dives, “Critical Flaws In Shuttles Loom as Potential Disaster,” with a look at the explosive bolts that hold down shuttles until liftoff.
For a flight of shuttle Atlantis, the story explained, something went badly. Detonation charges embedded in hold-down nuts failed.
Redundant firing signals triggered backup explosives, and Atlantis leaped into orbit. But NASA personnel, never solving the failure, were chilled by thoughts of hold downs not letting go of a shuttle straining under 7.8 million pounds of thrust.
If SpaceX makes space flight look easy, shuttles made it look hard. The spacecraft was conceived problematically for do-all abilities.
The Sentinel quoted Bill Heink, who had retired as director of The Boeing Co. shuttle operations at Kennedy Space Center: “Some people still involved in the program confided to me that they have been awakened in the night with nightmarish pictures of the vehicle cartwheeling off the pad.”
Woe unto Kennedy Space Center’s neighbor, Titusville.
Shuttle main engines and the machinery that fed them – and their speeds, pressures, volumes and temperatures – were demonic. But, as the Sentinel learned from NASA “anomaly” reports, thrusters often leaked poison, wiring frayed and arced, auxiliary power units sputtered and caught fire and hydrogen invaded the wrong voids. And, the shuttles were just getting old. Those were some of the big-ticket worries and foam wasn’t one of them. NASA seemed merely annoyed by the stuff.
The orbiters routinely came home peppered with dings and scrapes from strikes by foam pieces breaking free during launch. NASA grew accustomed it, never anticipating the day when a slab would shear off and hurtle at a relative speed approaching supersonic toward a shuttle.
“Arguably,” the Sentinel reported, “Columbia was a classic example of Murphy’s Law: The chunk of foam was the largest ever known to have come off the tank. It fell off later than any previous piece, so it was moving faster — about 500 mph in relation to the orbiter. And like none before it, the foam struck directly on the leading edge of the wing.”
NASA immediately formed the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, stocking with it admirals, generals, scientists and aerospace giants. They met at Barksdale Air Force Base a day after the disaster.
The chairman of the CAIB, as it was often called, was a retired admiral, Harold Gehman. The group of 13 included the Federal Aviation Administration’s director of accident investigation, Steven Wallace, Brigadier General Duane Deal, Stanford University physics professor Douglas Osheroff and trailblazer Sally K. Ride, America’s first woman in space.
Members of the the space shuttle Columbia accident investigation board including Maj. Gen. Ken Hess, left, Rear Admiral Stephen Turcotte, rear center, and Admiral Harold Gehman, center, talk with Jerry Smelser, NASA External Tank program manager, in blue, and Michael Javery, vice president of Production Operations for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Michoud Operations during a tour, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003 at the Lockheed Martin Corps. facility outside New Orleans. The facility is where shuttle externaltanks are built. Gehman said the purpose of the visit was to get an understanding of the tank’s production process and a smaller team likely would return next week to begin collecting data. (AP Photo/Lockheed Martin, ho) ORG XMIT: WXS101
The panel’s caliber seemed matched for a national tragedy. But the Sentinel leaned hard into a story that the CAIB’s civilians were hired by NASA at executive salaries. That meant that along with five active duty military officers, two transportation officials and a NASA official, all were federal employees.
The upshot was NASA could hide testimony and transcripts under lock and key. “Those are never going to see the light of day,” Gehman said, justifying confidentiality as how to gather truth from employees afraid of shame or termination.
Even to Congress, it appeared NASA had fixed the probe to evade or bury blame.
Still, Ride, a physicist and professor then at the University of California at San Diego, hardly seemed like anyone’s stooge. She answered my email, questioning the arrangement.
“I don’t see it an issue for the Board members to be on the federal payroll – this board, unlike most pro-bono government committees, is essentially a full-time job” that merits compensation, Ride wrote back. “But one might ask whether it should be NASA’s payroll.”
The task for Gehman and company was daunting. It would lead NASA, Congress and the nation to realize that the space agency, revered for putting humanity on the moon, had screwed up again, bureaucratizing away its instinct, ability and want for care with lives, exotically expensive hardware and national pride.
To do that – to prove and then nest the disaster’s physical cause within a deep reveal of NASA’s dysfunction – Gehman was part interrogator, part sleuth, part showman.
On July 7, five months after the accident, the CAIB invited a gaggle of reporters to the Southwest Research Institute, a nonprofit center of advanced science and technology in San Antonio.
Until that day, there was lingering denial at NASA that a chunk of foam a bit stouter than that of a cheap cooler could kill a shuttle.
Institute technicians had assembled a cannon powered by compressed nitrogen. The gangly device suggested brewery plumbing but the setting radiated suspense.
The cannon was aimed at a precise angle at a panel made for the leading edge of shuttle wings. It was densely black, manufactured from material called reinforced carbon-carbon, tough, lightweight, able to withstand plasma temperatures and costing a fortune.
The test was brief, emitting a whoosh, bang and observers’ gasps.
The 1.67 pounds of foam at 500 mph delivered nearly a ton of impact that smashed a circular hole of 250 square inches through the wing panel.
Reporters were surprised to be peaking behind a curtain of NASA investigation. But in that moment, we understood our roles in Gehman’s theater. The optics and a declarative statement said it all.
“We have found the smoking gun,” announced CAIB member Scott Hubbard, then NASA’s director of the Ames Research Center, who oversaw the test.
The aerospace world knew that CAIB members were the heaviest hitters. I got access to a few of them to convey their roles to the public.
I met Deal inside the Air Force’s Cheyenne Mountain blast-hardened fortress, which he commanded then with the 21st Space Wing in Colorado Springs, and which tracked Columbia’s re-entry disintegration. Deal formerly flew the SR-71 Blackbird spy planes, the world’s fastest jet. He and Husband were colleagues and buddies.
Deal had investigated many fatal Air Force crashes. He interviewed more than 80 NASA workers about the shuttle disaster. “Not one of them said safety is where it ought to be,” he said.
I met Osheroff in his Stanford laboratory. He had won a Nobel Prize for physics. His role mirrored that of superstar physicist Richard Feynman of the Challenger accident board, known for a dramatic demonstration of O-ring, or gasket weakness in cold temperatures – a prime culprit in that disaster.
Osheroff took the lead for the CAIB in analyzing foam. With $100 worth of equipment and experimenting in his kitchen, he made the case that NASA knew too little about foam behavior and why it detached during launches.
The investigation board did not ram its findings down NASA’s throat, intending to put someone in jail, but it bluntly rubbed the agency’s face in its lethal failings.
Both Challenger and Columbia ultimately were lost, investigators said, “because of the failure of NASA’s organizational system.”
Still, the investigators stressed “strong support for return to flight at the earliest date consistent with the overriding objective of safety.”
NASA restarted flights on July 26, 2005. The Sentinel was there. Shuttle Discovery blazed from its KSC launchpad, shedding a trail of foam, including a 1-pound chunk.
It missed the orbiter.
kspear@orlandosentinel.com
