Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [66]
In the astronaut office at NASA, we knew the statistics. Each mission had a “demonstrated risk” of 1 in 67.5, meaning that was the probability we wouldn’t make it back alive. Our “calculated risk”—the likelihood of a catastrophic failure on any given mission—was thought to be 1 in 57 for each mission, according to NASA data crunchers. I flew a total of four shuttle missions, which suggests that I had somewhere between a 1-in-14 and a 1-in-17 likelihood of not surviving my NASA career.
To understand the risks of space travel, I’d sometimes ask friends who aren’t astronauts to consider a deck of cards. “Imagine that I offered you a million dollars if you pick any of the fifty-two cards except the ace of spades,” I’d say. “A million dollars just like that. But the deal would be: If you pick the ace of spades, you’d lose your life. Would you take that risk—one out of fifty-two?”
Some would. Most wouldn’t. Even for a million dollars.
Then I’d ask: “Would you take those same odds for a ride in the space shuttle?”
Not many people said yes. But that’s the unspoken deal astronauts choose to take.
Our families knew the statistics, too, of course. By tradition, the day before liftoff, we’d be permitted to step out of quarantine and say goodbye to our spouses and children. The hugs were long. The mood would be joyous but stressful. Tears were common. There was a poignancy even in mundane directives: “Don’t forget to put out the garbage cans.” All of us were aware that fourteen of our comrades went through this same goodbye ritual, the hugs and the kisses, but didn’t make it home.
Gabby used to tell me that she never slept well when I was in space. She felt nervous and, for a take-charge person, uncomfortably helpless. She’d be glued to NASA TV in the middle of the night. During my 2008 mission, she talked about her worries in an interview on CNN. “I wake up every couple hours,” she said. “I check e-mail. Check the news. Make sure everything is going OK. You never really relax until you see the vehicle touch down, the parachute deploy, and it fully rolls to a stop.”
I’d sometimes talk to Gabby about my experiences on February 1, 2003, the day Columbia disintegrated during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The disaster happened because a piece of foam insulation not much bigger than the size of a pizza box had broken off from the shuttle’s external tank when it launched sixteen days earlier. This piece of debris had struck the left wing, damaging the vehicle’s thermal protection system, which we call TPS. The TPS was designed to protect the shuttle from the intense heat that results during reentry.
Columbia’s crew members had been aware that they were having serious problems. As the orbiter sped across New Mexico and then Texas, the crew was confronted with failures that we often see in the simulator. In this case, however, the failures were real and Columbia was quickly coming apart.
The last audio transmission came just before 8 a.m. central time, about sixteen minutes before the planned touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Columbia’s commander, Rick Husband, said “Roger” and then was abruptly cut off. About five seconds later, Columbia was out of control. Hot plasma had entered the wing and was melting the vehicle’s structure from the inside out. Over the next forty-two seconds, the crew fought desperately to salvage a rapidly deteriorating situation. At about 180,000 feet and Mach 15, the crew cabin began to break up. More than 84,000 pieces of debris would fall over east Texas.
Within seconds of hearing that we had lost communication with Columbia, and more ominously, that we had also lost tracking, I was in my car rushing to the NASA office. I joined another astronaut, Mike Good, in our contingency action center, where we started going through the mishap checklist. Over the next thirty minutes, nearly everyone in the astronaut office arrived to help.
We had never planned for