Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [67]
“OK,” he said. “You go.”
I immediately called Harris County’s Constable Bill Bailey. He was a great option if you needed something done fast. There isn’t a law-enforcement official in the state of Texas who looks more the part than Bill Bailey. Big hat, big boots, big belt buckle, BIG man. I said, “Bill, this is Mark Kelly. I need a helicopter right now.”
No explanation was required. He just said, “I’ll call you right back.” Within minutes Bill had a car on the way to the Johnson Space Center to bring me to a waiting U.S. Coast Guard helicopter. A short time later I was on my way to the debris field.
We headed for Hemphill, Texas, population 1,100, because we’d gotten word that the crew compartment may have landed near there. (In the early going, the media speculated about whether any of the crew members could have survived. We knew better.)
Three of the seven crew members started with me and my brother in our astronaut class back in 1996; they were our friends. I tried, not always successfully, to set aside my emotions as I helped look for their remains. The area was very remote, and the debris was spread widely. An FBI agent and I had to take dirt roads and then go off into the woods. We recovered the remains of Laurel Clark, my very good friend and a U.S. Navy flight surgeon, on one of those dirt roads in Hemphill. She was the coworker whom our wedding-ring bearer would later be named after. Another search party found the remains of Columbia’s pilot, Willie McCool, in a wooded area not far away. I immediately went to the scene to help with the identification and to make sure things were handled appropriately.
On the second day, the FBI agent and I recovered the body of Dave Brown, a Navy captain who had been conducting science experiments on the mission. I spent two hours in the woods, sitting next to Dave’s body, while the owner of the property cut back trees to get a larger vehicle to our location. I’d wished Dave well before the mission. Now, sixteen days later, all I could do for him was to make sure that his remains could be returned to his family. Most astronauts write a letter to their families to be opened only if they don’t return from their missions. I sat with Dave’s body, thinking about whether he’d written a letter, and what it might have said.
Like the Challenger accident seventeen years earlier, the loss of Columbia came in the wake of signs that were ignored. This wasn’t just a random accident. NASA certainly could have done a better job of addressing the long-term problem of foam liberating from the external tank. While the space shuttle is an incredibly complex machine that can fail in thousands of catastrophic ways, it sometimes tries to tell you ahead of time what’s coming. I think this was one of those times. We had seen foam problems again and again on successive launches and done little about it. Poor decision-making contributed to both tragedies, Challenger and Columbia.
From all my conversations with her, Gabby knew how I felt about the failings within NASA. I learned there that a well-meaning team of people can sometimes make horrible decisions that no single individual would make. Groupthink, and an unwillingness to disagree with the bosses, was too often a problem at NASA. It may be oversimplifying to say it this way, but in my years as an astronaut, I learned that none of us is as dumb as all of us. That phrase is now clearly posted in the room at NASA used by the Mission Management Team. (When Gabby was injured, and a large medical team needed to be assembled to treat her, it was very helpful to me to keep this mantra in mind.)
In the wake of Columbia, I had a hard time fully reassuring my daughters that everything would be OK. Though