_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [121]
Shedding foam from the Space Shuttles’ external fuel tanks had been a major concern during the early missions, but by now it had become a fact of life. It was considered an acceptable risk and more of a post-flight maintenance problem than a threat to flight safety. Space Shuttle managers had come to believe that it was somewhat like hitting your car bumper with the cover of your Styrofoam cooler.
Columbia’s was the first mission to fly in three years that did not have the International Space Station as its destination. The station, of course, can serve as a safe haven for the crew of a crippled ship. The Shuttle’s mission was a planned science flight with more than eighty experiments during its sixteen days in orbit, an ambitious around-the-clock agenda with more than seventy scientists involved worldwide. On board were commander Rick Husband; pilot Willie McCool; mission specialists Dave Brown, India-born Kalpana Chawla, Mike Anderson, and Laurel Clark; and Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon. Husband, Anderson, and Chawla had flown once before.
Following an almost flawless countdown, America’s oldest and most storied Space Shuttle rumbled off its launch pad at 10:39 A.M. Eastern time on January 16, 2003. Weather was ideal with a temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit, calm winds, and scattered clouds at four thousand feet.
The launch appeared to be normal to us at the press site, and these observations were backed up by early reports from Mission Control. But ground cameras later revealed that 81.7 seconds into the flight, at an altitude of 65,000 feet, one large piece and at least two smaller pieces of insulating foam broke away from the external tank’s left bipod ramp, one of the connection points between Columbia and the tank.
Additional photographic analysis the next day revealed that the larger piece, traveling at more than five hundred miles per hour, struck Columbia’s left wing’s leading edge. The chunk had an estimated weight of 1.67 pounds and was one by two feet in size. It was the seventh known time in Space Shuttle history that foam had fallen from the left bipod ramp—but this time it was fatal, because unknown to Columbia’s astronauts or anyone on the ground, the collision had caused a six-inch breach in the reinforced carbon-carbon panel in the middle leading edge of the left wing.
Once in orbit, Columbia’s crew went to work on their two shifts while on the ground, the Mission Management Team, with the responsibility for resolving outstanding problems outside the scope of flight directors in Mission Control, gave Columbia’s flight cursory notice. Linda Ham, an up-and-coming former flight director who was the Space Shuttle Program integration manager at the Johnson Space Center near Houston, served as chairwoman.
Because of its size, the strike was considered to be “out of family,” and a debris assessment team was established to analyze the problem. They relied on a mathematical modeling tool called “Crater,” developed by the Boeing Corporation to predict the penetration depth of debris impact, but the system was stretched beyond its designed limits because of the large size of this particular piece of debris. By flight day nine, after extensive analysis, the team came to the conclusion that there was no flight safety risk, and reported their results to the Mission Management Team.
During that time, three requests were made to get Department of Defense spy-satellite enhanced imagery of the wing. Two of the requests were turned down, and the third never came to the attention of the Mission Management Team because of a communication breakdown. There were numerous e-mail exchanges about the foam strike between concerned structural engineers at NASA’s Langley and Johnson centers, but their concerns never reached the proper channels. To compound the situation, three days before the mission was to conclude,