_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [122]
The Mission Management Team brushed aside further discussions of the foam. The Columbia Investigation Board also noted that the management team met only five times during the course of the mission, not every day as required by Shuttle program rules.
Ironically, on flight day eight of the mission, Mission Control sent up a message to Rick Husband and Willie McCool informing Columbia’s pilots about the foam hit on the left wing. The message stated there was no concern for reinforced carbon-carbon or tile damage, and because the phenomenon had been seen before, there was “absolutely no concern for reentry.” It was a heads-up for the crew in case the media asked about the incident during an upcoming in-flight news conference.
On the morning of that fateful Saturday, the first day of February 2003, the Columbia crew, justifiably proud of its accomplishments over the past fifteen days, prepared its ship for the landing at its Florida launch site.
Touchdown was set for 9:16 A.M. Eastern time, and I took my place before my microphone. On the main NBC network, Weekend Today hosts David Bloom and Soledad O’Brien were moving through their show with little or no interest in Columbia’s landing. After eighty-seven post-Challenger touchdowns without a hitch, this landing was routine. NBC News’s plan was for the Today Show to cut in with a brief video of the landing while I did a play-by-play of Columbia’s return for MSNBC’s Saturday-morning viewers.
On Columbia’s 255th trip around Earth in sixteen days, commander Rick Husband was given the “go” to put on his brakes and leave orbit. The senior pilot was flying Columbia backward and tails-up when he ignited the ship’s two orbiting maneuvering rockets. Twelve thousand pounds of thrust pounded against Columbia’s forward speed for two minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The burn was “right on the nose,” and it slowed the big Shuttle’s forward motion just enough to drop it out of orbit and onto an hour-long flight path to its Florida landing site.
Entry interface came over the Pacific Ocean at an altitude of 400,000 feet. This is when the spacecraft skips along the upper surface of the planet’s air, much like a stone skipping across a lake. The first effects of reentry heat can be felt when the Shuttle penetrates the atmosphere. Its surface grows hotter and hotter as it ploughs deeper and deeper into the thickening air. The plasma sheath around the Shuttle is hotter than the molten lava pouring from Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano.
In physics, plasma is a highly ionized gas containing an approximately equal number of positive ions and electrons. The super-hot plasma is the product of friction created by a fast-moving object through air. It first appeared to Columbia’s astronauts as a faint salmon glow. Nearing the California coast, Columbia was dropping like a rock. Its nose-up attitude was focusing the plasma’s super heat on its reinforced carbon-carbon panels covering the Shuttle’s nose and the leading edges of it wings.
“This is amazing,” Willie McCool said. “It’s really getting, uh, fairly bright out there,” he added, staring at the growing intensity of the outside fire.
Rick Husband grinned. It wasn’t his first reentry. He knew this was only the beginning of the blast furnace that was yet to come. “Yeah, you definitely don’t want to be outside now,” he smiled at his pilot.
Moments later, Columbia crossed the California coast at 8:53 A.M. Eastern time, twenty-three minutes from its Florida touchdown. Below, two news photographers had set up their cameras to photograph the returning Space Shuttle—a man-made shooting star leaving a long plume of fiery plasma trailing in its wake.
But instead of seeing a perfect plasma trail as expected, the photographers