_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [123]
The two stared at one another. Was that thing coming apart?
Inside Mission Control the reentry appeared normal until 8:54:24 A.M. Eastern time, when the Maintenance, Mechanical and Crew Systems officer informed entry flight director LeRoy Cain that four hydraulic sensors in the left wing were indicating “off-scale low.” At 8:59:15 A.M., the same crew systems officer reported that pressure readings in both left landing-gear tires had been lost.
Suddenly, Columbia’s commander, Rick Husband, was calling. He hadn’t talked to Mission Control since entering Earth’s atmosphere fifteen minutes earlier.
“And, uh, Hou…” he began, only for his transmission to be lost in the middle of the word “Houston.” This was not unusual. Such communications dropouts happen frequently during reentry when the Shuttle is banking and rolling as planned. Its huge tail assembly blocks signals between itself and the TDRS satellite 22,300 miles above the western Pacific. It is the TDRS satellite network that relays transmissions between the Shuttles and Mission Control.
LeRoy Cain told CapCom Charles Hobaugh to alert the crew about the sensors and tire-pressure losses.
Husband attempted to respond to Hobaugh with, “Roger, uh, buh—” Those were the last words from Columbia at 8:59:32 A.M. Eastern time as the storied Space Shuttle sped over north central Texas at an altitude of slightly less than forty miles.
What followed was inevitable. The super-hot plasma sped freely through the six-inch hold into Columbia’s left wing, melting the ship’s inner structure. America’s first Space Shuttle was instantly ripped into more than 84,000 pieces that would be recovered later, and its dedicated crew of seven, without a hint of their doom, died so swiftly they blessedly never finished their final thought.
I sat straight up in my chair, pulled my microphone closer, and told MSNBC control we should go on the air NOW!
The MSNBC anchor came to me and no sooner than I was reporting, “Mission Control has lost communications with the Space Shuttle Columbia,” I heard a strange click on my interrupted feedback line from New York. The voice of David Bloom was instantly in my ear along with Soledad O’Brien’s, and we were on all NBC networks with live coverage.
At the Shuttle landing strip itself, New York Times reporter and friend Stefano Coledan told me, “The first hint was the silence.” The countdown clock ticked down to touchdown time. No sonic boom rolled through the Florida swamps. Something was desperately wrong.
I brought our viewers up to date, and Mission Control kept calling Columbia, and, of course, the Space Shuttle crew did not answer, and soon one of our affiliate stations in Texas had video of the remains of Columbia streaking across the Lone Star state.
David Bloom, who would lose his own life a little more than two months later during the Iraqi invasion, came to me, and as soon as I saw the video I knew: “It’s Challenger all over again, David,” I said. “We’ve now lost Columbia.”
By mid-afternoon, NBC had flown Tom Brokaw to the Cape from his vacation in the Virgin Islands, and we were well into our coverage of the loss of a second Space Shuttle and its crew.
In Texas, a massive search-and-recovery undertaking involving more than 25,000 people from 270 different federal, state, and town emergency agencies was underway. In all, the searchers found over 84,000 individual pieces of Columbia from Fort Worth, Texas, to Fort Pork, Louisiana, an area the size of Connecticut covering 2.3 million acres.
By an amazing stroke of luck, there were no reports of injury and little property damage caused by the raining debris. NASA officials crossed themselves, and Florida Today space reporter Todd Halvorson wrote an investigative story stating that if the instant breakup of the Space Shuttle had occurred only one minute earlier, the bulk of the wreckage would have fallen on south Dallas.
The recovered debris played a significant role in the investigation, as Space Shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach and