_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [125]
The plan called for Atlantis to rendezvous under an inverted Columbia and station keep with the cargo doors of both Shuttles open, facing each other. Using tethered ropes, the Columbia astronauts would have been brought on board Atlantis. After the successful rescue, Mission Control would have configured Columbia for a de-orbit burn that would ditch the crippled Shuttle in the Pacific.
To NASA, the rescue option was considered “challenging but feasible.” And, despite NASA management shortcomings in the loss of Columbia, the great majority of NASA employees are still imbued with Apollo 13’s “can do” spirit. For every Space Shuttle launch, a rescue shuttle is standing by. The space station is a safe haven, and rescue crews stand in deep lines ready to fly to the aid of their fellow astronauts.
TWENTY-EIGHT
That’s a Wrap!
Following the loss of Columbia, it would be two-and-a-half years before another Space Shuttle would fly. NASA needed an attitude and cultural adjustment, and the agency also needed a fix for the problem of foam falling off a Shuttle’s external fuel tank. Ignoring the foam hazard for twenty-two years and 113 Space Shuttle flights had killed seven astronauts and destroyed a $2 billion space machine.
At 10:39 A.M. Eastern time on July 26, 2005, the Space Shuttle Discovery roared into orbit. It was the first return-to-flight mission following Columbia, and at the controls was a gutsy shuttle commander named Eileen Collins. She was about to show the boys how it was done.
With her years of well-honed skills, Colonel Collins flew a textbook flight. Her rendezvous was perfect, and she flew Discovery through a smooth 360-degree backflip so inspection cameras could photograph the Shuttle’s thermal protection system—the system with the hole that brought Columbia down. She docked, unloaded supplies, and sent two astronauts outside on space-station repair assignments. When Discovery’s stay at the station was over, Collins ended the two-week mission with a predawn landing at California’s Edwards Air Force Base.
Later at the Cape, Colonel Collins looked at me and whispered, “I landed a little short, but it was black out there.”
I smiled at her and nodded. “No one noticed.”
Her command had been superb but there was one problem, not of Eileen Collins’s making. During her climb into orbit, more potentially damaging foam dropped off her Shuttle’s external fuel tank. The foam debris did no harm, but it could have, and it was back to the drawing boards.
Another year of fix-it work dominated the space centers across the country. Little by little, NASA convinced itself the foam shedding had been reduced to an acceptable minimum. The shuttle Discovery lifted off once again, this time on Fourth of July 2006. Colonel Steve Lindsey took his crew to the space station on another textbook flight. The mission set the stage for the Space Shuttle trips needed to complete the construction of the international outpost—an orbiting complex that would grow to the size of a small city block.
Once again, America’s spaceports were humming with happy workers. The Space Station Processing Facility at the Cape was packed with complex pieces of the orbiting international outpost. One by one, the Space Shuttle fleet hauled each part that would form the final station upstairs. The challenge was to complete the “city in the sky” before the Space Shuttles were to be retired by presidential order September 30, 2010. NASA took a deep breath and went to work.
Chris Jansing and Jay Barbree report live on Discovery’s Return to Flight for MSNBC. (Shepherd Collection).
NBC’s Cape Canaveral crew. Seated, left to right: Specials’ producer Brian Cavanaugh, Atlanta bureau chief Frieda Morris, producer Martha Caskey, and producer Dan Shepherd. Standing, left to right: correspondent Jay Barbree, cameraman Dan Beckmann, production coordinator David Molko, and senior Today Show producer Javier Morgado. (Barbree Collection).
All the while, America’s spaceport was getting ready for the future. A new fleet