Columbia and the Year of Flight
‘Roger, uh–’radioed flight commander Rick D. Husband, 45, as he acknowledged news from Mission Control that there were wonky tire-pressure readings from sensors on the left wing of the space shuttle Columbia.
There were no further voice communications from Columbia.
It happened in the centennial year of the first manned flight. Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, the Wright brothers managed to urge their motorized kite some 120 feet into a gust off the sea that might have elevated a barn door. A hundred years later Columbia, with its crew of seven, flew 200,000 feet above Texas, meeting the atmosphere at 12,500 miles per hour and on schedule for a touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, 16 minutes later. Colonel Husband’s wife and two children waited there to welcome him back to Earth.
That was at 9 a.m. EST, on Saturday, February 1.
On the ground in Texas, the general public realized as soon as the flight engineers did that something was wrong. In a little house in the woods outside Nacogdoches, Donna Lipschutz was vacuuming when the sky started falling. “The first thing I thought was that my washing machine was off balance. We were standing around saying, ‘What could that be?’”
Then they started finding the pieces: in the watermelon patch behind Elmo’s store, in the drive-through of the Commercial Bank in downtown Nacogdoches, in ditches along roadsides among the beer cartons, truck mud flaps, and Styrofoam Sonic Drive-in containers. Many of the fragments hit hard and skidded, kicking up red Texas dirt. Incredibly, no one on the ground was hit. The momentum of the pieces with the greatest mass carried them farthest from the point of breakup, to eastern Texas and the Louisiana border, relatively unpopulated parts of the nation.
There were shards of steel and, worse, helmets and body parts. Following a track of lopped-off pine branches, one man found a piece of a computer board; another found a container with worms that had been part of an experiment, the only organisms aboard the shuttle that made it back to Earth alive. Some 25,000 people, from deer hunters on horseback to National Guardsmen, carved the countryside into a grid, wading through briars and swamps to collect more than 84,000 pieces of debris, about a third of the shuttle. NASA workers, the FBI, FEMA, and the EPA rushed into the area, coordinating with volunteers to mark the finds with yellow plastic tape, and then testing the pieces for toxic volatile organic compounds. “Varmints and vultures” were vying for the remains, figured Narlon Chambless. He measured a spear of metal in his front yard that had pierced the earth. Turkey buzzards circled above. “It’s sad for their families,” he said. “But they knew the risks when they got up in that thing.”
