A ‘duty’ to remember
After 2003 tragedy, astronauts’ legacy, lessons live on at home and NASA
Six-year-old Laurel Clark has the spunk and swimming chops of her grandmother and namesake, NASA astronaut Laurel Blair Salton Clark.
Laura Husband, 32, inherited the singing voice of her father, astronaut Rick Husband. Her brother Matthew, 27, has his attention to detail and passion for space.
Twenty years have passed since the Columbia space shuttle broke apart over Texas, yet memories of these astronauts live on at home and at NASA.
Their families channeled grief into helping others and continuing the Columbia crew’s legacy. NASA transformed a culture that had allowed the disaster to occur — one that accepted when systems didn’t act quite right and discouraged lower-level employees from speaking up.
The agency’s changes have been carried into the space station and moon programs. Its lessons have been shared with commercial companies and an up-and-coming generation that lacks the firsthand experiences of Columbia.
“You have to keep the corporate memory and the corporate culture and the lessons learned alive,” said Wayne Hale, a former manager for the Space Shuttle Program. “If you don’t know history, you’re doomed to repeat it.”
Seven astronauts died on Feb. 1, 2003: Rick Husband, 45; William McCool, 41; Michael Anderson, 43; David Brown, 46; Kalpana Chawla, 41; Laurel Blair Salton Clark, 41; and Ilan Ramon, 48.
“We have a duty to carry the memories of those that we lost,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a recent town hall, “and carry their dreams onward and upward.”
Columbia’s final mission, STS-107, launched on Jan. 16, 2003. It was the 28th flight for this shuttle — and the 113th shuttle mission overall.
About 80 seconds after the solid rocket boosters ignited, a large piece of insulating foam
“We have a duty to carry the memories of those that we lost, and carry their dreams onward and upward.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson
fell off the external tank and struck the shuttle’s left wing.
This would prove catastrophic 16 days later. But without cameras to see the wing — and a general acceptance that foam often fell off during launches and nothing bad happened — NASA’s top decision makers didn’t recognize the severity of the damage.
So the crew members proceeded with their science experiments, and they played in microgravity, performing front flips and eating floating M&Ms.
Evelyn Husband Thompson, the wife of Rick Husband (she married Bill Thompson in 2008), recalled a video call on Jan. 28 — the anniversary of their first date. As students at Texas Tech University, Rick proclaimed he would be an astronaut because playing for the Dallas Cowboys felt unrealistic. “The very first thing he said to me was, ‘Happy dating anniversary,’” she recalled. “That was the last time I ever talked to him.”
The shuttle reentered Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean on Feb. 1 just before 8:45 a.m. EST. It flew over California and Nevada, where the parents of William McCool, a Navy commander and long-distance runner, stepped outside their Las Vegas home. They saw their son shoot across the sky.
‘A lot of wailing’
In Florida, the bleachers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center were packed with excited spouses and children. JP Harrison, Kalpana Chawla’s husband, forgot his entry pass and had sweettalked security guards to gain access. Evelyn Husband Thompson took a photo with her children in front of the countdown clock.
The shuttle continued flying over Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. But something was wrong. Air likely hotter than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit penetrated the damaged left wing and melted the aluminum structure. Mission Control lost communication with the shuttle just before 9 a.m.
Jon Clark, the husband of Laurel Blair Salton Clark, heard the worrisome calls from Mission Control blaring over the loudspeaker. And where was the double sonic boom?
The countdown clock was approaching zero when NASA cellphones began ringing in the bleachers. The families were taken back to crew quarters and given the news: There would be no shuttle landing.
“There was a lot of wailing,” Jon Clark said. “The most somber cry you could ever imagine. It was really horrible.”
Months of investigation would reveal what happened, technically and culturally. Pressure to stay on schedule made the shuttle program less safe. It led to some tests being skipped, and NASA accepted more risk, according to a report from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
The agency suffered from what the board called a “normalization of deviance” — employees knew foam wasn’t supposed to come off during liftoff, but they accepted it because nothing catastrophic had happened before. And communication was hurt by NASA’s hierarchy.
Many of these same issues had come up with the Challenger tragedy that killed seven shuttle astronauts in 1986. But complacency had sunk in again. Plus the Challenger accident, which occurred after a vigorous debate about whether it was safe to launch in colder temperatures, had felt easier to rectify.
Columbia was a more subtle problem that revealed cultural issues, said Hale, who became deputy program manager after Columbia and later program manager, so it prompted broader changes. A big one was in communication, which he said used to be “very adversarial.”
“I came to work at NASA in the days when the organization was run by what I would call the members of the Greatest Generation who did not suffer fools gladly,” Hale said. “And if you didn’t do your job in the way that they thought it should be done, they would tell you in no uncertain terms about it. That was demotivating to the workforce.”
Today, leaders are trained to pull thoughts and expertise from everyone, including the quieter, introverted employees, said Edgar Castro, a propulsion and power manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Castro wrote a dissertation in 2013 on the organization, culture and safety similarities between Challenger and Columbia.
And all employees must complete an annual refresher of NASA’s accidents. This year, it’s on Columbia.
After Columbia, the astronauts’ families were loaded onto NASA planes and flown back to Houston. Jon Clark, who was a NASA flight surgeon, played cards with his son Iain, hoping to soothe the 8-year-old, whose demeanor changed abruptly as they flew over East Texas.
‘I felt Mom’
“He goes, ‘I felt Mom,’” Jon Clark recalled. “And it’s weird. Because, you know, as the vehicle broke apart they freefell into East Texas. That’s where they landed.”
Evelyn Husband Thompson had a police escort take her home. Cars pulled over and people got out, removing their hats and placing hands over hearts. Flowers and stuffed animals were placed at her front door, and mail began arriving in buckets.
NASA employees joined firefighters, divers, pilots, county constables and volunteers to search for Columbia debris. More than 25,000 people helped find objects spread from West Texas to West Louisiana, according to the August 2003 accident investigation report.
No one on the ground was injured by falling debris, and property damage was minimal. But there were close calls. A 600pound piece of a main engine created a 6-foot-wide hole in a golf course. Another piece of debris landed between two natural gas tanks. One woman almost lost control of her car when a piece of Columbia smacked into her windshield.
Houstonian Stokes McMillan, who was then deputy manager of NASA’s X-38 experimental crew return vehicle, rode in the back of a helicopter to help search for debris. “These pilots were good,” he said, “and we would fly literally at treetop level.”
Searchers ultimately found more than 84,900 pounds of Columbia debris, roughly 38 percent of the vehicle, and sent it to Florida so NASA could reconstruct the shuttle. The reconstruction — and a data system recorder that had been found, providing information from hundreds of sensors — helped NASA determine what had happened.
Legacies
For the families, attending funeral after funeral became exhausting. They mourned publicly and privately, and they found ways to carry on the legacies of their loved ones. JP Harrison led a group of Columbia family members to India to speak with students. He also sponsored three South African students to attend college, continuing a passion that his wife had pursued with students in India. She was the first woman of Indian origin to reach space.
Evelyn Husband Thompson became a board member of Fathers in the Field, a ministry created to help fatherless boys. She recently launched the ministry at her church with her husband, Bill Thompson.
Jon Clark threw himself into studying how the crew might have survived and how astronauts could survive future mishaps. He worked on the Red Bull Stratos high-altitude skydive from nearly 128,000 feet, a similar altitude to where Columbia broke apart, and he contributed to two NASA safety reports that have been used by SpaceX and other commercial companies.
As for NASA, it spent two years preparing to fly again. The Discovery space shuttle launched on July 26, 2005, to prove the shuttle’s flight worthiness.
Despite its success, plans were already in motion to ground the shuttle program. In 2004, President George W. Bush had announced that the shuttle would be retired after it was finished being used to assemble the International Space Station. The last mission, the 135th over a 30-year period, launched July 8, 2011.
Since then, NASA and commercial companies have largely returned their focus to capsules. These compact spacecraft can be pulled away from a rocket if something happens during liftoff, and they have fewer components that can break apart upon reentry.
NASA’s next endeavor, returning astronauts to the moon, will be far more dangerous than circling the globe in low-Earth orbit. But the agency plans to move forward with modern safety practices.
“We still have an unforgiving business,” Castro said, “but I do think there’s more robustness, after Columbia, in how we do it.”