Comm Check...: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia by Michael Cabbage & William Harwood

Author:Michael Cabbage & William Harwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Transportation, Astronomy & Space Science, Professional & Technical, Science & Math, Astrophysics & Space Science, Political Science, Astronomy & Astrophysics, History & Philosophy, Physics, Social Sciences, Science & Mathematics
ISBN: 9780743260916
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2004-01-26T23:00:00+00:00

Gehman spent the afternoon at his home, reading contingency plan documents being faxed to him by Gregory’s office. The first thing he decided to do was change the name of the accident board. The NASA title was International Space Station and Space Shuttle Mishap Inter-agency Investigations Board. It soon became simply the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, or CAIB.

The board had six predesignated non-NASA members, all of them experts in aerospace safety and aviation crash investigations. Rear Adm. Stephen Turcotte was commander of the U.S. Naval Safety Center in Norfolk. Maj. Gen. John Barry, director of plans and programs at Materiel Command, was based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hess was chief of safety at Kirtland Air Force Base.

Providing an academic’s perspective was Dr. James N. Hallock, chief of the Aviation Safety Division at the U.S. Department of Transportation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Also on board were Steven Wallace, director of accident investigations for the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, and Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, commander of the 21st Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.

Deal and Barry replaced two other Air force generals who were unable to serve.

Earlier that morning, a seventh member was added to the board: NASA’s own Scott Hubbard, director of the agency’s Ames Research Center. Hubbard led a major effort at NASA to redesign its Mars exploration program following back-to-back failures in 1999.

Hubbard realized the assignment would raise questions about the accident board’s independence from NASA.

“This was a national tragedy, and I wanted to do the best I could to serve the nation,” he said. “But I also immediately thought about being the only NASA board member and said to myself, well if I’m going to serve in this role, I’m just going to have to call them like I see them.”

O’Connor was named to the board as a non-voting ex-officio member, and Theron Bradley, NASA’s chief engineer in Washington, would serve as secretary.

Back at Johnson, flight controller Jeff Kling finally left Mission Control. Sitting in his pickup truck, he checked his voice mail and sobbed as he listened to messages from his children saying “we are behind you” and “we are sorry for you, Dad.”

“I sat out in my truck for about 10 minutes to recompose myself and make sure that I could go home,” he recalled. He lived in a nearby subdivision called Polly Ranch that featured an airstrip. Many of the homes had hangars and several astronauts lived there, including Columbia’s Dave Brown.

As Kling drove into the neighborhood, he was overwhelmed again.

“My wife had ordered some flags from the Boy Scouts, had them put out at the entrance to the neighborhood,” he said. “They already had a makeshift memorial out there and they had six American flags and one Israeli flag. I only had a block to drive and I didn’t know if I could do it. So I got home and we ended up opening our house and having kind of a ‘happy Dave time,’ sort of a memorial sort of thing.

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