Lesson 34 Out of the Blue
On a picture-perfect Texas morning, the shuttle Columbia was heading home when tragedy struck, leaving America and the world wondering what went wrong-and honoring the lives of seven brave astronauts.
By Evan Thomas
1) Tony Beasley, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, got up early, along with his wife and mother-in-law, to watch the space shuttle fly overhead. It was a little after 5:, California time, 7: at Mission Control1 in Houston, 8: at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Beasley could see the bright glow of the shuttle as it came over California’s Owens Valley, bound for a Florida landing, still 60 miles high, traveling at about 20 times the speed of sound. Then he noticed some bright flashes, just small ones at first. Beasley idly wondered if the shuttle was shedding some debris as it entered the atmosphere. He didn’t make much of it;2 he thought he recalled that space shuttles sometimes lost a few tiles as the craft burned into the atmospnere. But then he noticed a large pulse of light. “It wa
s like a big flare being dropped from the shuttle,” he told Newsweek. “It didn’t seem normal.”
2) A few minutes later, a few hundred miles to the east in Red Oak, Texas, Trudy Orton heard a boom as she stood on her front porch in the brightening morning. She thought it was a natural-gas explosion. “My house shook and windows rattled.” Her dog ran into the house and hid. A neighbor, loading her car, looked up and asked, “What on earth was that?” Orton looked up and saw a white streak of smoke across the sky. “It wasn’t a sleek little straight line like the jets make. It was billowing like a puffy cloud.”
3) At the Kennedy Space Center at , ET, the festive crowd-NASA officials, family members of the astronauts, local dignitaries and politicians, even a representative of the Israeli government, on hand to honor Israel’ s first astronaut, Col. Ilan Ramon-eagerly listened for the familiar sonic boom, heralding the arrival of the returning shuttle. But as the skies remained silent, the burble of chatter died down, then grew anxious. At about 9:05, mobile phones began to ring. Suddenly, officials were herding family members into buses.
The countdown clock continued to wind down to the scheduled 9:16 landing. But the crowd was already gone.
4) The specialists inside Mission Control were well aware that the complex machines they put into space and then hope to bring home again are potential deathtraps. The rest of us forget, until a tragedy occurs, and the nation and the world are left mourning the loss of the astonishing array of hope and talent that routinely fly aboard the shuttles-113 trips, so far. When the shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas last Saturday morning, it took with it an Air Force colonel and test pilot3 (whose last job had been chief of safety for the astronaut office); a former Eagle Scout fighter jock4 (second in his class at Annapolis); a veteran African-American astronaut making his second trip into space; an India-born woman with a Ph.D. who enjoyed flying aerobatics5; a medical doctor who had performed in the circus as an acrobat; another medical doctor who was a mother, and an Israeli Air Force hero who had bombed Iraq’ s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.
5) The seven crew members of the Columbia were finishing a 16-day mission that had gon
e off without a hitch6, hi between conducting dozens of scientific experiments, there had been plenty of time for stargazing. Astronaut Kalpana Chawla had told reporters how much, on a prior shuttle mission, she had enjoyed “watching the continents go by, the thunderstorms shimmering in the clouds, the city lights at night.” She flew over her native India and saw the Himalayas for the last time less than an hour before she died.
6) By about Eastern time, the astronauts had just about finished up the chore of checking the hundreds of switches in the crew module, verifying that they were in the right position for re-entry. In Florida, early-morning fog still shrouded the runway at Cape Canaveral, but NASA officials were confident the haze would burn off.7 The weather had been perfect for the launch; the forecast was blue skies at the landing.
7) Launches are the most frightening part of space-flight. “On re-entry you have some elevated apprehension, but nowhere near what you feel on launch,” says retired astronaut Mike Mullane. “Because you don’ t have any engines running, it’ s a much more passive event; you don’ t have the same threat of death hanging over you that you do on launch.” E
ven so, re-entry is perilous. Engineers talk about “the exchange of energy8.” The space shuttle stores up tremendous kinetic energy when it blasts off and circles the globe. It must dissipate that energy to slow down enough to return to Earth.
In essence, speed is exchanged for heat. The orbiter begins to make sweeping S-rurns as it enters the Atmosphere. At the moment of maximum friction, the temperature around the orbiter is 3,000 degrees. To reflect the heat and protect its metal frame, the shuttle has about 20,000 hand-laid tiles on its nose and underside. These ceramic tiles are light-like a piece of Styrofoam-but they are rock-hard. As the shuttle enters the atmosphere, it must be at just the right attitude, or angle of attack. The nose is tilted up sharply.9 If the orbiter pitches forward or jerks sideways, the metal will start melting and the airframe will come apart.