Comm Check.: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia

Book by Cabbage Michael Harwood William

Chapter One: Re-Entry

Looks like a blast furnace.

-- Shuttle commander Rick Husband, midway through re-entry

Plunging back to Earth after a 16-day science mission, the shuttle Columbia streaked through orbital darkness at 5 miles per second, fast enough to fly from Chicago to New York in two and a half minutes and to circle the entire planet in an hour and a half. For Columbia's seven-member crew, the only hint of the shuttle's enormous velocity was the smooth clockwork passage of entire continents far below.

Commander Rick Husband knew the slow-motion view was misleading, a trick of perspective and the lack of anything nearby to measure against the craft's swift passage. He knew the 117-ton shuttle actually was moving through space eight times faster than the bullet from an assault rifle, fast enough to fly the length of 84 football fields in a single heartbeat.

And Husband knew that in the next 15 minutes, the shuttle would shed the bulk of that unimaginable speed over the southwestern United States, enduring 3,000-degree temperatures as atmospheric friction converted forward motion into a hellish blaze of thermal energy. It had taken nearly 4 million pounds of rocket fuel to boost Columbia and its crew into orbital velocity. Now the astronauts were about to slam on the brakes.

For Husband, a devout Christian who put God and family ahead of his work as an astronaut, flying this amazing machine home from space was a near religious experience in its own right, one he couldn't wait to share with family and friends gathered at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He had served as pilot on a previous shuttle flight, but this was his first as commander, and in the world of shuttle operations, it's the commander who actually lands the spacecraft.

He relished the opportunity. But his life as an astronaut took a backseat to his deep faith in God. Before blasting off on his second space flight as commander of Columbia, he videotaped 34 Bible lessons for his two kids, one each for the 17 days he would be away from home.

"The space shuttle is by far the most complex machine in the world," he had told his hometown church congregation three years earlier. "When you think about all the thousands of people it took to sit down and design this machine -- the main engines, auxiliary power units, the hydraulics, the flight control systems, the reaction control jets, the solid rocket boosters, the external tank that fuels the main engines, the crew compartment with all the controls and all the time that was spent to put this thing together and make it work -- it's to me inconceivable that you could take a look at the universe and think that it all just happened by accident.

"And inside that vehicle are seven astronauts, each one of which is more complex than this vehicle we went up in," he continued. "And God is an awesome God."

Looking over his cockpit instruments as he prepared Columbia for entry, the 45-year-old Air Force colonel chatted easily with his crewmates, coming across more as an older brother than as the skipper of a $3 billion spacecraft. But underneath the friendly camaraderie was the steady hand of a commander at ease with leadership and life-or-death responsibility.

"People have characterized him as a laid-back guy, easy-going," said entry flight director LeRoy Cain, who shared Husband's deep religious convictions. "But a lot of that was based in his faith, realizing our time here is limited and ultimately the real goal is to have that relationship with your maker. And he had that and he wanted to share that in a way that wasn't intrusive or offensive. And that's the biggest reason this crew gelled so well together."

Husband was also the first pilot since the astronaut class of 1984 to be given a shuttle command on his second mission. Kent Rominger, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's astronaut corps and commander of Husband's first mission, said Husband "came out of that flight with a really strong reputation. Rick worked hard, did a really good job, was a great leader. He was a really gifted pilot."

So good, in fact, that data tapes charting his every move at the controls of NASA's shuttle training aircraft were frequently used to show other pilots how a textbook approach and landing should be flown.

"This is Mission Control, Houston. Columbia's altitude is now 90 miles above the Pacific Ocean to the north of the Hawaiian Islands, about two minutes away from entering the Earth's atmosphere," said NASA commentator James Hartsfield, his words carried around the world by satellite over NASA's television network. "All activities continuing to go smoothly en route toward a touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center at 8:16 A.M. Central time."

Getting to Columbia's flight deck hadn't been easy for Husband, who grew up dreaming about one day flying in space.

"I've wanted to be an astronaut all my life, ever since I was about four years old," he once said. "It was the only thing I could think about wanting to do."

So he planned his education and a military career with that single goal in mind.

After graduating from high school in 1975, the boy from Amarillo enrolled at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, a two-hour drive, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 1980. There, he fell in love with Evelyn Neely, who, like Husband, had grown up in Amarillo. The two were married in their hometown at First Presbyterian Church. Now, 20 years later, the couple had two children, a 12-year-old daughter, Laura, and a 7-year-old son, Matthew.

The first seven years after his college graduation included an endless procession of Air Force bases, where he learned to fly the F-4 fighter and eventually became so good at it he was promoted to instructor. In 1987, he was assigned to the legendary test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California's Mojave Desert. As an Amarillo schoolboy, he had built models of the flame-belching missiles that catapulted his heroes into orbit. Now, here at the same place where Chuck Yeager had broken the sound barrier, Husband proved he also had the right stuff.

But that wasn't enough.

By the time he arrived at Edwards, Husband already had applied to be an astronaut once and had been turned down. That was just prior to the explosion of the shuttle Challenger in 1986, and NASA ultimately canceled all new astronaut hires. Husband applied again afterward and was turned down a second time. Realizing NASA wanted astronaut candidates with advanced degrees, he went back to school at Fresno State University and earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering. The third time around, he got as far as the Johnson Space Center in Houston for a week of interviews and tests. Worried he might not pass the physical this time because of his eyesight, he wore contact lenses and lied about that on the application. He passed the physical, but again, the answer was no.

In the meantime, Husband drew an assignment as an exchange pilot with Britain's Royal Air Force in 1992 and shipped off to Boscombe Down, England, where he helped test a variety of new aircraft. He prayed for guidance on what he should do.

"God showed me that lying certainly was not the kind of thing that a Christian is supposed to do," he reflected in 2000. "When it came time for me to fill out the application a fourth time, I felt the strongest prompting from God to tell the truth. In studying the Bible more, I had come across Proverbs 3:5-6 that says, 'Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.'

"It was as if God was saying 'Just trust me! You lied last time and didn't make it. Try telling the truth this time and see what happens.' Finally, I had come to the point where I understood what it meant to give my life to God and to trust Him. I said, 'OK, Lord. I want to do what You want me to do, and it doesn't matter if I'm an astronaut or something else.' "

This time he told the truth and was invited to begin training at Johnson in December 1994. But despite his obvious skills in the cockpit, it would be another five years before he was assigned to his first mission. Only two other members of the 20-member astronaut class known as Group 15 waited longer.

"A lot of people didn't know that Rick was one of the last people to fly in his class," said Dave Pitre, an astronaut trainer assigned to Columbia's mission. "And I don't know the reason why, because I think Rick's a great guy. But this is what I speculate.

"You look at his résumé and he's the best. But he's so unassuming. And on the sixth floor [of the astronaut office], there's a lot of competition to be the best, to do the best. There's a lot of jockeying. Rick wouldn't do that, he never did that. He let his actions speak for himself. So he just sat there patiently in line and waited, and waited, and waited. I think he just wanted to make a statement and so they all tried just so hard, I mean, every training session you just got the feeling these guys were putting out 110 percent all the time. Everybody had something to prove on that flight and I think it just bonded them all together."

"Columbia is currently targeted toward runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center; the runway selection continues to be discussed here in Mission Control, however. But for its approach to runway 33, Columbia will perform a right overhead turn to align with the runway of about 214 degrees."

Preparations for the shuttle's arrival at Kennedy were in full swing. The landing support team, made up of engineers and technicians required to deactivate critical systems after touchdown, had gathered at dawn to go over their plans and to prepare their equipment. They were stationed at the northwest end of the broad, 3-mile-long Shuttle Landing Facility runway, expecting Columbia to come in from the southeast.

Shortly after sunrise, buses, limousines, and a fleet of sport-utility vehicles and government vans brought a crowd of VIPs, NASA managers, reporters, and invited guests to bleachers strung out on the eastern side of the Shuttle Landing Facility, about midway down the runway. Hartsfield's voice blared from loudspeakers mounted on telephone poles behind the bleachers, sounding clear in some areas but muffled in others. TV monitors, carrying NASA's television coverage of the landing, were spaced out in front of the bleachers, and a large countdown clock was ticking down toward touchdown.

The astronaut families were gathered at a lone set of bleachers at the northernmost end of the midfield viewing site, cordoned off from the other VIPs and guests to ensure a bit of privacy. An astronaut was assigned to each family to answer questions and to provide assistance in case of an emergency.

No problems were expected, and a triumphant homecoming was just minutes away. It was 8:44 A.M. on Feb. 1, 2003, and Columbia was descending through 400,000 feet northwest of Hawaii.

"OK, we're just past EI," Husband told his crewmates, marking when Columbia, flying wings level, its nose tilted up 40 degrees, finally fell into the discernible atmosphere.

He was referring to "entry interface," the moment the shuttle descended through an altitude of 76 miles. At that altitude -- 11 times higher than a typical passenger jet flies -- the atmosphere is still a vacuum in the everyday sense of the word. But enough atoms and molecules are present to begin having a noticeable effect on a vehicle plowing through them at 25 times the speed of sound.

Wearing bulky, bright orange pressure suits, Husband, rookie pilot William "Willie" McCool, flight engineer Kalpana Chawla (pronounced KULP´-nah CHAV´-lah), and Navy physician-astronaut Laurel Clark were strapped into their seats on Columbia's cramped flight deck, working through the final entries on a long checklist.

The shuttle's flight computers, each one taking in navigation data and plugging the numbers into long strings of equations, were doing the actual flying. Husband wouldn't take over manual control until the orbiter was on final approach, 50,000 feet above Kennedy. During this phase of entry, the astronauts were monitoring the ship's progress, discussing the view outside and making last-minute adjustments to their pressure suits. Husband and McCool had just finished drinking a final few bags of salty water in a somewhat unpleasant procedure known as "fluid loading." The concoction would make them less susceptible to feeling woozy during the onset of gravity after 16 days in weightlessness.

Husband was in the front left seat, the command position aboard any aircraft, with McCool to his right on the other side of a switch-studded instrument console. Chawla, a native of India, was a veteran of one previous shuttle flight and an accomplished pilot. Something of a legend in her hometown of Karnal in the Indian State of Punjab, Chawla was a role model in a country where less than half the women were literate. She sat directly behind the central console, calling out and double-checking re-entry tasks. Clark was seated to Chawla's right, almost touching shoulders with the diminutive flight engineer.

Strapped into seats on the split-level crew cabin's lower deck were payload commander Michael Anderson, another shuttle veteran and one of only a handful of African-American astronauts at NASA, physician-astronaut David Brown, a former circus acrobat, jet pilot and amateur videographer, and fighter pilot Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli to fly in space.

The crew was well aware of the high-risk nature of a shuttle flight. Like all astronauts, they had put their affairs in order before flying to Florida for the launch. Anderson, who attended the same Houston church as Husband, typified the tightly knit crew's feelings about personal safety. He told a former pastor not to be concerned if he didn't make it back from a mission. "Don't worry about me. I'm just going on higher."

High-risk missions were nothing new for Ramon. An impressive figure in the Israeli air force, he helped lead a daring 1981 Israeli bombing raid that reduced an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor to rubble. But he did not join Columbia's crew as a warrior.

"I represent, first of all, of course the state of Israel and the Jews," he said during an orbital interview a few days earlier. "But I represent also all our neighbors. And I hope it will contribute to the whole world and especially to our Middle East neighbors."

Unlike the upper flight deck with its wraparound airliner-type cockpit windows and large overhead view ports, the lower deck featured a single, small porthole in the shuttle's main hatch, almost out of view on the left side of the cabin. For Anderson, Brown and Ramon, there was nothing to see but rows of equipment lockers. At least they were plugged into the ship's intercom system, following along as the flight deck crew worked through the re-entry checklist.

They were listening in a half-hour earlier as Husband counted down to deorbit ignition, when Columbia's flight computers fired up the shuttle's twin braking rockets as the spacecraft flew upside down and backwards 170 miles above the central Indian Ocean. The two-minute 38-second rocket firing slowed the shuttle by just 176 mph. But that small decrease was just enough to lower the far side of Columbia's orbit deep into the atmosphere above Florida's east coast.

For the first half hour of re-entry, Columbia and its crew simply fell through the black void of space on a precisely plotted course toward a runway on the other side of the planet. But now, finally back in the discernible atm...