President's Message

I write this one-week after the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. As of this writing, NASA investigators and an independent failure investigation team are pouring over telemetry and video collected during the final minutes of the fateful flight in an effort to find out what went wrong high above the North American skies. Hundreds of local, state, and federal personnel are fanning out across a huge region stretching from California to Louisiana collecting the thousands of scattered pieces of a once-beautiful piece of machinery. Preliminary indications are that Columbia's left wing sustained damage to its heat-resistant tiles somewhere in the course of the flight, allowing hot gases to penetrate to sensitive areas during re-entry and leading to catastrophic failure of the vehicle.

When Odyssey editor Kris Cerone asked for articles on the Columbia for this issue, I wasn't sure what I could contribute to the discussion. Many writers of greater skill and eloquence than I have already published beautiful inspirational pieces on the crew, the Columbia itself, the need to continue manned space exploration, and the need to learn what happened on that flight, fix it, and move on with the business of expanding into the cosmos. So I was concerned that I'd be writing a redundant "Me Too" piece. Instead, I decided to put down a few words about Columbia and me.

My family spent most of my teen years in a small house in Downey, just down the street from the Rockwell plant where the Shuttles were being developed. The plant was literally at the end of our block and I'd have to walk past it on my way to school every day.

Rockwell Downey plant as seen from the air.

Several of my classmates' parents worked at Rockwell and my friends would give me regular updates from them on the trials and tribulations of building the world's first reusable spaceplane. Having picked up the "Space Bug" back in the Apollo era, I eagerly followed the latest developments on the program. Every once in awhile, I'd find a stray copy of the Rockwell News that someone had discarded and I'd go over it in detail like an archaeologist studying a rare antiquity.

My first "regular" job was bussing tables at the Pizza Hut adjacent to the plant on Imperial Highway. I remember how the lunch crowd would come in from Rockwell, often talking about the latest Shuttle systems checks or how the life support system was working or how they were going to control the orbiter when the external tank separated. I'd dawdle at tables close to these conversations to pick up the snatches of Shuttle-related news. (My boss apparently didn't appreciate the time I spent doing this and eventually let me go.)

Three years later, in spring of 1981, I was studying physics at a college in Indiana when the first Shuttle, Columbia, was scheduled to fly. I found myself with a few classmates in the basement TV room of our dorm that April night following the launch countdown. After the third or fourth two-hour hold of the countdown, I feared that this would be another scrub. I settled onto a couch and told another student to "wake me if it looks like they're really going to get this thing off the ground" and promptly fell asleep. I was shaken awake three hours later to someone saying, "Hey, Steve, wake up! They're going to go!" I opened my eyes in the final ten seconds of the countdown and watched Columbia roar into orbit. My classmates and I were whooping and hollering, "Go Baby! GO!!!!" and we all cheered loudly when Walter Cronkite announced that she'd reached orbit safely. A few days later we were again glued to the set watching her come in for her first landing out at Edwards Air Force Base.

Skip forward seven years and I was working for McDonnell Douglas on the Space Station program. My group was tasked to develop the operations, tools, etc. to assemble and maintenance the Station. One of our jobs was to figure out how to pack all of the Station pieces into the Shuttle cargo bay and still get the Shuttle off the ground and into orbit. (The old problem of packing ten pounds of stuff into a five-pound bag.) Once the Shuttle was in orbit, we had to figure out how to get the Station hardware out of the cargo bay and put together without banging elements together and without hitting the Shuttle.

For most of the Shuttles, this was a difficult but manageable job. The Shuttles had a sizeable lift capability and their center of gravity envelopes (i.e., the limits to where and how you can put equipment into the cargo bay and still fly the Shuttle like an airplane on re-entry) were reasonable. Unfortunately, one of the Shuttles was much heavier than the rest. It had extra structure, instrumentation and wiring built into it because the designers at Rockwell hadn't been sure how bad the launch and re-entry environments were going to be and so over-designed her. This extra dead weight also meant that she had a fairly narrow center of gravity envelope. You've probably figured out which Shuttle this was: Columbia. We had a bear of a time putting together cargo manifests that would fly successfully aboard her. Finally, NASA decided that she wouldn't be used for Space Station missions and would, instead, be dedicated to perform all of the science missions that the other Shuttles weren't available to support.

A few years later, NASA was running into budget and political problems with both Congress and the new Clinton administration and there was a move afoot to substantially re-scope the Space Station program. Our group, in conjunction with our NASA counterparts at Johnson Space Center, was tasked to look at radically redesigned Station configurations to see if we could make them viable. One of the more unusual ideas put forth by NASA was to take one of the Shuttles (preferably one that would be near the end of its planned flight life) and substantially modify it to serve as a permanently orbiting Station. Since the Shuttle already had crew quarters, a life support system, and other support capabilities that a Station would need (e.g., communications, thermal control, attitude control, reboost thrusters, power storage and control), it looked as though we might be able to pull it off.

But by the scheduled Station launch date, there would only be one Orbiter that would be close enough to its retirement age to allow us to seriously consider turning into a Station. Once again, it was Columbia. Eventually the idea was scrapped in favor of a more conventional configuration that had more capability than a modified Shuttle.

Personally, I'm glad. Having her serve as part of a cobbled-together space station just never seemed right to me. Although I'm saddened by her loss, in my mind Columbia will always be that beautiful white bird soaring into sunny Florida skies. And I can still hear my friends shouting "Go Baby! GO!!!!"

Steve Bartlett