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    Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew
    Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew
    Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew
    Audiobook10 hours

    Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

    Written by Michael D. Leinbach, Jonathan H. Ward, Robert Crippen and Eileen Collins

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell and Danny Campbell

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    About this audiobook

    On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation's eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach, Launch Director of the space shuttle program at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history.

    For the first time, here is the definitive inside story of the Columbia disaster and recovery and the inspiring message it ultimately holds. In the aftermath of tragedy, people and communities came together to help bring home the remains of the crew and nearly forty percent of shuttle, an effort that was instrumental in piecing together what happened so the shuttle program could return to flight and complete the International Space Station. Bringing Columbia Home shares the deeply personal stories that emerged as NASA employees looked for lost colleagues and searchers overcame immense physical, logistical, and emotional challenges and worked together to accomplish the impossible.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 24, 2018
    ISBN9781977380807
    Author

    Michael D. Leinbach

    Michael D. Leinbach was the last launch director in the space shuttle program at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, responsible for overall shuttle launch countdown activities until the end of the program in 2011. In November 2004, Leinbach was awarded the prestigious 2004 Presidential Rank Award. He lives in Scottsmoor, Florida.

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    • 4/5
      “The last few seconds of telemetry received in Mission Control on February 1 indicated Columbia’s crew likely knew their ship was in trouble in the final half minute before it broke apart. The data showed that Columbia’s steering thrusters were firing to compensate for drag on the left wing, the ship was rolling, and the triply-redundant hydraulic system was losing pressure. All of those conditions would have set off alarms inside the cockpit.” – Michael D. Leinbach and Jonathan H. Ward, Bringing Columbia Home

      While living in Central Florida, I used to watch the shuttles ascend to space and hear the twin sonic booms upon return. In 2003, I belonged to a professional organization and had arranged a speaker from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for our monthly meeting. His topic was to be “Risk Management in the Space Shuttle Program.” Just days before the meeting, the Columbia disaster occurred. Needless to say, the speaker canceled the engagement and I have always wondered what he would have said.

      This book is written by the Launch Director of KSC for Columbia STS-107, the flight that ended disaster when it disintegrated upon reentry on February 1, 2003. He provides an inside view to the sequence of events during the loss of signal, notification of the crew's families, retrieval of remains, collection of debris across a 250-mile swath of East Texas, reconstruction of the debris, and proof of what went wrong. He does not try to avoid responsibility. It is told in a logical, step-by-step manner with lots of details on the people, processes, and technology involved. It may be too detailed for some readers, but it is exactly what I would expect from a technical professional with an engineering background.

      ”’Prove to me that it’s not safe to come home’ demonstrates a very different management culture than ‘prove to me that it is safe to come home.’ The former attitude quashes arguments and debates when there is no hard evidence to support a concern. It allows people to talk themselves into a false sense of security. The latter encourages exploration of an issue and development of contingencies.”

      The book is well-organized. Footnotes and informative diagrams are provided, along with a glossary of technical terms and photos. It is difficult to keep track of the numerous participants’ names and the tech-talk gets a little cumbersome at times, but the paragraphs summarizing each chapter are particularly well-crafted and enlightening. The authors balance human-interest stories with methodical root-cause analysis.

      The authors highlight many little-known facts, such as the key contributions of the Texas Forest Service and wildland firefighting crews to the search and recovery efforts. I was not previously aware that two searchers had died. It is a historic record of events done at a time when people still remember (and are still around). It is a fitting tribute to the over 25,000 people and 450 federal, state, local, and volunteer organizations that came together to help in the aftermath of the disaster.

      Everyone agrees on two remarkable facts: The Columbia recovery was the largest ground search effort in American history; and it was also one with no internal strife, bickering, or inter-agency squabbles. Everyone involved had a single goal and worked collectively to achieve it - to bring Columbia and her crew home.

      The cockpit window frames of Columbia and a fuselage section of Challenger are on display at the Space Shuttle Atlantis building of the KSC Visitors Complex. I have seen this memorial and found it very moving. This book is recommended to anyone interested in the past, present, or future of space exploration.
    • 5/5
      An astounding book, written by a former NASA launch commander and an Ambassador connected with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Both authors combine their skills to create a history of the shuttle Columbia as the backdrop to the awful events of that day. They also include a well-described layout of Kennedy Space Center (and the photos help tie all that in) with brief bios of the crew and their mission. Interspersed were detailed "what-ifs" that show, from the moment of the launch, what went wrong and how. Such as pictures from the launch that were never downloaded; had they been, the ground crew would have seen a large chunk of foam missing from the left-hand side of the rocket.I also found invaluable the minute-by-minute events of that morning, with both shuttle mission information (what happens normally) and what people saw when. As Columbia began her entry, she was last seen zooming past California towards Nevada and Utah. Then, suddenly, the sensor readings begin to look different and temperatures go up. And then eye-witness accounts from Dallas and eastern Texas, along the path that Columbia broke up and the sonic booms that everyone in east Texas heard. What their reactions were. What caused them. Where debris landed. All of that, answering the "What happened?" questions not just from a mission normal narrative, but also the people who saw it disintegrate. And the reader who remembers the glowing streak across the sky and where I was that day.The other thing I appreciated was that while there were scientific explanations, the story does not bog down into great scientific formulas. I did have to look up a few flying terms but that was all. And also that authors described the great outpouring of help and support from the people in east Texas who helped with setting up command centers, finding hotels, and feeding everyone who came out. There were as many as 22,000 people who helped with the recovery effort. Also interesting was the help from all facets of the US Government. The Texas Forest Service brought in wildfire crews: they bring their own camp, tents, cooking, all that gear, and they are used to working on all kinds of tough terrain. And many of them are Native American tribes members. Or the National Transportation and Safety Board, who dispensed the advice, "Let the evidence show the cause of the accident; don't try to make the theory fit the evidence." Much praise is given to these agencies, and conversely sufficient blame is laid where it is deserved. As with the Challenger disaster, improvements were made to launches, and with one visit to the Hubble Space telescope, all future missions included docking with the International Space Station in order to ensure that the shuttle was safe for the return flight, and to provide future shuttle astronauts safe haven in case the shuttle was not capable of returning back to Earth.
    • 3/5
      I remember when the space shuttle Columbia returned from its mission in 2003. Like most Americans, I was shocked and dismayed when the shuttle broke up during reentry and its remnants were scattered in areas of the southeastern United States. Leinbach provided information as to what caused the disaster, efforts to ensure that it could not happen again and a scenario as to what the astronauts experienced in the last moments of their flight.

      The demise of the space shuttle Columbia is a depressing story. However the intense recovery efforts by NASA, various government agencies and private citizens to recover not only the remnants of the spacecraft but more importantly to find the remains of the dead astronauts is an uplifting one. Americans have a great history of banding together during tragedies and doing what is necessary to overcome them. This story is also covered here with amazing research and detail.

      Two rescue workers lost their lives in trying to find and recover Colombia's remnants. Recovery was not an easy task and the courage and fortitude by thousands of volunteers is described in this book. I had not heard this story before – – we often hear of the bad things that Americans have done – – this is a story of one of the very courageous and humanitarian things that Americans have accomplished.