Marc Flemming
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In the minutes after shuttle Columbia lost contact with NASA Mission Control, the flight director said there came a point when he bowed his head to pray, realizing the spacecraft was probably gone forever.
"My prayer was for the crew and their families," Leroy Cain, entry flight controller for Columbia, told reporters on Friday.
"At that point, we didn't know the details of the breakup, we didn't know the details of the situation as it was. All we knew was that we had a significant event that was probably catastrophic," Cain said in a televised news conference from Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Cain was at the heart of a 20-minute NASA video of Mission Control on Feb. 1. Released earlier on Friday, the video shows Cain frequently rubbing his forehead, covering his mouth and then bowing his head into his hand and looking up a moment later to reveal a tear coursing down one cheek as he realized the spacecraft was lost.
Columbia, the U.S. space agency's oldest shuttle, disintegrated over Texas minutes after communications were cut on Feb. 1. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. The shuttle had been only 16 minutes from landing in Florida after a 16-day science mission.
Cain said he knew something was horribly wrong from the moment Jeff Kling, in charge of shuttle maintenance and crew systems, told controllers, "FYI, I've just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle."
At that point, Columbia was over the Pacific Ocean, heading toward California, according to the tracking map.
"Is there anything common to them (the sensors)?" Cain asked on the video. "I mean, you're telling me you lost them all at exactly the same time."
"No, not exactly. They were within probably four or five seconds of each other," Kling replied.
NASA released control-room audio from that period earlier this week, but the video gave a clear picture of the tension evident when data first became erratic and then communications with ground controllers were lost altogether.
At least five times, controllers tried to get a signal from the Columbia crew: "Columbia, Houston UHF comm check?"
NO RESPONSE FROM COLUMBIA
There was no response. With the tracking map stopped with the shuttle apparently hanging over central Texas, the mood switched from anxiety to resignation, with Cain asking whether rescue personnel around Dallas were being mobilized to help find the remains of Columbia and its crew.
Cain told reporters that moment came after another NASA staffer told him of unverified reports that witnesses had seen multiple pieces coming down along the path the shuttle should have taken.
He then guided Mission Control staff to procedures in place in the event of catastrophe.
"After all, while we know now that many of the things that we did ... were futile, we didn't know that then and on a different day, they might not be," Cain said later.
He said training in procedures kept him and others at NASA in line. "The instinct that we had to keep moving forward and keep communicating and stay in our checklist was one that we rely on and that I think the situation showed that was very valuable."
An independent board to investigate the tragedy was appointed within hours of the shuttle's breakup. NASA chief Sean O'Keefe faced close questioning from members of Congress over whether the board was sufficiently independent from the U.S. space agency, and O'Keefe changed the panel's charter on Wednesday to address these concerns.
Board Chairman Harold Gehman, a retired U.S. Navy admiral who also investigated the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, said on Friday he expected to expand the 11-member panel to get members with specific expertise as needed and to cope with an expected heavy workload.
Speaking to reporters at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, one of several stops the board is making in its investigation, Gehman said his panel had asked NASA for specific analysis, data and witnesses.
"We're not going to double-check everything NASA does," Gehman said, adding the board planned to get independent verification of key points from universities and U.S. national laboratories.
He declined to comment on the significance of information released on Thursday indicating that shuttle Columbia's protective skin had been penetrated during flight, allowing super-hot gas to get into the spacecraft.
Source: Reuters
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02-15-2003 10:45 PM
