2/5/03

Bob Lowry, 334/844-9999

AU SPACE HISTORIAN'S JOURNAL ON COLUMBIA ACCIDENT - PART III

(Editor's Note: James R. Hansen, professor of history at Auburn University, is working on the first authorized biography of astronaut Neil A. Armstrong. This week he is conducting research and oral history interviews in and around the Johnson Space Center in Houston. While there, he is keeping a journal of his thoughts and observations pertaining to the Columbia tragedy specifically and to the American space program in general. He has agreed to share his journal, and this is Part III. Hansen has been writing about aerospace history for the past 22 years. His Armstrong biography is scheduled to appear in late 2004.)
* Newspaper editors: Please note this material may be suitable for an op-ed page.

Tuesday, Feb. 4

7 a.m.: Motel breakfast nook. The Houston Chronicle has a full-page tribute to the Columbia crew. For once, I'm glad Auburn doesn't have a greater number of alumni astronauts, which would have increased the chances that one of ours would have been aboard. The schools represented (including graduate programs) are Texas Tech, California State University, College of William and Mary, University of Washington, University of Texas, University of Colorado, U.S. Naval Academy, University of Wisconsin, and Tel Aviv University.

7:30 a.m.: Back in the motel room to watch the morning news. The local NBC affiliate says that John Glenn and Neil Armstrong will be coming to the memorial service here at Johnson Space Center along with President and Mrs. Bush aboard Air Force One. I didn't know Neil was coming, but I know how much the public enjoys seeing him. I try to count how many funerals Neil has attended in his lifetime for fellow aviators/astronauts who died in accidents. Counting the two Shuttle crews, the number is at least 25. (For those who would see Neil's (second) wife Carol with him at the ceremony, she was widowed some 10 years ago when her husband, also a pilot, died in a plane crash.

8:40 a.m.: Heading west on NASA Road One on the way to a morning interview. I see a sign for the Challenger 7 Memorial Park. Regrettably, before I get to the park, off to the right I see the Challenger U-Store-It Facility. Honest.

10 a.m.: At Milt Windlerıs kitchen table, finishing up our interview on his role in the Gemini and Apollo program. Milt gives me his thoughts on the Columbia tragedy: "It will be compounding the tragedy if we, in losing these people, let it scare us so bad that we give up a good goal. We Americans are getting worse about that. After people have sacrificed for something, and then to give it up, is not good. I think it's bad for the country." A lot of people feel the same way as Milt. But I worry about the goal. Is sustaining a vehicle that gets us in and out of orbit without going anywhere beyond a good enough goal? Shouldn't we be shooting a little farther out? Will keeping the Shuttle alive another 15-20 years get us there or keep us mired where we have been? And a lot of the veteran engineers I've spoken to down here are not sure that keeping the Shuttle alive is even all that feasible. Some say that some of the systems needed by the STS -- some of which are 30 years old -- truly can't even be replaced satisfactorily. It would be better to start over with something brand new that can integrate all the newest technology.

12:15 p.m.: Memorial service for Columbia crew at JSC. I'm across the lake pretty far from the podium, but I can take everything in pretty well. Beautiful ceremony on a beautiful crisp, clear day. The security around JSC is tremendous. The President's speech is pretty good; his speechwriters have been serving him very well recently. I'll have to watch the TV replay to judge for sure, but I think I was right in thinking that he could not come close to matching Reagan's comforting of the Challenger family members back in 1986. Perhaps Mr. Bush preferred to meet with the families in private, in contrast to Reagan's photogenic consoling of Challenger astronauts' children, which was in plain sight.

2:40 p.m.: Drinking a Sprite in the refreshment area outside the University of Houston at Clear Lake/NASA JSC Historical Archives. I have this thought: I want to write books. I don't want to develop technology for a new printing press; design a new word processing program; or spend a lot of time perfecting the sentence or the paragraph. NASA should think the same way. It should build vehicles, not develop technology. If it builds the vehicles, the technology will come along. In the 1960s, did NASA say it was developing technology? No, it was building the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft as well as the Apollo command and service modules and lunar module, and it was pretty far down the road to the design of the Shuttle. The technology came with the vehicle development. For the past 20-30 years, the party line has been technology development. The result is no new vehicles. If I took this approach, it would be a long time before my next book would ever get completed.

3:15 p.m.: More grunt work in the archives. Looking through one of the chronological files on Apollo, I come across a two-page document from 1965 warning of the need for a special coating of all the wiring in the Apollo command module due to the increased risk of danger in an oxygen-rich environment. Historians have probably seen this before, but it's obviously significant, in that it is warning about the exact danger that caused the Apollo fire that killed three astronauts at the Cape in 1967. I make a photocopy of the memorandum. Of course, the big story today about Columbia is that a 1990 study warned the damage to just a few tiles around the Shuttle's landing gear could trigger catastrophic damage to exposed fuel and hydraulic systems. And in 1997, a senior NASA engineer warned that hardened foam popping off the external tank could do significant damage to the Shuttle's ceramic tiles. I'll bet in every major technological failure, and for sure in every national disaster, there are people who feel that they had information that could have prevented it. But there is no way to make anything failure-proof. In addressing one failure point, another one would probably be neglected.

6 p.m.: Back at the motel reading email and eating a Subway sandwich (some dinner, huh)? I'm reading e-mail, and it's great to see so many folks from Auburn, including a lot of my former students, writing to me in response to this journal. Some are asking questions (sorry I can't answer all of them), and some are just sharing their thoughts about what has happened. Stacey Gardner writes: "You have no idea how much I have been asked about this event since people knew I took your space history class. With what little I know about space travel, that class has soared back into my mind." Elizabeth Volovecky writes: "I took your History of Space Travel 2 summers ago. I've been reading your online journal about the Columbia and I think it's great that you are doing it. I'm in Grad School now in Aerospace Engineering at Auburn and it's been kind of crazy here in the Aerospace Building, with reporters and all, it's almost surreal. I've found myself getting so tired of the naive questions that people ask, such as: "Do we even need a space program?" "Do you still want to be an astronaut after all of this?", or my absolute favorite, "Did we REALLY land on the moon?" One of my grad students, Andrew Baird, sent me an interesting comment: "I have just been reading your journal on the AU website. It's good to see a historical perspective receiving some attention. The Sunday edition of the Opelika-Auburn News carried a front-page story about the aerospace engineering program and their potential loss of funding as NASA curtails the shuttle program. The character of the story appalled me, although I'm sure the writer focused on only a small part of a larger interview with the AE faculty." Keep those emails coming, folks. It might take me a while but I'll get back to everyone.

11 p.m.: Last entry before hitting the sack. I had a very interesting interview tonight with a man by the name of Emil Schiesser. He came to work for NASA right out of college in the early 1960s and he helped to figure out the trajectories for Apollo. Brilliant mind. Emil worked, actually, on everything from Mercury through Shuttle. At the end of the interview, I asked him what he thought about Columbia and needed to be done in the space program. He offered the following: Ground the Shuttle and provide more money to the Russians so they can use their crew delivery system and automated cargo vehicle to provide what we need for the International Space Station. (Emil concedes we'd have to find some other way to get the really big payloads up to ISS since the Russian systems aren't big enough.) Then take the roughly $4 billion dollars we've been spending on human spaceflight and work to develop two new vehicles: one a pure crew delivery vehicle that is quite small and the other a larger unmanned cargo vehicle. Houston could be in charge of developing the former; Huntsville the latter. In 10 years time, we could spend $40 billion on the two new vehicles rather than pouring all that money back into the Shuttle. I'm not doing justice to Emil's proposal in this short description. If people think it's only naysayers and cranks that are saying things like this about the Shuttle, they are wrong. Many veterans of NASA, like Mr. Schiesser, feel that something quite new and different needs to be done.

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feb03:AU-columbia2

CONTACT: Hansen.