11 p.m., I've learned one thing about keeping a journal. It's best to start one when you don't have much else to do. I've been so busy with archival research and oral interviews -- and then in the evening watching C-SPAN replays of NASA's press conferences and some CNN programs -- that the only way I've been able to make journal entries is by staying up too late and overtiring myself. So, I've got to cut down on this little exercise, as fun as it has been, and offer maybe just one or two observations per day.

I think Ron Dittemore, NASA's Shuttle program manager, has been doing a fabulous job. I haven't met anyone even in the NASA history books who I think could do a better job than Dittemore has been in this situation. I'll bet his former professors (not sure where he went to school) are proud of him -- and upset with the media for misquoting and misunderstanding him. A couple of days ago Dittemore was addressing the matter of the foam off the external tank and what sort of damage it might have done to the orbiter after launch, and Ron says, "We asked our working group to assume that's the root cause and then work their way through it to see if that could possibly be the source of our problem." Now, that's simply good engineering technique. You'd think people (even reporters) would understand that. And Ron said it two or three times. Then on the news that night, we heard from the networks that "NASA has decided that this is the problem," and when they show Dittemore talking, they don't include the "assume" part of what he said. The media makes it look like NASA had decided that the foam was the cause -- which was never the case. It's just another example of how little the media and the general public understand engineering.

If I were an engineering professor at Auburn or anywhere else, I would make it a requirement that students watch Dittemore's news conferences. They'd learn a lot -- and not just about the Shuttle.

Thursday, Feb. 6:

10 p.m., I interviewed Apollo 12 and Skylab astronaut, Alan Bean, this morning at his home in west Houston. For the past many years, he has devoted all of his energies to painting, especially pictures of Apollo astronauts on the Moon. He's a remarkable man who wants to be known now as an "explorer-artist." I don't think there is another astronaut like him (lots of right brain activity).
Though now an artist, Al still puts on the engineer's hat every once and a while. He offered me some interesting speculation about what might have happened to Columbia. Remember why we lost our last two Mars probes? Bad numbers. Some of the computer equations were not quite right. What if NASA somehow loaded the Shuttle's computers with equations that didn't allow the machine to orient, align, or stabilize precisely enough for reentry? It wouldn't take much of an error. It's really tough to get the Shuttle back in, to get it to fly right between Mach 20 when it comes into the atmosphere down to Mach 0.10 (or whatever the speed is) when it lands. It takes a multitude of equations in the on-board computers to get the job done. If the flight controls and the aerodynamics of the machine got messed up due to a bad equation, could that have caused a chain of events -- independent of anything related to tiles -- leading to the Shuttle's catastrophic problems? Or, putting the tiles back into the picture, we could ask, what happens if the Shuttle had a bunch of tiles knocked off its left elevon? We know that the left wing was heating up, but we don't know why. I myself have no idea, and I didn't keep up with everything Al Bean said to me.

I'll bet therešs been some interesting analysis of all the possibilities in the AU Engineering departments. That's the place to go, folks, for some solid ideas. I'm just a historian who pays attention to this sort of stuff. I might not have even described Al Bean's ideas accurately. But at least I knew what Ron Dittemore was saying to us a couple days ago.

Sunday, Feb. 9:

8 p.m., In front of the laptop after an unbelievably hectic, traumatic, yet rewarding week. This entry constitutes my last musings on the Columbia tragedy and my week in Houston. I'll actually be here until Tuesday, when I fly to Dallas-Fort Worth to complete the research trip. The federal records center in Fort Worth holds all of Johnson Space Center's records on the Gemini program, so I'll be deep in the dusty vaults of the government archive all day Wednesday through Friday. It's quite a place to work for someone sensitive to dust, which I am. Oh, well. The cough from my cold has persisted for about three weeks now. What's a little more dust in the system?

I wish I had some brilliant wrap-up summary to offer, but I don't. The question as to what happened to Columbia is still wide open. Now we're hearing that the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado located an object receding quickly from the Shuttle about a day after it launched. What it was, nobody knows. It could have been a piece of Columbia that somehow fell off; a piece of space debris that hit the Shuttle; or maybe nothing more than ice crystals formed by a wastewater dump by the Columbia. I've even heard speculation that it could be something like a wrench that fell out of the orbiter's cargo bay. Personally, I don't think whatever it was that it is related to what caused the accident, but I could be totally wrong. Just a hunch.

I do wonder when the issue of space debris becomes a real problem, however. There have been nearly 5,000 satellites launched since Sputnik 1 in 1957. Many are defunct and simply float around uncontrollably. And there's more junk up there than just old satellites: spacecraft parts that have broken, paint chips, tiles, gloves, all sorts of stuff. In all, therešs about 10,000 pieces of junk up there, just waiting to smack into something. There was a Shuttle launch back in the mid-1990s that had to be postponed for a few minutes to make sure its trajectory missed some known debris. A French satellite (Selene?) even lost some of its parts after it collided with some suitcase-sized trash. So, space debris is a problem.
Maybe sometime in the future there will be privately-operated refuse management company that will collect all the space garbage. What a world! We've already turned near-space into a junkyard! I think NASA has been trying to jettison less stuff, and satellite operators are doing a better job of programming their machines to re-enter the atmosphere (where they burn up in the great trash incinerator up above) as soon as possible. But maybe we should just make sure our space ventures produce less trash. That's one of the real problems for our future in space. We just take all of nasty habits with us.
One of the big news stories the last couple days in Houston is that White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was forced to admit that President Bush had never paid a visit to Johnson Space Center until he arrived here for the memorial service. The day after the Columbia accident, Bush's press secretary said that Bush had visited JSC as governor. As it turns out, he never had. As Texas governor, he had never been to Johnson, not once. The locals didn't like the sound of that, nor did they care much for Mr. Fleischer's earlier insistence that Bush had been to the space center. In the Sunday morning papers, the columnists and editorialists were saying that now Bush has finally been to Johnson, it will be interesting to see what effect the visit had on him and his actions toward the space program. Up to the Columbia accident, Bush really hadn't focused much at all on space. Of course, before the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, John F. Kennedy hadn't been much of a space buff, either.
Someone in the morning paper also did some interesting math. We have attempted 113 missions with the Shuttle, and we have lost 14 astronauts. That means we lose more than one person for each eight missions flown. With that unfortunate statistic, I'll bring this to a close. It's been a fascinating week in Houston to say the least. Thank God, I'm not a reporter thinking only about this story. I've spent my working days thinking and reading about much more pleasant, and generally more successful (save the Apollo fire), historic events related to the manned space program of the 1960s. I've photocopied somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand pages of material and I've conducted 10 major interviews. On Monday I conclude my work here in Houston (at least temporarily) by interviewing Gene Kranz, the flight director that some of you may no better as the actor Ed Harris from "Apollo 13," and astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man on the Moon.

It's going to be hard to start WRITING this book. The research is too much fun!

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CONTACT: Hansen.

Click here for Part I of Hansen's journal.