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Fragments of Columbia were laid out on a vast concrete floor like broken bones on an autopsy table.
Seared shards, wet with pine needles and caked with mud, were barely recognizable as fuselage, wings, tail and flaps.
Once-sleek contours were crusted with charcoal-colored stove canker. Wing parts had been honed to a razor's edge by superheated gases.
For weeks, wreckage poured into the isolated hangar at Florida's Kennedy Space Center — 27 tractor-trailer loads in all delivered by Lone Star Trucking. The 50,000-square-foot hangar sat on a dry hillock in the tidal marsh near the space shuttle landing strip, edged by cattails and pepper trees.
Two shifts a day, six days a week, 150 NASA technicians in white suits, goggles and safety gloves laid out the remains.
They sorted pieces by thickness and arranged parts by serial number when one could be found. Otherwise, they relied on rivet patterns, burn marks, soot streaks and fracture lines — anything that would allow them to match one part with the next.
The wreckage had a story to tell, but at first it could barely be heard amid the clamor of so public an inquest.
When the independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board arrived at the hangar, NASA had already arranged the wreckage to suit itself and launched its own forensic analysis.
The rivalry was immediate.
Distrustful of board investigators, NASA technicians withheld information. They were suspicious of the investigators, who seemed too anxious to publicize discoveries before they had been fully analyzed and too eager to experiment with exotic, expensive techniques.
For their part, board members argued that openness was crucial to maintaining public faith in the investigation. Findings were to be disclosed as quickly as possible.
NASA had the manpower and the engineering resources. It controlled access to the site.
But the Columbia board — led by an uncompromising retired admiral, Hal Gehman — had impounded the wreckage. No one could test it without obtaining the board's permission.
The board was impatient at NASA's overly methodical approach and its resistance to new ideas, said Gregory Kovacs, a Stanford University biomedical engineer who supervised debris analysis for the board.
Suspicions about possible damage to the left wing were so strong, Kovacs said, that it seemed more sensible to devote extra effort to studying its fragments, rather than slowly analyzing all of the debris.
On occasion, board investigators and NASA experts found themselves in shouting matches over the best way to proceed.
It was implicitly an argument over how history would judge what happened.
Slowly, the work moved forward.
Technicians examined 83,900 pieces of the shuttle. They eventually identified almost 44,000 of them.
"It was the only physical evidence we had," Kovacs said. "It was the only ground truth."
Seared shards, wet with pine needles and caked with mud, were barely recognizable as fuselage, wings, tail and flaps.
Once-sleek contours were crusted with charcoal-colored stove canker. Wing parts had been honed to a razor's edge by superheated gases.
For weeks, wreckage poured into the isolated hangar at Florida's Kennedy Space Center — 27 tractor-trailer loads in all delivered by Lone Star Trucking. The 50,000-square-foot hangar sat on a dry hillock in the tidal marsh near the space shuttle landing strip, edged by cattails and pepper trees.
Two shifts a day, six days a week, 150 NASA technicians in white suits, goggles and safety gloves laid out the remains.
They sorted pieces by thickness and arranged parts by serial number when one could be found. Otherwise, they relied on rivet patterns, burn marks, soot streaks and fracture lines — anything that would allow them to match one part with the next.
The wreckage had a story to tell, but at first it could barely be heard amid the clamor of so public an inquest.
When the independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board arrived at the hangar, NASA had already arranged the wreckage to suit itself and launched its own forensic analysis.
The rivalry was immediate.
Distrustful of board investigators, NASA technicians withheld information. They were suspicious of the investigators, who seemed too anxious to publicize discoveries before they had been fully analyzed and too eager to experiment with exotic, expensive techniques.
For their part, board members argued that openness was crucial to maintaining public faith in the investigation. Findings were to be disclosed as quickly as possible.
NASA had the manpower and the engineering resources. It controlled access to the site.
But the Columbia board — led by an uncompromising retired admiral, Hal Gehman — had impounded the wreckage. No one could test it without obtaining the board's permission.
 Doug Stevens / LAT
SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS: The wreckage had a story to tell, but at first it could barely be heard amid
the clamor of so public an inquest. |
Suspicions about possible damage to the left wing were so strong, Kovacs said, that it seemed more sensible to devote extra effort to studying its fragments, rather than slowly analyzing all of the debris.
On occasion, board investigators and NASA experts found themselves in shouting matches over the best way to proceed.
It was implicitly an argument over how history would judge what happened.
Slowly, the work moved forward.
Technicians examined 83,900 pieces of the shuttle. They eventually identified almost 44,000 of them.
"It was the only physical evidence we had," Kovacs said. "It was the only ground truth."
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