Kennedy Center Stunned by Silence

On Florida’s Space Coast, the clap of thunder heralding a shuttle’s return is a reassuring if jarring sound, and the ears of Al Feinberg, a new NASA employee, were poised eagerly Saturday morning to hear it for the first time.

Sixty-one times, America’s reusable orbital vehicles have returned to the spaceport by the Atlantic Ocean, touching down safely on a swath of thick concrete as wide as a football field and three miles long.

A chilling fog had burned off Saturday morning and Feinberg, other NASA workers, relatives of the Columbia astronauts and VIPs were in the grandstands -- awaiting the sonic boom that would herald the shuttle’s arrival in the dazzling blue skies overhead.

Instead, there was silence.

“We didn’t hear anything,” said Feinberg, 49, a public affairs officer at NASA’s Washington headquarters. “There were some clouds that started to come in, and it got a little cooler. It started to feel a little ominous at that point.”

Touchdown had been scheduled for 9:16 a.m. Standing near Feinberg, another NASA official received a call on his cell phone that a “contingency plan” had been declared -- the space agency code phrase for a major problem.

In its fifth decade of existence, the Kennedy Space Center -- the 160,000-acre home of some of the nation’s greatest triumphs -- was beginning one of its hardest, most heart-breaking days. Within an hour of the eerie silence in the skies, the flag here had been lowered to half-staff.

At the base of a black granite wall etched with the names of 17 astronauts who had lost their lives in the line of duty -- including the seven who died in the 1986 explosion of the shuttle Challenger -- new wreaths were laid during the day to honor the five men and two women who perished aboard Columbia.

“We’ve all hoped and prayed many times that no names would be added to this wall,” said Stephen Feldman, president of the Astronaut Memorial Foundation.

At the wall near the space center’s visitor center, a busy tourist attraction especially on the weekends, hundreds of people gathered for a moment of silent tribute.

At a news conference here, NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe gave the nation its first official confirmation of a “tragic day” in its history.

“I was here this morning with the families of the astronauts and their friends,” O’Keefe said. “It started out as a pretty happy morning as we were awaiting the landing of STS-107 [Columbia’s mission designation]. We had highly anticipated their return because we couldn’t wait to congratulate them for their extraordinary performance and their excellent effort on this very important science mission.”

Instead of embraces and happy words from the astronauts, relatives got a telephone call from President Bush expressing “our deepest national regrets,” O’Keefe said.

For Kennedy Space Center’s 15,000 full-time employees, the new and urgent priority became detecting what had gone terribly awry -- and what steps would fix it. Ron Dittemore, shuttle program manager, announced in Houston that hardware and the last data received from the doomed shuttle’s crew were being impounded.

“We will be poring over that data 24 hours a day for the foreseeable future,” he said.

NASA also grounded its shuttle flights indefinitely. Columbia’s sister ship Atlantis had been scheduled for liftoff March 1 to carry supplies and a new crew to the international space station.

Saturday, what should have been Columbia’s happy homecoming after 16 days in orbit, became instead a time of tears and consoling hugs, of long hours and sharp grief mixed with a numb emptiness.

“We knew all seven astronauts, we had them all down here,” said Bruce Buckingham, chief of NASA’s news center at Kennedy and an 18-year agency veteran. “It’s like the Challenger all over again. I don’t think for me the feeling has sunk in yet. I think I’ll go home and plop into bed, and it’ll hit me then.”

In nearby Titusville, Cocoa Beach and the other coastal towns where the space program has become both a major employer and tourist draw, flags at hotels, restaurants, government offices and businesses were lowered in mourning.

Feinberg, who had worked as a television reporter until joining NASA in November, hugged weeping co-workers and, when he felt overwhelmed himself, went outside for a walk and a phone call with his fiancee. The sorrowful news of the day, he said, was a stark reminder of the enormous risks incurred in sending men and women into the heavens.

“You know how people say, ‘It isn’t rocket science?’ ” the NASA official said. “Well, this is rocket science.”

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Associated Press contributed to this report.