‘Mother Ship’ Lost in Its ‘Prime’

On the ribbon of concrete by the Atlantic where Columbia should have come back to Earth a week ago, thousands of workers gathered at America’s spaceport Friday to mourn the seven astronauts they launched into orbit, along with the craft that carried them.

“I’m sure that Columbia, which had traveled millions of miles and made that fiery reentry 27 times before, struggled mightily in those last moments to bring her crew home safely once again,” Robert L. Crippen, the pilot on the shuttle’s April 1981 maiden mission, said at the morning memorial service. “She wasn’t successful.”

The first of America’s five reusable spacecraft to be fully operational, Columbia -- which carried extra fuel tanks for longer missions -- “was often badmouthed for being a little heavy in the rear end,” Crippen acknowledged. “But many of us can relate to that. Many said she was old and past her prime. Still, she had lived barely a quarter of her design life.”

“Columbia had a great many missions ahead of her,” said the former astronaut and Kennedy Space Center director, his voice thick with emotion. “She, along with the crew, had her life snuffed out in her prime.”

The hourlong outdoor service for the five men and two women who perished when the 116-ton orbiter disintegrated in the atmosphere Feb. 1 was the last of three this week, and, in a sense, NASA’s most private. The public was not invited, while workers at the space center were given time off to attend. The highest-ranking outsider present was the president’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

“They were supposed to return here,” Bush recalled wistfully from the temporary stage erected on the 15,000-foot runway, officially named the Shuttle Landing Facility. “But the men and women of Columbia did not return to us.”

At 9:16 a.m., when the space shuttle was scheduled to touch down after 255 trips around the Earth and nearly 16 days in space, four T-38 jets piloted by fellow astronauts streaked through the skies. One airplane broke away suddenly and streaked upward in the “missing man formation,” a traditional fliers’ tribute to their dead.

“It’s not only the families grieving, it’s NASA,” said data librarian Latasha Williams, who carried a bouquet of yellow mums in tribute to Columbia’s crew. “Here at KSC, people are mourning their loss.”

Many of the 8,000 NASA and contractor employees who attended the service had spent much of their careers preparing the lost shuttle for its flights into space, and recalled it with melancholy. “Columbia was the mother ship, the very first one,” said Kaisha Harris, who for seven years was a tile technician, bonding to the vehicle’s fuselage the insulating material that had been identified as a possible cause of the breakup.

Since the disaster, there have been fears of possible mass layoffs here like those that followed the 1986 Challenger explosion, when the shuttle program was frozen for 2 1/2 years. At the memorial service, NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe thanked the space center’s personnel for responding to the latest emergency with “focus, professionalism and unbroken faith in the mission of this agency.”

It was 41 years ago this month, O’Keefe noted, that John Glenn blasted off from a Florida launch pad to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Likewise, he said, America’s manned Apollo missions to the moon and unmanned probes to the planets originated from here.

“This is the port from which all this historic exploration occurred, and from which much more history will be made,” O’Keefe said in an effort to reassure Kennedy Space Center employees. Once the cause of Columbia’s splintering is found and fixed, the NASA administrator promised, there will be a return to “safe flight.”

As the pioneering orbiter, Columbia was crammed with sensors intended to gauge actual performance against computer and wind-tunnel studies. That bulked up the craft and reduced its payload capacity. Additionally, the shuttle lacked the docking systems that allow its sister craft to link up with the international space station.

“Because she was a little heavy, she didn’t get some of the more glamorous missions,” Crippen said. “But she was our leader in doing science on orbit.” It was this “fine ship,” he said, that put the Chandra X-ray observatory into orbit, last serviced the Hubble Space Telescope and conducted numerous microgravity experiments in materials processing and life sciences.

“Just as her crew has, Columbia has left us quite a legacy,” the orbiter’s first pilot said. “There is heavy grief in our hearts, which will diminish with time but will never go away.”

His voice quavering, Crippen concluded: “Hail Columbia.”