At Mission Control, a Tense and Devastating Morning

Every NASA flight director gets to name his flight control team. Leroy Cain, a crew-cut father of three daughters and a veteran of 12 space shuttle flights, decided to call his “Chrome.”

The name reminded him of the old jalopies he used to restore as a kid, when he saved the chrome bumpers and hood ornaments for last. But mostly it was because of chromium itself, an element that resists tarnish and corrosion. It’s tough, metallic, steely, and if he was going to be in charge of guiding Columbia back from space, that’s how he wanted his staff.

Some of the 20 men and women inside mission control on Feb. 1 had been at work since midnight, but beyond the few sips of cold coffee left on their desks, it didn’t show.

As captured on a video released by NASA on Friday -- the first internal look at mission control officials before, during and after Columbia disintegrated over Texas, killing all seven crew members -- Cain and the deputies next to him had taken off their suit jackets and slung them over the backs of their chairs. That was the only concession they made to themselves, and to comfort. Their neckties were still tight around their necks, perfectly dimpled at the knot.

It was 7:40 a.m. The space shuttle was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean and coming in fast. “Ready?” Cain, 39, asked through his headset. Of course they were.

Then, suddenly, it began.

“FYI, I’ve just lost four separate temperatures ... on the left side of the vehicle,” said Jeff Kling, a NASA official in charge of shuttle maintenance and crew systems, his voice crackling in Cain’s headset.

“Four high return temps?” asked Cain. “You’re telling me you lost them all at exactly the same time?”

“No, not exactly. They were probably within four of five seconds of each other. All four of them are located in the aft portion of the left wing.”

At that point, it was still possible that mission control was getting bad data. By design, the sensors that record temperature, hydraulics and pressure on the shuttle are hypersensitive, and they frequently give false indications of problems during landing. In front of Cain, a giant video screen showed the shuttle cruising at more than 12,000 mph, first over California, then Nevada, then Arizona.

Cain rubbed the left side of his face. One man began twiddling his thumbs.

“Everything look good to you?” Cain asked.

“Control has been stable,” another mission control official said. “I don’t see anything out of the ordinary.”

The pace of communication, however, was picking up. Disparate voices were streaming into Cain’s headset. One NASA official cut in: “Pressure on tires.” A communications officer was trying to talk to the crew. “We did not copy your last,” the officer said. “Roger,” Columbia’s pilot replied. “Uh ...”

The line went dead. “We’ve taken a few hits here,” one woman said. “Four temperature sensors,” another said. The space shuttle routinely loses communication with the ground during reentry, but a third officer said: “I didn’t expect this bad of a hit on comm.”

Sweat was building on Cain’s lip.

“Columbia. Houston. Comm check.”

Nothing.

“Columbia. Houston. UHF comm check.”

“When are you expecting tracking?” Cain asked, searching in vain for data that would tell him where his spaceship was.

“One minute ago, flight.”

Behind Cain, Phil Engelauf, a NASA mission operations official, leaned toward a woman to his right. “Oh my God,” she said. Engelauf stood up and called to Cain, who turned around and leaned over a countertop to talk. Engelauf told him someone had just called -- NASA still isn’t sure who -- to report that they had seen the shuttle breaking into pieces.

Cain turned back around to face the screen. The red line tracking the shuttle’s progress had stopped over Texas. Tears rolled down his face, and he said a quick prayer for Columbia’s astronauts and their families.

Time was moving in “microseconds,” he said later, and after just a few tics, someone managed to turn on a live feed from a Fort Worth television station. All those fancy computers in front of him, but Cain was watching TV. On a small screen, he saw it for the first time: The shuttle streaking over East Texas, in pieces.

Cain turned away. “Lock the doors,” he said.

There had been no hysterics. No raised voices. Chrome had held together. But the space shuttle was gone.

At Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday, Cain said he remained proud of his team.

“I never had any doubts, and I still don’t, about what we did or didn’t do,” he said. “The NASA team has got resolve. We will get through this.”

Asked to describe the impact of the last two weeks, Cain said only: “I’m tired.”