NASA Debates Goodbyes for a Crew Lost in Space

Days before blasting off, the seven astronauts discussed the possibility of being stranded in orbit because of a disastrous fuel leak.

It was an informal conversation among the space shuttle crew, almost on the level of joking to lighten the dead-serious topic. But they talked about how, if space junk punctured and drained their fuel tanks, they might find themselves circling Earth, out of gas and waiting for the power to fade and the air to run out.

And, yes, making one last call to their families.

As it turns out, their shuttle -- Columbia -- avoided orbiting shrapnel and landed safely last year. But on Columbia’s next flight, one year later, the craft broke apart during reentry, killing all seven aboard.

“It could have been any of us,” said Columbia’s next-to-last commander, Scott Altman.

After four months, accident investigators have yet to settle on a cause. But they suspect that Columbia was doomed from the start by a chunk of foam insulation that broke off the fuel tank at liftoff and smashed into the leading edge of the left wing.

Now that time has passed and emotions are not as raw and egos not as intrusive, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board is looking into what NASA could have done to save the five men and two women if the extent of the wing damage had been known early on.

And that has raised an unsettling question: If NASA had known during the 16-day mission that the shuttle was mortally wounded, would it -- should it -- have informed the crew and arranged a last call home?

“Ummmmm, talk about being uncomfortable,” said Milt Heflin, head of the flight director’s office at Johnson Space Center.

There are no rules at NASA for this sort of thing, according to Heflin.

“I mean, we’re talking what they do in Hollywood,” he said. “I don’t need to go any further than that because I just don’t know what we would have done.”

But NASA’s own flight surgeons have been trying to force a discussion of such troubling contingencies since long before the Columbia accident. The technical types -- flight directors, engineers, rocket scientists -- need to think about this more, especially with astronauts living aboard the international space station, Dr. Terry Taddeo said.

“You have to raise people’s consciousness,” Taddeo said. “I can’t imagine any other way of doing it than having an event like this, for better or worse. People have to be taking it more seriously now.”

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who flew aboard Columbia as a congressman in 1986, just days before the Challenger disaster, contends that the seven astronauts should have been told more about the foam strike and the engineering analysis that went into absolving it while they were in orbit. He chastised NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe on the matter during a hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee last month.

“To cut the crew out, you’re eliminating a great resource,” Nelson said.

It would be a shame not to take advantage of all that brain power in orbit, said Dr. J. D. Polk, a NASA flight surgeon.

“We’re talking about a lot of PhDs and doctors and people with master’s in aerospace and people with a lot of operational knowledge of the vehicle. We might have been able to think of something,” Polk said. “Plus, I think the crew would probably want time to talk to the families and get things squared away in their minds and with their families, as to how the family is going to continue on.”

What Altman and his crew would have done, had something gone amiss last year, was “do the best we could as long as we could and let everybody on the ground figure out if there were any options.” If there were none -- and NASA contends there would have been few, if any, for the astronauts who went down with Columbia on Feb. 1 -- Altman says he’d try landing with the full understanding that the shuttle and crew might not make it.

First, though, he figures that he’d want to make one last call to his family.

Eileen Collins, NASA’s only female space shuttle commander, also finds the subject difficult to contemplate. Her flight aboard Atlantis to the space station should have been completed by now, but is on indefinite hold because of the grounding of the shuttle fleet.

Would she want to know in orbit that her days were numbered? Would she want one last radio hookup with her husband and two young children to say goodbye?

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said softly, shaking her head.

Chuck Shaw, a former flight director who is working on NASA’s proposed orbital space plane, says astronauts and flight controllers can’t help but think, at times, about the worst that could happen -- and has happened twice in 22 years of space shuttle flight.

“It runs through your mind,” Shaw said. But “it’s not very productive to dwell on getting into a scenario like that. I fixate on how to avoid getting into that problem in the first place.”

Shaw recalls how during his early years at Johnson Space Center, he devised a shuttle flight simulation in which all the electricity-producing fuel cells died -- as did the spaceship and its two-man crew. When Shaw got back to his office after the practice session, John Young, the commander, was sitting on the desk, waiting for him.

“He says, ‘You know about that leak you put in? It’s not fun to die for real or make-believe. You ought not to do that.’ And he got up and left,” Shaw said. “And you know, it was like, ‘Aw, geez, you’re right.’

“So do you train crews in impossible cases? No.”

Evelyn Husband, widow of Columbia’s commander, Rick Husband, says the only thing worse than what happened would have been discovering during the flight that the wing was fatally breached -- and inoperable.

“We would have gone through days of absolute agony with the crew and the families as well as the nation,” Evelyn Husband said, adding: “God was very merciful in this situation.”

Dr. Jon Clark, a NASA flight surgeon and widower of astronaut-physician Laurel Clark, agrees that it is a blessing the crew was unaware of the extent of the damage.

He points out that the crew members had no robot arm to survey the wing, no handholds on the wing for an emergency spacewalk and no repair kit for patching a hole.

“From the families that I’ve talked to, the perspective we have is that we were all very glad the crew did not detract from the mission to try and work a problem they would have never been able to fix anyway,” Clark said.

Clark takes comfort in the salvaged cockpit videotape that shows the final minutes of his wife’s life; so do other family members.

“Each time I watch it, I get a sense of joy to know they were just having such a great time,” Clark said, adding that he much prefers that scene as opposed to a final, helpless call.

Evelyn Husband says the scientific research mission, with more than 80 experiments, had been a huge success, and she is grateful for that.

“They were on their way home, 16 minutes away from landing, feeling incredibly happy at the job well done. We were on the ground waiting for them, feeling the very same way,” she said.

“For anything different, I think, would be absolutely horrible. We have the rest of our lives to deal with their loss. But to know it a day, two days, a few moments beforehand would have not added one bit to this experience. It would have made it worse.”