Columbia: Revisiting A Tragedy

Almost one year after the tragic space shuttle Columbia disaster, many still wonder how it happened and if it could have been prevented.

Two seasoned space journalists, Michael Cabbage of the Orlando Sentinel and CBS News space consultant William Harwood, have co-authored "Comm Check… : The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia," which gives a comprehensive view of what happened behind the scenes before Columbia launched and after it disintegrated mid-air on Feb. 1, 2003.

Cabbage tells The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler, "When we first started talking about writing the book, one of the things that really struck us was the sort of human drama that was behind this entire thing, especially when you talk about the organizational causes. How was it that a group of incredibly bright and well-meaning people, like NASA managers at Johnson Space Center in Houston, reached a point where they didn't see the danger posed by this foam insulation that was falling off the shuttle's external fuel tank?"

The book points out that low-level engineers were very concerned about this foam striking, yet it seemed to fall on deaf ears. The information never got to upper management.

Harwood notes, "It was a mindset that if you were going to raise an issue about a technical problem, you need to be able to prove that it could cause damage. That was almost the opposite of the way it should have been. They reached a point where they had to prove it was unsafe to fly rather than proving it was safe to fly."

Between the two of them, Cabbage and Harwood have 30 years experience and have covered almost all of NASA's 113 shuttle missions.

Read an excerpt from "Comm Check… : The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia":

Chapter One: Re-Entry

Looks like a blast furnace.
-- Shuttle commander Rick Husband, midway through re-entry

Plunging back to Earth after a 16-day science mission, the shuttle Columbia streaked through orbital darkness at 5 miles per second, fast enough to fly from Chicago to New York in two and a half minutes and to circle the entire planet in an hour and a half. For Columbia's seven-member crew, the only hint of the shuttle's enormous velocity was the smooth clockwork passage of entire continents far below.

Commander Rick Husband knew the slow-motion view was misleading, a trick of perspective and the lack of anything nearby to measure against the craft's swift passage. He knew the 117-ton shuttle actually was moving through space eight times faster than the bullet from an assault rifle, fast enough to fly the length of 84 football fields in a single heartbeat.

And Husband knew that in the next 15 minutes, the shuttle would shed the bulk of that unimaginable speed over the southwestern United States, enduring 3,000-degree temperatures as atmospheric friction converted forward motion into a hellish blaze of thermal energy. It had taken nearly 4 million pounds of rocket fuel to boost Columbia and its crew into orbital velocity. Now the astronauts were about to slam on the brakes.

For Husband, a devout Christian who put God and family ahead of his work as an astronaut, flying this amazing machine home from space was a near religious experience in its own right, one he couldn't wait to share with family and friends gathered at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He had served as pilot on a previous shuttle flight, but this was his first as commander, and in the world of shuttle operations, it's the commander who actually lands the spacecraft.

He relished the opportunity. But his life as an astronaut took a backseat to his deep faith in God. Before blasting off on his second space flight as commander of Columbia, he videotaped 34 Bible lessons for his two kids, one each for the 17 days he would be away from home.

"The space shuttle is by far the most complex machine in the world," he had told his hometown church congregation three years earlier. "When you think about all the thousands of people it took to sit down and design this machine -- the main engines, auxiliary power units, the hydraulics, the flight control systems, the reaction control jets, the solid rocket boosters, the external tank that fuels the main engines, the crew compartment with all the controls and all the time that was spent to put this thing together and make it work -- it's to me inconceivable that you could take a look at the universe and think that it all just happened by accident.

"And inside that vehicle are seven astronauts, each one of which is more complex than this vehicle we went up in," he continued. "And God is an awesome God."

Looking over his cockpit instruments as he prepared Columbia for entry, the 45-year-old Air Force colonel chatted easily with his crewmates, coming across more as an older brother than as the skipper of a $3 billion spacecraft. But underneath the friendly camaraderie was the steady hand of a commander at ease with leadership and life-or-death responsibility.

"People have characterized him as a laid-back guy, easy-going," said entry flight director LeRoy Cain, who shared Husband's deep religious convictions. "But a lot of that was based in his faith, realizing our time here is limited and ultimately the real goal is to have that relationship with your maker. And he had that and he wanted to share that in a way that wasn't intrusive or offensive. And that's the biggest reason this crew gelled so well together."

Husband was also the first pilot since the astronaut class of 1984 to be given a shuttle command on his second mission. Kent Rominger, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's astronaut corps and commander of Husband's first mission, said Husband "came out of that flight with a really strong reputation. Rick worked hard, did a really good job, was a great leader. He was a really gifted pilot."

So good, in fact, that data tapes charting his every move at the controls of NASA's shuttle training aircraft were frequently used to show other pilots how a textbook approach and landing should be flown.

"This is Mission Control, Houston. Columbia's altitude is now 90 miles above the Pacific Ocean to the north of the Hawaiian Islands, about two minutes away from entering the Earth's atmosphere," said NASA commentator James Hartsfield, his words carried around the world by satellite over NASA's television network. "All activities continuing to go smoothly en route toward a touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center at 8:16 A.M. Central time."

Getting to Columbia's flight deck hadn't been easy for Husband, who grew up dreaming about one day flying in space.

Excerpted by permission of Free Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.