Leaden skies and chilly air greeted Milt Heflin 20 years ago today when he pulled into the large parking lot outside Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Although space shuttle Columbia was due to return to Earth after a two-week mission, the center was quiet on a Saturday morning. When Heflin, chief of the flight director office at NASA, walked into Mission Control, he found the observation room nearly empty. While the shuttle's seven astronauts made their final preparations to enter Earth's atmosphere, Heflin chatted amiably with the room's only other occupant, a mission operations chief named Ron Epps.
Through large glass windows, the two looked out over Mission Control. As the shuttle's ground track began to cross over the United States, making its approach across the southern tier of states toward Florida, Heflin began to sense that all was not well. "I got the feeling that something was not right from the movements of the flight controllers," he said.
Heflin and Epps quieted themselves and listened to the mission audio more closely. Soon, they saw the mission operations director, John Shannon, hastily get up from his position behind the flight director and grab a large notebook that contained the flight contingency procedures. Shannon exited Mission Control and moments later entered the viewing room. Heflin knew where Shannon was headed: to the nearby suite of Johnson Space Center Director Jefferson D. Howell.
As Shannon passed through the viewing room, Heflin asked, "John, what's up?"
Shannon offered a simple answer, "We lost them."
He was referring to the seven astronauts on board Columbia—Commander Rick Husband, Pilot William C. McCool, and specialists Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon. They died at about 9 am local time due to a failure of the shuttle's thermal protection system, caused by a chunk of foam that had struck the spacecraft's wing two weeks earlier during launch. First, the shuttle's crew cabin suffered a depressurization, followed by a violent rotation of the vehicle and hot gasses entering the spacecraft as it flew over Texas.
This happened 20 years ago, on February 1, 2003. In recounting that terrible morning, Heflin choked up. "It still breaks me up today," he said during a recent interview.
Broken safety culture
The loss of the space shuttle was a wrenching tragedy for NASA, the nation, and the world. Mission specialist Chawla was born in India before she moved to the United States in 1982. Payload Specialist Roman was the first Israeli astronaut.
The shuttle would be grounded for more than two years, and it was only brought back in August 2005 so that NASA could use its capacious payload bay to complete the construction of the International Space Station. In 2011, the winged vehicle was retired for good.
For NASA, the resulting analysis from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board produced a damning indictment of the agency's safety culture.
"Cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety were allowed to develop," the report stated. NASA engineers and decision-makers relied on past successes with the shuttle as a substitute for sound engineering practices. Moreover, organizational barriers stifled differences of opinion and made it difficult for lower-level employees to bring forward safety concerns to management.
Simply put, NASA had gotten complacent.
In Columbia's case, managers had observed foam falling off the shuttle's external tank during many previous launches. It had not caused serious damage to the space shuttle before, so why should it this time? And while there were some concerns about this particular foam incident—lower-level engineers at NASA on three occasions requested images of a potentially damaged shuttle in space from US Department of Defense satellites—they were never acted upon by senior managers. Transcripts of meetings of Columbia's Mission Management Team, chaired by Linda Ham, revealed virtually no discussion of the issue.
So the fatal damage to the orbiter's left wing was not discovered until after it was far too late to save seven astronauts on board Columbia. They became the third major loss of crew in the space agency's history.
Echoes of history
For Heflin, the loss of Columbia marked the third time he had experienced such a tragedy. Amid the frenzy of Apollo, he came to NASA in 1966 immediately after graduating from the University of Central Oklahoma with degrees in physics and math. He was assigned to a group working to develop and test water-recovery systems for the Apollo spacecraft.
One of the tasks he undertook that summer was a ground test to determine how long it would take to open the hatch to the Apollo Command Module spacecraft in case of an emergency. The inner hatch had to be opened first, which could only be done after the cabin pressure was decreased—otherwise, the higher pressure inside the cabin would prevent its opening.
Heflin's supervisor was Wayne Koons, a helicopter pilot who led the recovery of Alan Shepard's Mercury spacecraft in 1961. By the time of the Apollo Program, Koons was a senior manager in the Apollo recovery program and had become concerned about how long it would take the crew to exit the vehicle. So Koons had one of his teams, including Heflin, pressurize a high-fidelity mock-up of the Apollo spacecraft and see how long it would take to depressurize the vehicle enough to remove the inner hatch and then open the outer mechanical hatch.
The results of the test showed that it would take several minutes to depress the vehicle enough to open the hatches and escape.
The concerns of Koons would be validated a few months later, on January 21, 1967, when a fire erupted in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the Apollo capsule during a powered ground test. The crew—Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee—died in seconds. There was not enough time to open the cumbersome hatches.
To get the Apollo program back on track, several changes were made to the Apollo spacecraft's design, including significantly simplifying the hatch design and opening procedures.
For the young Heflin, it brought hard lessons. "It never dawned on me until much later what I was really doing," he said. "I just did not ask enough questions." At the time, he was just doing what his supervisor asked. Only later would he learn about Koons' concerns about egress time, which had gone unheeded by senior managers and might have saved three lives.
More echoes
Two decades later, Milt Heflin was a NASA flight director, his favorite job during his decades-long career at the space agency. In early 1986, he served as lead flight director for a week-long mission on space shuttle Columbia commanded by Hoot Gibson that landed on January 18. The mission, which included among its crew two future NASA administrators in Charlie Bolden and Bill Nelson, had gone smoothly.
Ten days later, Heflin was inside the "action center" in Mission Control. Having just overseen a shuttle flight, Heflin was only an interested observer as space shuttle Challenger took off from Florida on a frigid morning. He and others in the room were shocked when the orbiter disintegrated just 73 seconds into flight, 14 km above the Atlantic Ocean.
Lost were Commander Richard Scobee, Pilot Michael J. Smith, and specialists Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe.
The cause of this first space shuttle failure was traced to a failure of the primary and secondary O-ring seals in the right-side booster. Near-freezing temperatures at the launch site—rare for Florida—had stiffened the joints so they did not create a proper seal. This lack of elasticity caused hot, pressurized gas to leak, causing the destruction of the shuttle's fuel tank.
This accident was investigated by the Rogers Commission, which quickly discovered that employees for the rocket booster's manufacturer, Morton Thiokol, had expressed serious reservations about launching in cold weather. These recommendations to delay the launch were overridden by senior managers at the company and NASA.
Having lived through all of these disasters, Heflin sees a common cause. In each case, there were concerns raised ahead of the accident; for Apollo 1, pure oxygen in the Command Module, bad wiring, and slow egress; for Challenger, dissenting opinions on very cold temperatures and the solid rocket booster seals; and for Columbia, a known history of foam shedding and a normalization of this risk.
His general takeaway is that those involved in spaceflight must always remain vigilant to the dangers of spaceflight and never accept success as a substitute for rigor.
Every two decades
NASA has sought to make all manner of changes to improve its safety culture. For example, for the daily space shuttle Mission Management Team meetings after Columbia, the agency moved to a larger room to accommodate more people and replaced a rectangular table with a circular table. The goal was to take what had been an intimidating setting and make it less so for participants to encourage people with dissenting opinions to speak up. With a round table, for example, there was no "head of the table." Microphones were also installed on the back walls for anyone to use.
Today, NASA no longer has a monopoly on US human spaceflight. At present, the space agency's only operational means of getting humans into orbit is SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft. Later this spring, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will start flying. And in about two years, the Orion spacecraft will begin taking humans into deep space. That's three different spacecraft with three different teams of operators.
Heflin has a message for the managers at NASA and private companies who are ultimately overseeing these spaceflights.
"We have enough examples now of what not to do," Heflin said. "I don't care what it is. If you have someone who is worried, don't slough it off. Deal with it. The program manager is under all this pressure to complete a mission. But you just can't ignore someone who might just have something you really need to pay attention to. You can't allow all of these successes to blind you to things you should pay attention to."
The fliers on these vehicles are clearly thinking about the legacy of loss upon the 20th anniversary of the Columbia disaster.
NASA Astronaut Stephen Bowen joined the space agency in July 2000 and had completed training by the time of the Columbia accident. Later, he flew three space shuttle missions. In February, Bowen will command the Crew-6 mission aboard Crew Dragon to the space station, marking the ninth launch of this vehicle with humans on board. Challenger, he noted, was the 25th shuttle launch. Columbia was the 113th mission.
"It's not routine; it's still a test flight," he said of his Dragon mission. "And I feel confident having spent time with the SpaceX team that they still look at it that way. They're still trying to understand what they've built and where the problems are. Because we all know that to engineer is human. We've made mistakes in every one of our designs. It's just, when is that going to bite us? And can we find it before it does?"
Challenger's loss came 19 years after Apollo 1. Columbia's loss came 17 years after Challenger. It's sobering to realize this cadence of accidents on the 20th anniversary of Columbia's tragic loss.
Two decades is a generation. So does every new generation have to learn these hard lessons?
Let us hope to not have an answer for such a question any time soon.
