by Duncan Lunan

Michael D. Leinbach and Jonathan H. Ward, “Bringing Columbia Home, The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew”, pbk, 358 pp, Arcade Publishing. 2020 edition,  (Fig. 2)

Linda and I recently joined a book club, and one of the first titles suggested for reading was Ian Rankin’s Westwind, which I hadn’t previously heard of.  It was his second book, published three years after his first Rebus novel.  It would hardly be fair to review an author’s early work in full after nearly 35 years, so I’ll concentrate on the space-related aspects.  I wasn’t going to write it up at all, but immediately after it  (as so often happens), I began reading Bringing Columbia Home and the comparisons and contrasts leaped out at me.

In his early notes Ian Rankin referred to Westwind as ‘the satellite book’.  It’s about an attempt to nobble a British spy satellite called Zephyr, as part of a bigger plot by second-grade officers in the US forces and British Military Intelligence to trigger World War Three for their own ends.  Rankin admits that he boned up on ‘how satellites work’ in libraries, even finding a children’s book helpful  (a tip I often give to writers who want to write SF but don’t have a science background).  He’s done his homework well, because Zephyr is an interesting piece of kit.  It’s evidently in a ‘Molniya’ orbit  (see ‘Launch Costs per Vehicle’, ON, November 12^th 2023), which gives it lots of time at apogee, furthest from Earth, over the target country.  But alternatively it can drop into atmosphere at perigee, nearest to Earth, for really low-level coverage.  Rankin doesn’t mention it, but that would let it change orbital plane or phase using aerodynamic forces, without the high fuel cost of plane changes in space. 

In the mid-1980s, NASA and the USAF had competing projects for OMVs  (Orbital Manoeuvring Vehicles, Fig. 3)   to do just that, picking up satellites  (mainly spy satellites)  and re-launching them at new inclinations, using liquid-fuel Centaur engines and refuelling at what was then to be the all-US Alpha Space Station.  Both projects were scrapped along with other Shuttle-Centaur applications in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster, and the training mock-ups were being removed from the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston when I was there in the summer of 1986, as a guest of NASA expert James E. Oberg  (Fig. 4;  ‘Space Shuttle Trainer’, ON, August 14^th 2022).  Zephyr probably uses arc jets, since it needs a lot less refuelling, but even so it must be doing some fancy perigee footwork to stay over the British Isles at various heights as it does.  It would have been nice to see some of that, instead of taking it as read.

At the beginning of the novel, Zephyr goes offline for an unexplained three minutes.  It coincides with the launch from the Space Shuttle Argos of a communications satellite ‘less than a thousand miles away’, after which the Shuttle crashes on return to Earth, to Edwards Air Force Base in California, because the undercarriage fails to deploy.  Only a British astronaut, Mike Dreyfuss, survives.  After the launch of the communications satellite, he picked up some stray data from it on ‘his panel’, and for some reason this antagonised at least some of the American astronauts, one of whom tried to kill him during the crash.

As David Frost would say, ‘The clues are there’, to show Rankin has done homework on the Shuttle and its operations.  For example, there were only three instrument panels in the Space Shuttle – none in the mid-deck, which was lined with equipment lockers, making it hard to get around under gravity because there are no floors.  On the flight deck, the pilot’s and copilot’s panels were up front and the third was the engineering panel, from whose rear-facing window overlooking the cargo bay two standing astronauts controlled operations out there, such as satellite launches and use of the Remote Arm  (Fig. 5).  The crews consisted of pilot astronauts  (two), Mission Specialists, with whatever skills were needed for particular flights, and one or two Payload Specialists, supervising or launching the payload on behalf of the institution or nation most concerned with it  (Fig. 6).

In the crash, after the Argos ‘flails across the runway’, as it digs in its nose section collapses and generates a ball of flame, as it would – and did, in the last moments of the Challenger –  because the propellants for the attitude control jets in the nose were hypergolic, igniting spontaneously on contact.  But in his last moments of consciousness Dreyfuss could see it, and irrationally wanted to kick it away, which tells us he was on the flight deck and not on the mid-deck, which has no windows, and that probably the Orbiter was upside-down. 

He could only be in one of the engineers’ seats  (Fig. 7), behind the pilots;  that, his nationality, and the reference to ‘his panel’ at the satellite deployment all mean that he is the Payload Specialist for the mission, or one of them.  That in turn means that a large part of the satellite has been built in Britain, probably the ‘bus’ vehicle for a standard communications satellite, to which new electronics have been attached.  That’s entirely possible, because there are senior British MI. participants in the conspiracy;  and it would considerably enhance Dreyfuss’s status, were we told it.  As it is, we see him almost entirely through the disparaging eyes of the conspirators, who make a big deal of how he’s the oldest and least experienced of the British candidates for the mission, so not to be believed if he does remember anything  (see below);  but actually he’s an important member of the crew launching the satellite, which makes it easier for us to believe when he gets the girl at the end.

The inverted final crash position is entirely possible.  In the mid-1960s there was a spectacular incident at a Canadian air show  (as I recall), where an F-100 Super Sabre touched water at around 300 mph, faster than the Space Shuttle touchdown.  After skidding several times the fighter took to the air again, inverted, and flew a long arc before finally striking the ground.  The pilot couldn’t eject, even if he was still conscious, because he was head-down, and the tail surfaces had been ripped off.  The footage made an impression on me and I worked it into Timescale, the unpublished prequel to my ‘Interface’ stories  (‘My SF’, ON, 10^th September 2023), and because a wheels-up Shuttle crash would be similar, Ian Rankin might well have done the same.

In 1990, I can believe that his agent or publisher might have told him to lose the spaceflight detail, so they could market the book as a simple thriller.  In 2019, after the success of Andy Weir’s The Martian, I find it a lot harder to understand, especially since Westwind was under revision and the missing details are information which the reader really needs to know.  The cover of the 2019 edition bills it only as ‘The Iconic Number One Bestseller’  (that’s the author, not the book), and ‘The Classic Lost Thriller’, with a cover showing only a man on a spiral staircase and no hint that the novel is space-related  (Fig. 1).

Where the contrast with Bringing Columbia Home becomes total, however, is in the reaction to the Shuttle disaster.  In the aftermath of the Challenger loss, when Sean O’Keefe became NASA Administrator, he instituted a major expansion of the Agency’s plans for dealing with disasters, or ‘contingencies’ as NASA prefers to call them.  It called for the setting up of more than 100 technical boards to assess every aspect of a Shuttle crash, and after ensuring the safety of the public and recovering the crew, the highest priority was to determine the cause of the accident.  As it happens, lowering the undercarriage was the only part of the Shuttle operation which wasn’t automated, at the insistence of the astronauts, so ‘pilot error’ would obviously be suspected;  but Dreyfuss states that there was total loss of control, as if the ‘main computer’ had failed.  Actually, the Shuttle had at least four computers, a minimum of three of which had to agree before any automated action.  Dreyfuss’s account sounds more like a complete failure of the Auxiliary Power Units, despite their duplication, and as that would obviously show on the screens at Kennedy Space Centre and Houston, sabotage would quickly be suspected and confirmed.  As it was, on Presidential direction, the FBI was directed to investigate that possibility with the Columbia, and quickly ruled it out.

On the social level, in the aftermath of the Challenger loss, a national day of mourning was declared, and a NASA Remembrance Day was established on the last Thursday of January for the Shuttle crew and the previous victims of the Apollo 1 fire, with the crew of the Columbia added in due course.  There were understandable protests from the families bereaved by two civilian air crashes, before and after Challenger, but it was clear that the public saw the events in wholly different lights.  The search for the Columbia debris and the remains of the crew brought out 25,000 volunteers for an unprecedented search of Louisiana and East Texas.  Admittedly in the Argos case the crash is on the Edwards AFB main runway, so there’s no vast area of territory to search, but public feeling would surely find other means of expression.

In summer 1986 when I visited JSC, I was told in confidence about the efforts being made to care for the partners and families of the Challenger crew, and although there were admitted shortcomings at the start  (Christa McAuliffe’s parents were initially left alone on the VIP stand), I was impressed by the effort being made by the space agency since.  Absolutely nothing like any of that happens here.  There’s no investigation of any kind, and the only comment is, “Well, space shuttles do crash”.  The only public reaction is that rednecks beat up a few British subjects because the limey ‘must’ have been responsible.  Dreyfuss is spirited away by the conspirators to an interrogation facility with fake doctors and nurses, and nobody from NASA even tries to look for him, much less to care for him and his loved ones.  His only visitors are the General in charge of removing US troops from Britain, and a gentleman from the State Department whose main role seems to be to restrain him.  Both are desperate to know what he saw in the stray transmission he picked up, for what turn out to be opposite reasons – the former because he knows what’s going on and the latter because he doesn’t.  Trusting neither, Dreyfuss feigns amnesia and gets away with it until a belated visit by a diplomat from the British Embassy, who turns out to be Military Intelligence and gets him out with what seems amazing ease, until one remembers that there are prominent M.I. members in the conspiracy.

In real life, Leinbach describes how on the day after the Columbia accident, the leaders of ‘myriad state and federal agencies had poured into the Lufkin Civic Center overnight and into the morning’.  Many of them, like the FBI and the National Guard, were mandated to be there, but many were volunteers and almost all represented large volunteer numbers;  two that Leinbach mentions on that page were the Texas Forest Service, whose general expertise and knowledge of the area put them at the forefront of organising the search, and the VFW Women’s Auxiliary, who undertook to feed them all.  A large contingent of the searchers came from the Native American community, putting ancient tribal rivalries aside to make their expertise available.  The whole undertaking took three months and was the largest search-and-recovery operation in US history, under overall auspices of the new Department of Homeland Security.  38% by weight of the airframe was recovered, along with remains of all the crew.  “One trusts that the residents of any region in America would have responded with the same grace, love, and dedication that the communities of Texas displayed”.  A bigger contrast with how America falls apart in Into the Guns, reviewed here last week, would be hard to find, but the indifference shown in Westwind comes close.

On my 1979 VIP tour of Rockwell International at Palmdale  (‘Discovery Landing’, ON, July 31^st 2022), as part of my briefing I was given samples of the Space Shuttle’s thermal tiles to handle.  I had already been told at Kennedy Space Center that “the damned Shuttle is so fragile, it’s like trying to put an eggshell into orbit”.  The Columbia had just been delivered to KSC, in such bad shape that the astronauts were threatening to strike rather than fly it.  There was a secret plan to smuggle me into the Vehicle Processing Facility to meet senior astronaut John Young, who would show me what was wrong with it.  NASA management probably got wind of that, because they made sure I was kept busy all day.  At Rockwell, I found that the white tiles were indeed alarmingly light, almost ready to float if one let go of them, and I was warned against crushing or crumbling them.  But the heavyweight Reinforced Carbon-Carbon tiles of the nose and leading edges were a different matter, reassuringly heavy and robust.  A British invention, by Brabham, it remains the standard material for the disc brakes on Formula 1 racing cars.  I had a particular interest in it:  briefed in advance by the late Prof. Terence Nonweiler, the inventor of the Waverider re-entry vehicle  (ON, November 27^th, 2022), I was to ask whether the material was strong enough to take the much smaller radius of curvature of a Waverider wing leading edge, and if so, whether the mechanical attachment system would be strong enough to keep it in place there.  Striking the table with the RCC block for emphasis, my guide assured me that it could take almost anything, as it later did  (Fig. 8).

I believed him, and I spent the Columbia’s last week reassuring people that there was no danger, although a large piece of insulating foam had broken from the External Tank and struck the leading edge during ascent  (Fig. 9). 

Many of those conversations were in the Bon Accord in Glasgow, and I would point to the mahogany bar and say, “If you gouged a piece of plaster out of the wall and threw it at the edge of the bar, it would break into dust and leave a mark, but it wouldn’t damage the wood”.  As Shuttle Launch Director, Michael Leinbach participated in safety reviews that week and blames himself for believing it too, even helping to suppress the concerns of less senior personnel who were sure something was wrong.  In fact the foam had made a hole in the leading edge the size of a dinner plate, and during re-entry the plasma stream entered the wing and melted the aluminium structure, leading to the break-up of the vehicle.

What he and I and everyone else had neglected was the ‘penetrator effect’, responsible for the fairground trick of ‘shooting a candle through a barn door’  (before the days of Health and Safety).  After the success of his ‘bouncing bomb’, Barnes Wallis had used the penetrator principle to devastating effect in his ‘earthquake bombs’, the Tallboy and the Grand Slam, with which 617 Squadron undermined railway bridges, viaducts and aqueducts, destroyed the underground V3 gun emplacements at Mimoyecques, and powered through the concrete shielding of E-Boat pens on the North Sea coast  (see the later chapters of Paul Brickhill, The Dam Busters, Pan Books, 1954).  Such was the confidence at Rockwell and NASA that the danger had never been tested for, and when samples of foam were fired at leading edge tiles, even at 100 miles per hour, they went through the tiles like cannon-balls through cardboard.  The criticisms in the official report were rightly devastating  (Columbia Accident Investigation Board:  Report, Volume 1 and 2.   US Government Printing Office  (Aug 2003).

Nothing could have saved the crew of the Columbia, even if the astronauts and the controllers been aware of the danger.   There wasn’t even the option of taking shelter at the International Space Station, because the Columbia’s science mission was in a different orbital plane  (see comments on the OMV, above.)  It was decreed that all future missions would be in that plane, with new procedures and equipment for inspections of the underside, and repairs if needed.  Turning the Shuttle end-over-end for inspection at the ISS, on its later missions, became a familiar sight.  O’Keefe cancelled the final repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, which isn’t in the ISS orbital plane to prevent contamination of the optics, but he restored it under international pressure.  All other missions concentrated on completing assembly of the ISS, with a last one, the 135^th, added to wrap up the job, and then the Shuttle was retired.  It had always been ahead of its time, incorporating design errors which Prof. Nonweiler criticised all the way back in 1973, correctly predicting both of the fatal accidents.  As one later commentator said, ‘It was too close to the margins in too many areas’.  George Abbey, the former head of Shuttle crew selection, was particularly critical of the return-to-flight schedule, saying at the 2008 UK Space Conference, ‘This is how we kill people’.

Once it was over, NASA made sure it wouldn’t be forgotten.  There are Shuttle museums and displays all over the USA, some still under construction.  At KSC the displays include a museum dedicated to the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia.  Note the timing, in light of George Abbey’s comment:  they couldn’t build it until the Shuttle was retired, in case they needed to add another crew to the memorial.

As Leinback writes, the new generation of space vehicles all come with escape systems, and with the return to capsules, they’re all up on top of the boosters and out of harm’s way from debris.  Nevertheless, we all know what’s going to happen, and as John Glenn said of the Challenger loss, “We always knew there would be a day like this – we just hoped we could put it off for ever”.  Or, to cite The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s not only bowls of petunias that can say, “Oh no, not again”.  Be ready for it when it comes.