The three surviving shuttles returned to space starting in 2005. The damaged panel allowed searing hot gases to seep into the wing on re-entry, causing the craft to lose control and disintegrate. A piece of insulating foam from its external fuel tank broke away, striking and cracking a panel on the orbiter’s left wing. Pieces turned up as late as 2011, when the state’s brutal drought uncovered an aluminum fuel tank on the bottom of Lake Nacogdoches.Īn investigation determined Columbia was doomed almost from the instant its 16-day mission began. Overall, NASA recovered about 84,000 pieces of the orbiter, about 40% of the craft, scattered from the Texas panhandle to Fort Polk, Louisiana. Hemphill’s VFW hall was quickly turned into a dining hall for the search teams, and it will host lunch for the guests at Friday’s ceremony. Gay’s husband was president of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, and she led the group’s Ladies’ Auxiliary. “My house started vibrating, and the pictures on the wall started shaking, and then I heard two sonic booms,” she said. Unlike Steed, whose space buff sister-in-law called her outside that morning, she was getting ready for a relative’s baby shower and didn’t see the breakup. Gay now leads the Sabine County Columbia Memorial Committee. In addition, two members of a helicopter crew engaged in the search were killed in a crash the following month. The remains of the shuttle’s crew were found near Hemphill, along with the nose, part of the landing gear and much of the cabin. You knew that if you found a can of caviar with Velcro on the back of it, you know it’s not supposed to be in the woods.” You could still see the numbers and the switches. “We would find some of the instrument panel that was in the shuttle cockpit. “Some of them, you knew instantly what they were,” said Belinda Gay, one of those searchers. Space shuttle Columbia part found in east Texas One of them is Hemphill, Texas, about 170 miles north of Houston, where a roadside monument and a museum commemorate the disaster and the volunteers who combed the surrounding woods for pieces of the spacecraft. “I don’t think that pain ever completely goes away.”Ĭommemorations will also be held in some of the towns where the orbiter’s wreckage rained down that bright Saturday morning. “The Lord definitely healed our hearts tremendously, but it’s a lifelong process,” she said. Nevertheless, she said, the grief still lingers. Nobody maliciously caused this to happen.” They’re flawed,” said Husband-Thompson, who remarried five years ago. But she said NASA is “the best of the best.” In an instant, she was a single mother with two young children. “I remember looking up at the sky and thinking, ‘Is that it? Is that the end of Rick’s life?’ ” she told CNN. Space fan remembers the shuttle 10 years later Shuttle commander Rick Husband’s wife Evelyn, who was waiting for him there, feared the worst. ET, about 15 minutes before it had been expected to land at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Controllers lost contact with Columbia at 8:59 a.m.
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