Sunday, February 1, 2004
Search for parts haunted workers
By SANDRA FREDERICK
NEWS-JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
EDGEWATER — Flanked by men and women, farmers and prisoners, Richard Van Treuren slowly trod through rural pastures with his eyes riveted toward the ground.
Some 48 hours after Columbia broke apart re-entering the Earth´s atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003, Van Treuren and hundreds of volunteers had the arduous task of trudging through remote areas across Texas searching for debris that may have rained down during the orbiter´s path back to Kennedy Space Center.
“After the initial shock wore off, we just wanted to find that magical piece that would give NASA officials the link to what happened and get us closer to returning to flight,” the 53-year-old United Space Alliance employee said last week from his Edgewater home.
He said it was an emotional time, because of not just the loss of seven lives, but also the loss of his beloved Columbia. For three weeks he searched on the ground and from the air for the same parts he had touched many times as an spacecraft operator - a job that often sat him in the same seat as the shuttle commander and pilot during pre-flight testing.
For others of the hundreds of Volusia and few Flagler county residents who commute to the Kennedy Space Center area to work for NASA and its contractors, grief for the astronauts and orbiter was accompanied by worry for their own livelihoods. A year later, though, those fears have proved largely unfounded and space workers express hope for growth in the industry.
And the job Van Treuren and his colleagues began in the Texas fields was formally brought to a close Friday, when NASA officials announced that the nearly 83,000 pieces of Columbia recovered are in their final resting place on the 16th floor of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the space center.
“This room will be here for scientist, engineers and for future study and development of the space program, 10, 15, 20 and even 50 years from now,” said Mike Leinbach, shuttle launch director.
Van Treuren´s role was as an expert at identifying the hardware.
“Every time a piece was found, it brought tears to my eyes,” he said.
Unlike the Challenger explosion in January 1986, Columbia´s disintegration caused pieces to fall across the landscape from Las Vegas to eastern Texas, leaving forensic clues as to the cause of the catastrophic accident. The Challenger blew up nearly two minutes after takeoff over the ocean leaving large pieces of debris.
The task confronting the engineers and space officials was finding as many pieces of Columbia as possible, even if they were burned and broken shards, and then reconstructing the orbiter.
It took an estimated 1 1/2 million man-hours for search and recovery efforts and another 150,000 hours to reconstruct the pieces that were retrieved. In all, about 38 percent of the shuttle was found, including parts of the left wing where the original breach happened and the inner module where the astronauts sat, said NASA spokesman Scott Thurston.
After the Challenger accident, the space program came to an abrupt halt, causing layoffs at the space center. It took 32 months before another shuttle - the Columbia - lifted off from a launch pad at the Cape. NASA hopes to get the Atlantis to the international space station in September or October, some 21 months after Columbia´s demise.
Kari Fluegel, spokeswoman for United Space Alliance, the largest independent contractor for NASA in Brevard County, said the company was hit emotionally - but not financially - by the loss. The efforts of the 6,400 employees, 180 from Volusia County, continue to be geared toward returning to space.
“From what I have been told, following the Challenger explosion, there was a lot of uncertainty,” she said from her office at Kennedy Space Center. “In this case, the president immediately came out and said we would return to flight.”
Instead of making layoffs, Fluegel said, the company has had to hire employees to keep up with demand. Two of the three remaining shuttles have been refitted with state-of-the-art cockpits and wiring upgrades in preparation for future missions, she said.
Steve Williams, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 756 in Port Orange, said there were some layoffs following the Columbia accident, but was not sure if they were directly related to the accident. Williams estimated the union supplies about 50 local people to Kennedy Space Center for work on launch pads and the Canaveral Air Force launch facility.
“Anything space-related affects us,” he said. “We are part of the support team.”
Both are putting stock in President Bush´s space initiative announced last month to get humans to the moon, then on to the farther outpost - Mars - which could ultimately bring more jobs to the area.
“Getting the shuttle program up and running is the first step in that vision,” Fluegel said. “It´s additional energy on the road to a return in flight.”
With Challenger and Columbia etched in his memory, Van Treuren prays another space accident never happens. Two in his 25 years at the space center are as much as one can withstand, he said.
“I wouldn´t say this time around it was easier,” he said. “We felt invincible the first time. This time we knew we weren´t. We had been there before.”
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