[FPSPACE] Columbia crew

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi all - 

With my stroke, I have trouble remembering things anymore, so perhaps someone here may be able to help with some details concerning Columbia....

If memory serves, in addition to Columbia's crew, two pilots were lost in the Columbia debris recovery effort. I can't find a link to their names, but IMO NASA's incompetence in handling the Columbia emergency killed them as surely as it killed Columbia's crew. Perhaps someone here might remember what they're names were, and know something about the friends and family they left behind.  Those men deserve more than to be forgotten.

And of course, we had the bizarre spectacle of NASA wanting to put their blunders in dealing with Columbia behind them so rapidly that they had the crew's funerals, and THEN discovered the crew compartment at the bottom of the resevoir with the crew's remains inside. My memory's more than a little fuzzy, but it seems to me that one of the recovery divers or support staff was lost there as well. That would raise the count from nine to ten.

Then there's astronaut Lisa Novak, and I seem to recall that the stress of losing a close friend in Columbia and then rehearsing shuttle failures every day for months on end laid the foundation for her later problems.

Right now, we're being told about a hypersonic flat spin, and that the crew compartment separated as Columbia disintegrated. Three weeks to go, and then say about two or three months more. 

I'd like to close this note by stating that I have complete confidence in Wayne Hale
as director of shuttle operations, and its really too bad that he did not arrive at Kennedy just a week or two sooner.

E.P.
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