Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

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The story of the recovery of the space shuttle Columbia deserves to be better known and celebrated.

On February 1, 2003, I was at home enjoying my retirement, when I received a phone call from my daughter Susan, who worked on the Space Shuttle Program at Johnson Space Center. She said, “Dad, they’ve lost contact with Columbia.”

Her words felt like a heavy punch in my gut. Columbia was on reentry coming home from her STS-107 mission. Susan and I both knew that if they had lost contact during reentry, then the vehicle was lost. Only three days earlier, we had marked the seventeenth anniversary of the loss of Challenger.

The Space Shuttle Program consumed a major portion of my life. I worked on the shuttle during its development, and I was fortunate enough to be selected to fly with John Young on Columbia during its maiden flight. That first flight was more successful than any of us involved with the program could have hoped for. This was the first time astronauts launched on a vehicle that had not first been tested in an unmanned flight. It was the first crewed vehicle to use solid rocket boosters, and it was the first spacecraft to return to a landing on a runway. John and I were very proud of Columbia’s performance on that initial test flight.

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