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

 

Bringing Columbia Home is the story of the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in which the shuttle broke up during reentry. It was written by a former NASA employee who was the launch director when the disaster occurred and published in 2018.

The beginning of the book goes through what was happening on the ground as the shuttle lost contact with the ground and how frantic people were becoming as the shuttle was not where it was supposed to be and then missed the landing (which is calculated to the second). Then the author goes through the mission from the beginning, detailing how much was known about the foam strike that occurred during the launch of the shuttle, and the debate that went on about whether the shuttle was actually in danger. The author goes into a lot of detail about the recovery effort, and how the focus at first was recovering the remains of the shuttle crew, and then after the remains of all seven astronauts were found, detailing the major effort made to find as much of the shuttle as they could.

The book is very harrowing. The author does a great job detailing what happened, while still being respectful to the people who were lost and their families. He also goes into a lot of detail about how the people in rural Texas (which is where most of the debris was landed) helped searchers locate the remains of the shuttle and the crew. The author does give readers a general idea of where the remains of the crew members were found, but did not go into specifics (to protect the privacy of the property owners) and did not detail the condition of the bodies (to respect the dead and their families). But, you can definitely read between the lines to know that only some remains of each crew member were found.

The substantive portion of the book is 300 pages long, then there are a couple of appendices that give the names of people who were key to the recovery efforts and a glossary of the NASA terms used. Then there are several pages of endnotes. Most of the notes just point to sources, but some of the notes are explanatory. If you are a nerd about reading the notes, it is kind of a pain to go back and see what text it was created from, so I think they would have been better as footnotes. The book is very emotional, even now 20-plus years after the disaster. While the cause of the accident was not as infuriating as the Challenger disaster, as there was really no practical rescue that could have been made either before the shuttle reentered the atmosphere or during, it was still hard to read how some people were just dismissing the fact that there was any danger to the shuttle. It is definitely worth reading.