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  • Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew by Michael D. Leinbach book cover
  • Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew by Michael D. Leinbach book cover
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Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

by Michael D. Leinbach

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The search and recovery after Columbia

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Awards & Recognition

  • Award recognition

    Space Hipsters’ Best Space Book of 2018

    Voted Best Space Book of 2018

AlbakiReads Editorial

The search and recovery after Columbia

Michael D. Leinbach, a NASA space-shuttle launch director who helped lead the recovery effort, recounts the response to Columbia’s 2003 disintegration during reentry. The book traces a vast search across rural east Texas, where NASA worked alongside federal, state, and local agencies and hundreds of volunteers to recover shuttle debris and the crew. Its four-part structure moves from the confusion surrounding the disaster through the recovery work and its aftermath. Alongside the operational challenges, the account includes personal stories of NASA employees and searchers, and describes how recovered evidence helped piece together what happened and supported the shuttle program’s return to flight.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • For readers interested in the space shuttle program and NASA history.
  • For readers seeking accounts of disaster response, search operations, and interagency cooperation.
  • For readers interested in personal accounts from people involved in the Columbia recovery.

Themes

Columbia disaster and recoverySpaceflight and NASA historyDisaster response and cooperationCollective loss and remembrance

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Book overview

Voted the Best Space Book of 2018 by the Space Hipsters

The dramatic inside story of the epic search and recovery operation after the Columbia space shuttle disaster.

On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation's eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach, Launch Director of the space shuttle program at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history. This comprehensive account is told in four parts:
  • Parallel Confusion
  • Courage, Compassion, and Commitment
  • Picking Up the Pieces
  • A Bittersweet Victory
For the first time, here is the definitive inside story of the Columbia disaster and recovery and the inspiring message it ultimately holds. In the aftermath of tragedy, people and communities came together to help bring home the remains of the crew and nearly 40 percent of shuttle, an effort that was instrumental in piecing together what happened so the shuttle program could return to flight and complete the International Space Station. Bringing Columbia Home shares the deeply personal stories that emerged as NASA employees looked for lost colleagues and searchers overcame immense physical, logistical, and emotional challenges and worked together to accomplish the impossible.

Featuring a foreword and epilogue by astronauts Robert Crippen and Eileen Collins, and dedicated to the astronauts and recovery search persons who lost their lives, this is an incredible, compelling narrative about the best of humanity in the darkest of times and about how a failure at the pinnacle of human achievement became a story of cooperation and hope.
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