Columbia Email from 20 years ago

This the letter I sent to friends and family February 2nd 2003 (I added some AI art to break up the words)

I want to thank everyone who emailed/phoned these past few days giving their support in these trying times. I am doing one blanket email to try to gather my thoughts(sorry for the length) and answer questions on where I was, but feel free to email me back. I will pass on anything I know, but at this point I know nothing more than what has been reported on the news.

I was not in Mission Control for the STS-107 Entry. I could have been there to observe and train, but instead I was in Missouri for my future brother in law's graduation from Army basic training. He was going right from basic to Germany with the possibility of being deployed so I wanted to be there for his graduation to show him how proud I was. I have worked my fair share of landings and wasn't assigned to work this entry so if I was going to be there on Saturday it would have been merely as an observer. Do I regret not being there? I can't say. Do I think I might have noticed something that the people on console missed? No, I had the opportunity to sub at A/E Control during one of the final ascent/entry sims in the weeks before liftoff and I have the utmost confidence in the team that was on console. From all reports so far everything was nominal up until the loss of comm and I for one am not about to start second guessing or pointing fingers at the team.

How am I doing? pretty crappy right now. I really feel like we lost 8 members of the family. Columbia was like the family dog who had gotten old, but she was still loyal and true and you knew you could count on her. I was amazed as I drove home with all the signs from the local businesses offering their support. We really are One NASA and it hurts to lose friends like this. I didn't know any of them personally other than a meeting here and there or maybe in a sim together, but right now it feels like a big part of me is gone. As most of you know space isn't just my job it has been my destiny and dream for most of my life. To work here at mission control is a wonder each and every day and really is the stuff dreams are made of. For some this is just a job, others share my enthusiasm and love for the program, but everyone is dedicated 110% each day to bring each astronaut safely home every mission and when they don't then we all feel the pain and anguish like right now. I watched Apollo One from the HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon" on Sunday to try to get some prospective.?It wasn't carelessness but failure of imagination that caused the Apollo One Fire and maybe we have failed once again in our imagination on what could have gone wrong.?For all the training we do to prepare for each mission, the trainers can only come up with a limited amount of scenarios, but obviously there is at least one way out scenario that we didn't think of. In some sense watching that episode and seeing how those left behind handled the tragedy spoke to me more deeply now than when the series first aired. I remember Challenger, but being in junior high and only dreaming of working on the space program it didn't hit me as hard as this disaster hits now. To paraphrase what John Shea (former head of the Apollo Program) said to Harold Storm (fmr head of North American Aviation -they built the Apollo command module) at the end of the episode " As tragic as the loss of losing the astronauts is, I think it is much worse for those of us left behind."

So what can I tell you about where we go from here? Not much, even before I got back into town on Saturday I was trying to find out if there was anything to do to help. I got in touch with my boss when I got home and right now it is a wait and see how the investigation is going to be set up.

I do believe that we will get to the bottom of what happened and make sure we fix it and get back to flying, but I don't think we can rush the investigation on account of the ISS. There are mechanisms in place, though I am not privy to them all, but I am sure that in the near term our international partners will come together to ensure that we don't abandon the station and its crew.

I am a little surprised at how the whole nation is supporting us in this time, but it is a shame that it takes a tragedy to once again get the nation interested in the space program. For too long shuttle missions were of little interest to the general public. The meager budget that kept shrinking was seen as too much for those who cared little for space science and more for problems here on earth. Space has always been dangerous, but its benefits are for all humankind. In the 40+ years of NASA's history we have now lost 24 brave men and women in the pursuit of space exploration. They knew and accepted the risks and we on the ground work diligently to keep them safe and bring them home. Some times we have let them down, but I do believe we will pick ourselves up from this latest tragedy and continue moving forward. Space is our future, not just for the U.S. but for all us on planet Earth. We need to keep pushing out and understanding our place in the universe. Someday in the distant future this planet will be gone whether by nuclear war, exhausting of the sun or some other disaster, but for whatever the reason some day they will speak of "Earth that was" only if we continue our exploration of space. If we let this latest incident ground us and stop us from finding our place among the stars then when the earth is finally destroyed it will take with it all of our potential, all of our heroes/writers/explorers, all of our dreams, all of what we were and who we were with it. If we don't fix this and continue to explore then who will remember Shakespeare, Columbus, Einstein, Hawkins, Grissom, McAuliffe, and now Husband and the rest of the STS-107 Columbia crew?

That is all from now in Houston. I may not have everyone's email address so pass this along.

Mike Interbartolo

Shuttle GNC Flight Controller