Stephen F. Austin State University

As Columbia STS-107 streaked across a bright blue sky on Feb. 1, 2003, 200,000 feet above Texas, the world changed in an instant.

Damage caused to the leading edge of one of the shuttle’s wings two weeks earlier during Columbia’s final liftoff doomed the shuttle that morning. The searing heat caused by re-entry found its way through the damaged heat shield and ripped the shuttle apart, scattering debris across East Texas, and taking the lives of seven astronauts: Commander Rick D. Husband, pilot William C. McCool, payload commander Michael P. Anderson, mission specialist 1 David M. Brown, mission specialist 2 Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist 4 Laurel Brown and payload specialist 1 Ilan Ramon of Israel.

As tragedy struck the NASA family, the recovery mission fell squarely on the shoulders of East Texans.

To help honor the memory of Columbia and the ensuing recovery effort, and in honor of the fifth anniversary of the shuttle Columbia accident, the Columbia Regional Geospatial Service Center in Nacogdoches and the Columbia Memorial Museum is presenting “Memories of Columbia.”

The exhibit features an extensive history of NASA’s manned spaceflight program and also devotes countless items and history resources of the Columbia accident and recovery effort.

Helping to lead the effort to form the museum and the tribute to Columbia was CRGSC Assistant Director of Education and Training Dr. Darrel L. McDonald.

“The idea for the museum started emerging out of SFA as a community effort,” McDonald said. “The real impetus behind getting it together, though, was Dr. Morris Jackson.”

Helping McDonald set the center up was fellow CRGSC Assistant Director Dr. Paul Blackwell.

“Many people in the area were involved with the recovery effort itself, so we dovetailed the recovery with the broader scale of space travel,” Blackwell explained.

Items at the exhibit cover a long line in the history of space travel and include special instruments used in space flight, along with a space suit and even a tire from the shuttle Atlantis. Many of the items donated to the exhibit and the Columbia Memorial Museum are from Dr. Morris Jackson.

What draws special attention at the exhibit, as Blackwell explained, is the tribute to the thousands of volunteers who worked during the recovery effort.

Much of the success of the recovery effort, can be given to the geospatial work done by Stephen F. Austin State University. Blackwell said for the past 15 years SFA has done extensive work involving geospatial mapping through the Hughes GIS lab at the university. And, just a couple of months before the Columbia disaster, Dr. James Kroll, director of CRGSC got the group involved with the Nacogdoches County emergency response system.

“Forty minutes after the accident we were out helping officials find debris,” Blackwell said.

Blackwell and others would take reports of debris locations and locate them on a map which would help others go out and find the pieces, with members of the Hughes lab organizing the GPS crews who would assign each piece of debris an exact location.

Every two hours Blackwell and others working on geospatial mapping would update their findings and it all began to come together.

“We got to looking at it (on a map) and we found a linear pattern,” Blackwell said, noting how debris reports were taken on a line from Anderson County to San Augustine County. “Overnight we developed a linear regression and that became the base search vector for the recovery effort.”

From those initial few hours after the shuttle came apart recovery crews working all across East Texas began to develop a solid idea of where debris components could be found, and it allowed the massive amount of volunteers to focus their attention on specific targets.

“I can’t stress enough how much help the volunteers were in this entire process,” Blackwell said, bragging on the work being done by people from all over the state, with many of the volunteers having extensive training in geospatial analysis.

“Those kinds of volunteers were extremely crucial to our effort,” Blackwell added.

As the search continued and other official agencies became involved, the GIS group would make specific maps for each agency.

“We made a customized product for the people working on the ground,” Blackwell said.

They also set up forward mapping centers in San Augustine and Six Mile to get information into the hands of the searchers more efficiently.

The impact of the days and weeks following the disintegration of Columbia over the skies of Texas is still evident around Nacogdoches. The GIS group at SFA soon outgrew its environs on the university campus and now has an office on the downtown square in Nacogdoches, proudly displaying the name Columbia.

The Columbia Regional Geospatial Service Center also will hold a permanent museum to the Columbia disaster and recovery effort.

“The entire experience is just part of the development of the Columbia Center,” Blackwell said. “It really let people know what we were capable of doing.”

Memories of Columbia will be open through Feb. 10. Guided and group tours are available. Along with NASA exhibits and artifacts from the nation’s space industry, there are movies and slide shows helping to give people a better look at a nation in space.

The exhibit is located at 204 E. Pilar St. next to city hall on the square in downtown Nacogdoches. It is open from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and from 1 to 5 p.m. on Sundays.