posted 02-05-2023 12:44 PM               

Space Cover 688: STS-107 Debris Search

Just over 20 years ago as the Space Shuttle Columbia re-entered from its STS-107 mission, it broke up in a tragic accident. Debris was scattered across a long swath of the southern US, with the bulk of the debris landing in central/eastern Texas. The effort to recover the debris involved myriad volunteers along with NASA employees. Above is a cover postmarked at Corsicana, TX on March 7, 2003. It was carried by me (in the foreground of the cachet photo in the white hat) as a volunteer helping to search for debris from the accident.

When I heard on TV that the search for debris was taking place, I called down to Houston to see if I could wrangle a press pass. I called a number that I had and talked to a man about my wanting to cover the search for the ATA Space Study Unit, and that I'd had press credentials from NASA for Apollo 16 at KSC. Luckily the man apparently had some knowledge of space cover collecting and collectors and said, "Aren't you kind of tall and thin and wear glasses?" I responded, "That's me alright."  The description was close enough and I couldn't be absolutely sure that he was wrong.  So he said, "OK, come on down.  We're leaving early so be here by 4 AM."  I left home at 2AM and drove to Corsicana.  I got in on the briefings and was assigned to a bus that went to one of the edges of the search area. 

Most of the volunteers that day consisted of teams of National Forest Fire Fighters. About 50 of us would line up against a barbed wire fence at one end of the grid and standing about 6 to 8 feet apart from each other, we would slowly walk about a quarter mile to another barbed wire fence. Then we'd all shift to the right to where the 50th person was standing, and we'd walk back. (Note: I wish that I'd known how long we were going to repeat this over and over as there were no bathroom breaks for about 6 hours.) At one time I saw a metal plate sitting vertically in a small clump of Johnson Grass. I didn't want to be seen picking up anything myself so I called over the fire fighter closest to me and pointed it out to him.  It didn't pan out though.  It had fallen off a farm implement.  In all, our group found only a large handful of Shuttle insulation that had blown over that way. The heavier metal had fallen south of us. 

I carried 500 covers in a canvas backpack and took several photos of the line of searchers. Then I saw a photographer walking near us and asked him to shoot a photo of me for my personal use.  But later when I showed the photos to Space Unit member Bob Boyd and pointed out a photo that I wanted to use for the cachet, he talked me into using the one showing that I was carrying the covers.

The Corsicana post office was still open when I got to it, but the local postmaster didn't know whether to allow me to use a canceller to hand cancel the covers myself as I told him that it was allowable as long as I was within eyesight of the postal workers.  It took two calls by him to the Dallas Postmaster and almost two hours before he let cancel all the covers I'd carried.

posted 02-27-2023 09:44 AM               

To accommodate this search, command and operations sites were placed throughout East Texas. These sites were located at Corsicana, Hemphill, Longview, Lufkin, Nacogdoches, Palestine, and San Augustine.

I tried to commemorate this massive search through cover collecting and here some examples of them.