ANGLONAUTS:

Andy's ready to blast off: When the shuttle heads back to space, Andy Thomas will be on board. Australia's only astronaut talks to Caroline Overington about how the Columbia might have been saved - and why man must go to Mars.
(Sydney Morning Herald, January 24, 2004)

It was only by chance that the Australian astronaut Andy Thomas was not aboard the doomed space shuttle Columbia which broke apart over Texas a year ago, taking the lives of all seven crew. It is, however, by choice that he will be aboard the next shuttle, which is expected to be launched in October.

"I was considered for Columbia," Thomas says. "But ultimately it comes down to where you are in the rotation, and I was scheduled for a different one."

So, on the day that Columbia broke up and tumbled from the sky, Thomas was in his office at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, forced to watch and wait and wonder why the shuttle had not appeared on his radar.

He knew everybody on board, and one of the astronauts, Mike Anderson, was a close friend who had travelled with him to the Mir space station. "It was very troubling," he says. "It was about 8am [on February 1 last year] and the shuttle was supposedly 16 minutes from landing, but we couldn't find her. I thought, 'This doesn't look good."' Thomas immediately started calling people and "while I was in my office, doing that, CNN showed the video [of debris raining from the sky]. And that was ... ah, well, pretty horrific," he says.

Thomas, 51, says he knew from the footage that Columbia was lost, but he still hoped that the crew might have survived. "The question I was struggling with was, were they able to activate escape systems?" But within an hour he knew all hope was lost. "The break-up was catastrophic. It was not survivable."

After the accident, the independent Columbia Accident Review Board savaged NASA for failing to "heed alarm bells" and for not having a "culture of safety". Chastened, NASA agreed to implement all the board's recommendations, and now believes it is almost ready to fly again. Thomas will be on the so-called "return-to-flight" mission - at his own request. Some people thought he was made to volunteer, but he says: "It will be the safest shuttle flight ever. And I knew it needed people with experience, so I asked to be considered ..."

Since the President proposed continuing on to Mars, you've heard again the bitterness with which the costs of manned space flight are viewed by many (think Barney Frank), so it's interesting that we send so many non-American citizens into space with that money.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 23, 2004 9:25 AM