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NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe noted there were no turf battles between the diverse organizations, most of whom didn't have any experience working with each other. O'Keefe said, "The unprecedented debris recovery operation involved over 14,000 people representing over 130 different agencies and volunteer groups, contractors and private organizations, state and local governments -- you name it, everybody was involved. Well beyond the expectations of what we ever could have imagined, with that many disparate groups who had never worked together before, this has proven to be, in my judgment, the greatest inter-agency, inter-government, inter-personal activity we could have conducted anywhere -- any time. It has been absolutely flawless, and it is for that reason there has been absolutely no controversy to speak of at all. It has been scantily covered [in the news]. If there was any controversy, we would have been reading about it on the front page."
Astronaut John Herrington echoed O'Keefe's comments: "The people who were there had this real motivation and dedication to what they were doing. They did it. When you asked for something, it would happen. There wasn't any, ‘We can't do that because of this.’ You needed something -- it would happen. "
Herrington also noted the passion of the searchers, "People have a real deep appreciation for the human aspect of human spaceflight. It's the people involved in it. If anything came out of this tragedy, [it is that] you realize there's a huge support for flying humans in space from the general public. That, if anything, makes you feel you're doing this for a reason. People appreciate this -- they realize what it means to them. I appreciate the fact there were people there going way beyond what was expected to recover both the crew and the hardware to figure what happened. You'll never have any idea unless you're out in East Texas, what a fabulous thing the people out there did. From the minute it happened and debris started coming down in Texas, to all the people who came from around the country to participate in the recovery. I was really, really impressed with the people I met -- Texas forestry service, U.S. forest service, FEMA, EPA, you name it. It was really good, coming together with really talented people doing really important things.”
Lounge flew on the shuttle three times, in 1985, 1988, and 1990 with his last mission on Columbia. He notes that on his first flight in 1985 the first two minutes seemed to fly by in seconds. His second flight was the STS-26 flight, the first flight after the Challenger accident. He said that on that flight it seemed to take half an hour for the same period to pass.
Lounge said, "I went up to review the camp [in Corsicana] and just meet the people in a show of support. After I had supper with them in the mess hall we set up a slide show in one of the tents. I had several hundred of these workers in the audience. I showed my slide show of my three shuttle flights and talked about all of the things that went into flying in space. I took some questions and it was really heartening to see the interest. This group of American citizens had never been close to the space program before and they were just very engaged. Just really really good questions about all aspects of it. I finally had to cut off the questions and there was one Indian in the back, long pony-tail, tough looking guy. I took one more question from him.
He said, 'Mr. Lounge I understand NASA has a lot of interest in going to Mars, can you tell me why that is.' I launched off into a lecture about life in the universe and life developing on Earth and why we think Mars had a similar environment at least early on. And if we're going to find life elsewhere in this solar system that's where we need to go. And I finally shut up and he said, 'Well, that might be true. But I think it's because the government heard there was some Indian land up there.' So I fell for that one.”
O'Keefe shared an unusual story: "They discovered one morning [in the base camp] that the folks from the Palestine camp had commandeered one of their busses - so [the people in the command center] announced that the Palestinians had taken the bus. Anywhere else but East Texas this may have made a major headline."