Hundreds of NASA personnel joined the recovery effort in the field, including many astronauts. Astronaut John Herrington was assigned to coordinate the aerial searches from the Lufkin Command Center. Herrington had performed similar tasks in the Navy before coming to NASA.
Herrington arrived in Lufkin Texas about two weeks after the accident. He says his job at the command center kept him busy and he never got the opportunity to join the searchers in the field either on the ground or in the air. Herrington said "I would have loved to have gone out in the field and walked the line but I just had a huge job to do."
The Texas Forest Service had up to 36 helicopters, 10 light aircraft, a handful of aircraft with special sensors, the civil air patrol, and even ultralight powered paragliders. Helicopters could cover four times as much land as search teams on the ground, but they could only spot larger pieces or things that were unusual looking, which would warrant sending a ground team to inspect the area more closely. The helicopters were sent primarily to areas where winds could have blown lighter debris away from the main search corridor.
Herrington was the air ops officer on March 27 when a Bell 407 helicopter crashed in the Angelina National Forest in San Augustine County, Texas, killing two of its five occupants. Herrington said, "It just added to the feeling of how bad it was already. Two people had perished in the process, in the recovery effort. For me that was the hardest time in the whole ordeal."
The recovery operations were marred by a helicopter crash on March 27, killing pilot Jules “Buzz” Mier (in black coat) and Charles Krenek, an employee of the Texas Forest Service (yellow coat); and injuring Matt Tschacher, an U.S. Forest Service employee; and KSC workers Richard Lange and Ronnie Dale (not in this photo).
As part of the search and recovery operations, the astronauts spent much of their time meeting volunteers. Herrington, the first enrolled Native American astronaut, said, "A good portion [of the searchers] were fire crews, and a good portion of people who fight fires in this country are Native Americans. I could show them the respect and honor they deserved because they did a phenomenal job. It was amazing. I heard 89 percent of the people walking the debris line were Native Americans. What was neat about it was they treated it with a reverence that a lot of people didn't expect and people who aren't Native would see this and how much they held the pieces they would find in reverence. These were not inanimate objects they were finding, these were very, very living pieces they had a connection to. Here's a group of folks who for centuries had a very intimate connection to the sky. They are a part of what's going to return us to flight, they're now part of the space program and what we're doing."
Many of the volunteers, especially the American Indians, wanted to meet Herrington. He said, "I just tried to make sure I would talk to every camp -- I went to Nacogdoches, Hemphill, Palestine, and Corsicana - the four major camps out there. I wanted to go out and see people. I don't know how many autographs I signed, how many people I thanked. For a while I would do four or five autographs per person, personalized. Just to say thanks for what you're doing -- because you're the reason why we're going to fly again, because you're helping solve the puzzle. It was my honor and privilege to be there.
So why the passion? Herrington said, "The first time a person sees a launch they have an immediate connection to the space program -- they are participants, they feel the emotions, they see it with their eyes. People who see a launch for the first time recognize that flying in space is a wondrous thing, it's a dangerous thing. But you need to see it -- seeing it in the newspaper just doesn't cut it. You've got to feel it. That's human spaceflight at its essence."
The Native Americans involved in the search are proud of what they accomplished. Herrington noted well after the recovery effort was completed, "I'm at a pow-wow in Bozeman, Montana, and a lady walks by me with a Columbia recovery T-shirt -- pretty neat."
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