Revering the Relics of Disaster

About 84,000 traumatized pieces -- twisted aluminum, charred ceramic tile and shreds of tire rubber -- lie on a massive grid of yellow tape in a hangar at Kennedy Space Center.

For seven months, an army of workers has delicately assembled the shards into the ghostly outline of what once was the shuttle Columbia -- key clues in determining why the orbiter plunged out of the blue Texas sky in February.

With investigators preparing to issue their final report on the cause of the accident Tuesday, the scattered debris is now making a sad transition from evidence into relic and reservoir of history, memory and pain.

One question looms: What to do with it all?

Such answers came more easily after the Challenger explosion in 1986. The 20 tons of debris recovered from the Atlantic Ocean -- about half of the shuttle and most of the crew cabin -- were bagged, cataloged and entombed in two abandoned Minuteman silos at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station near the ill-fated Challenger’s launch pad.

It was an ignominious burial: The 90-foot-deep silos had held discarded control room consoles and several feet of stagnant water before they were cleared. When they were uncapped, the stench overpowered workers and rats scurried out. Less than a year after the accident, the last vestiges of the shuttle were lifted skyward by crane, dropped into the silos and sealed under 10,000-pound concrete caps.

Columbia will be different.

“One thing we’re not going to do, which was done with the Challenger, is lock it up and bury it and pretend that it didn’t happen,” vowed NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe.

NASA officials have decided to provide some pieces to scientists and engineers for research. They are also cautiously broaching the idea of putting the shattered remnants of Columbia on display as an official memorial.

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., has asked to display parts of the ruined shuttle, including the leading edge of the left wing where the fatal breach is thought to have occurred. A number of cities across the nation have also approached the agency, asking for smaller pieces to create their own tributes. NASA has declined to identify the cities involved.

Like the mangled steel I-beams of the World Trade Center and chunks of granite from the Oklahoma City bombing that have been become part of memorials around the country, parts of the shuttle are now in demand.

“Living people don’t want to let go. We don’t want to forget, so we create shrines -- whatever form they take,” said Anneli Rufus, the author of “Magnificent Corpses,” a book about medieval religious relics.

After the American Civil War, it took decades before some small towns were able to pay for and mount tributes to dead soldiers. Today, it seems memorials need to go up before the next news cycle eclipses them or people’s short attention spans move on to something else. While there has always been calamity, the modern world seems incessantly awash in tragedy -- from a bombing or the death of a princess half a world away to the murder of a child in the next county.

“It sounds harsh, but there’s a feeling we have to capitalize on the moment before we forget,” said Gary M. Laderman, a professor of religion at Emory University and author of “Rest In Peace,” a history of funeral rituals in the 20th century.

Immediately after Columbia fell, fields of flowers and handwritten notes appeared at the entrance gates of the Kennedy and Johnson space centers. Cyber-memorials of all types sprung up on the Web, letting anyone with an Internet connection glimpse the private lives of a group relatively unknown before their deaths. Mission specialist Kalpana Chawla loved the band Deep Purple. Pilot William C. McCool backpacked through the parks of the American West every chance he got. Payload commander Michael P. Anderson drove a classic Porsche.

In a matter of weeks, small tributes began to sprout up around the country. A Cub Scout troop in Indiana planted a perennial garden around their elementary school to honor the astronauts; the city of Lancaster changed the name of Avenue M to “Columbia Way.” Seven asteroids were named after the dead astronauts, and a 13,980-foot high peak in Colorado now goes by the name “Columbia Point.”

But there is a desire for more -- a piece of the fallen shuttle.

“Somehow you connect more through material than through memories,” said Edward T. Linenthal, a professor of religion at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and the author of “Unfinished Bombing,” a book about the Oklahoma City National Memorial Archive. The shuttle crash “is a national story, a public death, so the stuff becomes part of the pantheon of national relics.”

The power of jagged pieces of shuttle aluminum can be haunting. In 1996, more than a decade after Challenger exploded, a barnacle-encrusted 14-foot-long piece of wing flap washed ashore near a Cocoa Beach, Fla., bar. “It’s like a ghost came back,” one Kennedy Space Center employee said at the time. Another called it “an act of God.” The piece was added to the silo holding the rest of the debris.

While NASA leaders are open to the idea, no decision has been made on whether, or how, to display pieces of Columbia, said Michael D. Leinbach, who was shuttle launch director and now oversees debris reconstruction at Kennedy Space Center.

An immediate question is where to house an official Columbia memorial or display. Contenders include Kennedy Space Center in Florida, home to the shuttle, and Johnson Space Center in Texas, home to the astronauts.

A natural site might be the National Air and Space Museum, which chronicles the history of flight. Roger Launius, who leads the museum’s space history department, said he would like to include parts of both Columbia and Challenger in a permanent exhibit on shuttle and space station projects.

“Our intent would be to tell the full history of the shuttle,” he said. “In that context, we have to talk about the two accidents.”

Many communities are not waiting for an official memorial. Several East Texas counties are creating a “historic Space Shuttle corridor” along the 240-mile swath of land that was pelted with shuttle debris in February. Sabine County officials plan to place a replica of the nose cone at the site where the real cone was found, relatively intact, embedded 6 feet in the ground.

Even towns with little direct connection to the accident, from Syracuse, N.Y., to Lompoc, are joining the disaster-shrine movement.

Lompoc sits on the edge of Vandenberg Air Force Base, which once was scheduled to launch a shuttle but never did. That didn’t stop Lompoc Councilman Will Schuyler from raising money for a Columbia memorial within days of the accident. He raised half of the $3,000 he needed for the project in just 24 hours.

“I just felt it was important, even though we never launched the shuttle here, to have a memorial,” he said. “I just don’t think people should forget these things.”

Such memorials are becoming big draws, no matter how many thousands of miles away they are from the heart of a disaster. A flatbed carrying 16 tons of twisted World Trade Center steel and a disabled New York City firetruck drew crowds as it crossed the country on its way to Rancho Cucamonga, where a $9-million museum is planned to house it. Other I-beams have taken up residence in cities such as Martinez, Calif., Lafayette, La., and Palos Hills, Ill.

“Distance intensifies the appetite to be closer to it,” said Sarah Henry, the deputy director for programs of the Museum of the City of New York. She collected materials after the Sept. 11 attacks for preservation and future display. “In New York, we were so close, we didn’t need that as much.”

Chunks of granite from the bombed hulk of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building are housed in federal buildings across the country and play a starring role in the memorial constructed on the site -- a place that now receives half a million visitors a year.

“It’s the most visited site in Oklahoma,” said Kari Watkins, the memorial’s executive director. Watkins is not surprised that distant strangers are drawn to the memorial because so many people lived through the blast and its painful aftermath via television. “You didn’t have to be here, live here or know anybody to relate.”

Memorial planners all grapple with what narrative to tell about an event. There is a tendency, notes monument expert Linenthal, for memorial planners to soften painful events with “comforting stories that dilute the realities of violence.”

Traditional memorials celebrate heroism, bravery and triumph over adversity. But the shuttle accident, as well as the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City, are underlain by darker stories -- terrorism and failures of technology. Should a shuttle memorial simply glorify the adventure of spaceflight? Or should it question the endeavor’s human cost and ultimate worth?

“It will be very interesting to see what kind of narrative they will pick,” Linenthal said. “Is it one of guilt and culpability and something that should not have happened? Or is it one of heroism and sacrifice?”

Kennedy Space Center’s Leinbach said it was uncertain whether NASA would play a major role in designing a memorial using Columbia debris.

Memorial designers will also have to struggle with how to tell the story of the tragedy without being too gruesome and further wounding those who have suffered the loss of loved ones. It is not an easy task.

To create the Oklahoma City memorial, survivors, residents and family members of victims endured a sometimes grueling three-year process to decide just how to remember the event that wracked their city. “It really would have been much easier to plow it into a field or a hangar and forget about it,” Watkins said. “That is the easy way out.”

Many objects from the Holocaust still remain too painful. Curators of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., planned to display hair from concentration camp victims that had been cut to stuff mattresses and make socks. The plan was shelved after survivors protested that the display was too painful and disrespectful.

“People worried it was so toxic symbolically it didn’t belong,” Linenthal said.

NASA officials face similar ethical questions. So far, some family members have supported displaying parts of Columbia; others say it’s unnecessary.

“Clearly we don’t want to do something that is gruesome or grotesque,” said the Smithsonian’s Launius. “I myself go back and forth on whether we should display it.”

The shuttle’s crew cabin, the last thing the astronauts saw or touched before they died, is off-limits. Pieces of it have been cordoned off and are stored separately from the rest of the debris.

The pain surrounding any object from a disaster may explain why even seemingly innocuous items such as ceramic tiles hold so much sway: They may be all that witnesses can bear. In the case of the violent forces that ripped apart the shuttle nearly 40 miles above the Earth, even small shreds of material are compelling simply because they survived.

“Something reached the ground,” said the Museum of the City of New York’s Henry. “There is a sense of awe.”