Columbia tragedy hits home

Jenny Marder

Mark Bixby woke up at 5:35 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the space

shuttle Columbia as it soared over Huntington Beach just minutes

before its tragic descent.

He watched the “orange dot” travel across the early morning sky in

awe, before heading home, where he planned to watch it land, live on

CNN.

What started out as a thrilling morning ended in shock and

devastation.

On Monday, everyone at Boeing Huntington Beach put down their

pens, hung up their phones and lowered their heads in a moment of

silence, joining Boeing offices in Canoga and Palmdale in honoring

the seven astronauts who were killed 16 minutes before the shuttle’s

scheduled landing at the NASA base in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

On Tuesday, crowds gathered in Boeing’s Huntington Beach

cafeteria, lobby and conference rooms to watch President George W.

Bush’s televised speech.

“Everyone was very moved by the service,” Boeing spokeswoman Lynne

Van Trieste said. “This is a very challenging time, but we’re going

to keep moving forward.”

The Columbia tragedy has struck a deep chord in Huntington Beach,

where much of the design and engineering work for NASA’s space

shuttle program has taken place.

Two thousand Huntington Beach employees work long hours on the

Delta Rocket program, and roughly 350 are still assigned to work on

the space shuttle and space station programs, Van Trieste said.

Until recently, Huntington Beach was the headquarters for Boeing’s

participation in the space shuttle program after Boeing’s engineering

design work and payload integration work for the shuttle program

moved here from Downey in November 1999.

Two years ago in Palmdale, electrical and structural improvements

were made on the Columbia. These improvements included the

installation of a $9-million glass cockpit with upgraded monitor

screens and other modernized instrumentation. After the upgrades,

additional engineering work was performed on it by Huntington Beach

employees.

“Engineering for Columbia, as far as sustaining engineering, did

come out of Huntington Beach and Downey,” Van Trieste said. “The

payload integration activities were performed here as well.”

But a year ago, in an effort to reduce costs and concentrate their

efforts closer to home, NASA began phasing their shuttle programs out

of Huntington Beach and into their main operating sites in Houston

and Cape Canaveral.

The bulk of the employees who used to work at Huntington Beach are

now in Houston, Van Trieste said. But the Huntington Beach site still

provides design, development, hardware, software, upgrades and

program management functions for the space shuttle and space station

programs.

“They do everything from the drawing board to launch operations,”

said Robert Villanueva, a spokesman for Boeing.

After the Challenger tragedy in 1986, shuttle flight activity was

halted for two years.

In his speech after the explosion on Saturday, President Bush

said, “Our journey into space will go on.”

But Villanueva said it is hard to predict how this will affect

future science missions.

“It’s premature right now, we can’t predict what the outcome [of

the Columbia tragedy] will be,” Villanueva said. “We have no idea

what plans are to replace the Columbia. But we are hopeful that the

space program continues and the shuttles return to flight again.”

Van Trieste said that people at Boeing Co. have been sharing

memories and photographs of meeting the astronauts as well as

experiences they have had working on the Columbia.

“Many people in Orange County and Southern California work or have

worked on the space programs at Boeing and know that this business is

very challenging with much risk and uncertainty involved,” said

Villanueva. “But we will all pull together as a community during this

difficult time.”

The shuttle could be spotted just above the horizon at six degrees

north in Huntington Beach early Saturday morning.

Bixby said he could see it with the naked eye from 5:53 to 5:55

a.m.

“It looked like an orange dot traveling west to east across the

northern sky with a faint trailing orange contrail,” Bixby said. He

added that the contrail would occasionally have a burst of brightness

and then become dim again, but said he could not perceive anything

falling off the shuttle and forming a separate contrail.

Bixby walked back to his house at about 6 a.m. and turned on the

television to catch CNN’s broadcast of the landing. When nothing was

on CNN, he signed online to the NASA Web site for the internet feed,

but said there was no audio feed from the shuttle, just a view of

mission control.

“They were saying they had lost radio communication,” Bixby said.

“I knew something was wrong when I heard them saying that the radar

track in Florida had lost it.”

At Monday’s City Council meeting, Mayor Connie Boardman directed a

moment of silence for “the seven souls, seven explorers and seven

scientists we lost on Saturday.”

And at Boeing, the flag flew half mast from Saturday until

Tuesday.

“It was a pretty awful feeling,” Bixby said of his reaction. “It

was kind of like, Oh no, not again.”

* JENNY MARDER covers City Hall. She can be reached at (714)

965-7173 or by e-mail at jenny.marder@latimes.com.