Spanish firefighters help put a U.S. servicemember dressed in a space suit onto the ground during a space shuttle emergency drill on Friday at Morón Air Base, Spain. (Scott Schonauer / S&S)
Spanish firefighters help put a U.S. servicemember dressed in a space suit onto the ground during a space shuttle emergency drill on Friday at Morón Air Base, Spain. (Scott Schonauer / S&S)
Spanish firefighters at Morón Air Base, Spain, wear protective gear during a space shuttle emergency drill. (Scott Schonauer / S&S)
A U.S. servicemember serves as an injured astronaut during Friday's drill at Morón Air Base in Spain, home to about 120 U.S. Air Force personnel and an emergency landing site for the shuttle. (Scott Schonauer / S&S)
MORÓN AIR BASE, Spain — If the space shuttle had to make an emergency landing shortly after launch, what would it be like?
NASA officials, along with U.S. military and Spanish civilian medical teams, wanted to know.
So they held a mock shuttle disaster Friday on the runway at this military base in southern Spain to test how they would react to such a catastrophe.
It was an important drill.
If disaster struck the shuttle, astronauts could use the base runway 35 miles southeast of Seville to make an emergency landing.
“It’s exercises like this that give us assurance that should we launch and there is a contingency, locations like these are ready,” Tim O’Brien, a senior NASA representative, told the teams.
Morón — a Spanish base that is home to about 120 U.S. Air Force personnel — is one of two emergency-landing sites, or Transoceanic Abort Landing bases, in Spain. The other is in Zaragoza, which is in the northeast. There are more than four dozen similar sites spread out across the globe to give NASA a last chance at saving the shuttle and the crew if something goes wrong.
More than 50 people from NASA, the U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force and emergency medical teams from a hospital in Seville participated in the exercise. Although the base has held similar exercises, it marked the first time in nine years Seville medical evacuation personnel took part.
It was one of the largest such exercises NASA and the military have ever done.
“This is a very large-scale exercise in the scheme of things,” said Tom Friers, a NASA ground operations manager.
The scenario involved the shuttle having a problem after blasting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and having to land at the base. During the landing, one of the tires blows and the nose gear collapses. The seven crew members are injured; three critically.
A 45-passenger Blue Bird bus served as the shuttle during the rehearsal and seven servicemembers played the roles of the injured cabin crew.
Firefighters dressed in bulky, silver suits rushed to the bus as soon as Navy and Air Force teams got the signal from the on-scene commander. Their job: pull the astronauts from the bus and take them to a safe area more than 1,000 feet away from the nose of the shuttle.
The Spanish firefighters wear the protective suits because of the hazardous chemicals that are in the orbiter’s thrusters.
One of the role-playing astronauts wore a heavy, orange space suit to give the practice run more realism. It proved to be a challenge for firefighters to transport him to waiting medical personnel. About 40 doctors, nurses and corpsmen from the Navy hospital in Rota treated the injured just as they would have in a real disaster.
The drill was not without its share of mistakes. There were language problems between the Americans and Spaniards, and teams struggled to figure out how to get the injured astronauts from one location to the other. Some of the people who participated had never been involved in such an exercise of this scale.
Although the shuttle support team has areas to improve, Air Force Col. Bob Pecoraro, commander of the 712th Air Base Group at Morón, said he has no doubts that the base will be ready for the next shuttle launch in May.
“We have no concerns about if a launch were to happen today, we’d be ready,” Pecoraro said.
Lt. Cmdr. Fred Lindsay, a doctor at Naval Station Rota, said it was important for the different groups of people to get out on the runway and see where they need to improve for the next launch.
“Medically trained, we’re fine,” he said after the drill. “It’s just the logistics of moving the astronauts from here, getting them medically treated and then leaving the area and going to Seville. Just that 10- and 15-minute part of how we’re going to do that [is what] we’re trying to figure out.”
Although shuttle crews have never had to make an emergency landing, such a tragedy is not so unthinkable. In 1999, it almost happened. The shuttle experienced a reduction in engine power after a part shook loose seconds after launch.
The 2003 Columbia explosion in which the seven astronauts were killed is a reminder that things can go tragically wrong in an instant.
“Hopefully, we’ll never have to use [an emergency-landing site], but it’s good to know that they’re here,” O’Brien said.
