We’re coming up on the anniversary of the Columbia accident. It’s been quite a challenging year for everybody involved, particularly, I’m sure, for the 114 crew -- you were just weeks away from launching when the accident occurred, and now you’re facing a long stretch of training for a very different type of flight. Before we go into the flight itself, if you could discuss your own feelings a year later, what the last year has meant to you, how you’ve approached, perhaps a rededication, to this mission that you’re the pilot for, and the whole issue of returning Shuttles to flight.
James Kelly, STS-114 Pilot: Yeah, well, obviously the Columbia tragedy for me was both a personal and professional tragedy. Starting on a personal level, I knew the whole crew and especially three of them were classmates of mine -- Laurel, Willie, and Dave. I'd been with them for more than six years at that point and knew them very, very well, and had flown with all the rest of them in T-38s and so obviously I knew all of them. For me it was just like a sock in the gut. I was actually taking my son that Saturday morning to a band concert and got the call to show up at the office right away. Of course, you know right away what’s going on ’cause I knew the landing was happening right then. With the aftermath of that, obviously, there’s a lot of sadness, there’s a lot of emotion that goes along with that, and I know the families pretty well; some better than others, but dealing with them and, and having time to spend with them has really been precious this last year as they go through this, watching them as they overcome the tragedy and as they work forward towards a future. So for me, that has gone from sadness into kind of a hope for the future, being able to watch the families and how they reacted to the tragedy and, and carried on, and the message that they’re trying to carry through.
Jim, time is a great healer, of course, but clearly in the weeks and months that unfolded after the accident, I’m sure there were moments at home when you had moments to yourself with your family that you had your own personal thoughts about what this all meant and what the future could hold for you. How tough was it for you personally to absorb the whole issue on, literally on the verge of your own launch just as the accident occurred, to absorb this recovery that has been unfolding over the last year and, and to respond to the changing nature of what your flight is going to become?
James Kelly, STS-114 Pilot: Well, I’ll tell you, interestingly enough, when it happened, my flight just kind of vanished from our mind at that point. Like you say, we were, we were four weeks away from flying, so we were supposed to launch on the 1st of March; so four weeks after the Columbia accident occurred. But as soon as I got the phone call to go into the office and started working, my flight vanished from my mind for pretty much the better part of a month and a half. I, I was deeply involved with the families, because that was a job that I was chosen to do by one of the crewmembers of Columbia and so my own personal life, my own professional life, it all went away. So in looking back at it, I really didn’t process a whole lot of it that first month and a half because that, my job was to help the families and, and help with the aftermath of the tragedy, so I kind of closeted all of that, and didn’t pull it out until later. And to tell you the truth I didn’t give a second thought to our flight or even for that matter I didn’t talk to my commander -- I talked to her once in the four weeks after Columbia. So, it pretty much immediately got put on the back shelf and, and, and wasn’t even a thought until later on in the summer. So, in the immediate aftermath there wasn’t any of that, and since then, I’ve actually had some time to process, and so I had to, I didn’t get the immediate processing that probably would have been good, but since then I’ve thought about it long and hard, done a lot of talking with folks, and with my own family, and kind of come to the end of it, hopefully knowing more about myself and more about what happened and, and once again, hopefully, to use some of that for the future, realizing also that that’s going to make our mission much tougher from that aspect. Not necessarily on the crew -- I think once we get going, it’s going to be like anything else I’ve done in my life, most of us have done, as a professional, get ready to go do a job.
