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News stories from April, 2012

News stories from February, 2011

Space shuttle Discovery blasts off on its final flight Computer problems add last-minute drama to space station mission STS-133  February 24, 2011 By Marcia Dunn The Associated Press updated 2/24/2011 9:25:19 PM ET 2011-02-25T02:25:19 CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Discovery, the world's most traveled spaceship, thundered into orbit for the final time Thursday, heading toward the International Space Station on a journey that marks the beginning of the end of the shuttle era. The six astronauts on board, all experienced spacefliers, were thrilled to be on their way after a delay of nearly four months for fuel tank repairs. But it puts Discovery on the cusp of retirement when it returns in 11 days and eventually heads to a museum. "Discovery now making one last reach for the stars," the Mission Control commentator said once the shuttle cleared the launch tower. Discovery is the oldest of NASA's three surviving space shuttles and the first to be decommissioned this year. Two missions remain, first by Atlantis and then Endeavour, to end the 30-year program. It was Discovery's 39th launch and the 133rd shuttle mission overall. There were several tense minutes just before liftoff when an Air Force computer problem popped up and threatened to halt everything. The issue was resolved and Discovery blasted off three minutes late, with just two seconds to spare. "Great way to go out," said launch director Mike Leinbach. Launching late in the window like that "probably makes it a little bit more sweet." "I would say we scripted it that way," added Mike Moses, chairman of the mission management team, "but I could use a little less heart palpitations in the final couple seconds of the countdown." As the final minutes ticked away, commander Steven Lindsey thanked everyone for the work in getting Discovery ready. "And for those watching," he called out, "get ready to witness the majesty and the power of Discovery as she lifts off one final time." Emotions ran high as the shuttle rocketed off its seaside pad into a late afternoon clear blue sky, and arced out over the Atlantic on its farewell flight. Discovery will reach the space station Saturday, delivering a small chamber full of supplies and an experimental humanoid robot. "Look forward to having company here on ISS in a couple days," station commander Scott Kelly said in a Twitter message. The orbiting lab was soaring over the South Pacific when Discovery took off. Onboard TV cameras showed some pieces of foam insulation breaking off the shuttle's external fuel tank four minutes into the flight — more than usual in fact. But it shouldn't pose any safety concerns because it was late enough after liftoff, officials said. NASA is under presidential direction to retire the shuttle fleet this summer, let private companies take over trips to orbit and focus on getting astronauts to asteroids and Mars. An estimated 40,000 guests gathered at Kennedy Space Center to witness history in the making, including a small delegation from Congress and Florida's new Gov. Rick Scott. Discovery frenzy took over not only the launch site, but neighboring towns. Roads leading to the launching site were jammed with cars parked two and three deep; recreational vehicles snagged prime viewing spots along the Banana River well before dawn. Businesses and governments joined in, their signs offering words of encouragement. "The heavens await Discovery," a Cocoa Beach church proclaimed. Groceries stocked up on extra red, white and blue cakes with shuttle pictures. Stores ran out of camera batteries. The launch team also got into the act. A competition was held to craft the departing salutation from Launch Control: "The final liftoff of Discovery, a tribute to the dedication, hard work and pride of America's space shuttle team." Kennedy's public affairs office normally comes up with the parting line. Souvenir photos of Discovery were set aside for controllers in the firing room. Many posed for group shots. Lindsey and his crew paused to take in the significance of it all, before boarding Discovery. They embraced in a group hug at the base of the launch pad. Unlike the first try back in November, no hydrogen gas leaked during Thursday's fueling. NASA also was confident no cracks would develop in the external fuel tank; nothing serious was spotted during the final checks at the pad. Both problems cropped up during the initial countdown in early November, and the repairs took almost four months. The cracks in the midsection of the tank, which holds instruments but no fuel, could have been dangerous. The lengthy postponement kept one of the original crew from flying. Astronaut Timothy Kopra, the lead spacewalker, was hurt when he wrecked his bicycle last month. Experienced spacewalker Stephen Bowen stepped in and became the first astronaut to fly back-to-back shuttle missions. Kopra watched the liftoff back in Houston; he'll help out in Mission Control during next week's two spacewalks. Packed aboard Discovery is Robonaut 2, or R2, set to become the first humanoid robot in space. The experimental machine — looking human from the waist up — will remain boxed until after Discovery departs. Its twin was at the launch site, perched atop a rover, waving goodbye. "I'm in space! HELLO UNIVERSE!!!" R2 announced in a tweet sent by a NASA spokeswoman. Discovery already has 143 million miles to its credit, beginning with its first flight in 1984. By the time this mission ends, the shuttle will have tacked on another 4.5 million miles. And it will have spent 363 days in space and circled Earth 5,800 times when it returns March 7. No other spacecraft has been launched so many times. Discovery's list of achievements include delivering the Hubble Space Telescope to orbit, carrying the first Russian cosmonaut to launch on a U.S. spaceship, performing the first rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir with the first female shuttle pilot in the cockpit, returning Mercury astronaut John Glenn to orbit, and bringing shuttle flights back to life after the Challenger and Columbia accidents. Discovery is expected to be eventually put on display by the Smithsonian Institution.

Astronauts climb into Discovery for its final flight After group hug, six crew members get set for space station mission STS-133  February 24, 2011 Discovery's astronauts gather together for a group hug at the launch pad, just before strapping in for Thursday's launch. This mission marks Discovery's final space voyage before retirement.   CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The shuttle Discovery's six crew members gathered together for a group hug on the launch pad Thursday, then prepared to blast off on the spaceship's final voyage. The trip to the launch pad came after NASA finished pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel into Discovery's external fuel tank. The crew has been waiting to take on this mission to the International Space Station since November, when fueling problems forced a long delay for repairs. Discovery is NASA's most traveled space shuttle, putting in nearly three decades of service. Now it's slated to become the first shuttle to retire. After the months of delay, launch director Mike Leinbach said everything finally seemed to be coming together. Even the weather was looking up: the forecast improved to 90 percent "go" for the 4:50 p.m. ET liftoff. This time, no hydrogen gas seeped out during fueling. NASA also was confident no cracks would develop in the external fuel tank. Both problems cropped up during the initial countdown in November. The cracks in the midsection of the tank, which holds instruments but no fuel, could have been dangerous. Discovery will head to the International Space Station with the crew, as well as a load of supplies and a humanoid robot. This will be the 39th flight for Discovery, which has logged 143 million miles (230 million kilometers) since its first mission in 1984. After retirement, the orbiter is expected to go on display at the Smithsonian Institution's Udvar-Hazy Center, an annex of the National Air and Space Museum. NASA estimated that 40,000 guests were on hand for Discovery's farewell launch, including a small contingent from Congress. Watching with special interest from Mission Control in Houston is astronaut Timothy Kopra, who was supposed to be the flight's lead spacewalker. He was hurt in a bicycle crash last month and was replaced by Stephen Bowen, who will become the first astronaut to fly back-to-back shuttle missions. The other crew members include commander Steve Lindsey, pilot Eric Boe, spacewalker Benjamin Alvin Drew Jr. and mission specialists Michael Barratt and Nicole Stott. All six astronauts are veterans. Stott and Barratt served long-term stints on the space station in 2009. Onlookers flock to watch launch Well before dawn, recreational vehicles already lined nearby roads offering the best views of liftoff. Signs outside businesses and government offices in the neighboring towns of Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach offered words of encouragement. "The heavens await Discovery," one church proclaimed. Local grocery stores stocked up on extra red, white and blue cakes adorned with shuttle pictures. Camera batteries flew off shelves. Leinbach noted that it would be "tough" to see Discovery soar one last time. "What will be most difficult will be on landing day when we know that that's the end of her mission completely," he said. Discovery will spend 11 days in orbit — on top of the 352 days it's already spent circling the planet — and will rack up another 4.5 million miles (7.2 million kilometers). Its list of achievements include delivering the Hubble Space Telescope to orbit, carrying the first Russian cosmonaut to launch on a U.S. spaceship, returning Mercury astronaut John Glenn to orbit, and bringing shuttle flights back to life after the Challenger and Columbia accidents. "She's been an amazing machine," Leinbach said Wednesday. "She's done everything we've asked of her." Discovery's crew will deliver and install a closetlike compartment full of space station supplies. The Italian-made module was named Leonardo, after the Italian artist/inventor Leonardo da Vinci. Packed inside the compartment is Robonaut 2, or R2, set to become the first humanoid robot in space. The experimental machine — looking human from the waist up — will remain boxed until after Discovery departs. Up at the space station, meanwhile, the six-person crew welcomed a European cargo ship that was launched last week from French Guiana. It docked successfully just six hours before Discovery's planned liftoff, keeping the shuttle countdown on track. "Busy day in space," station commander Scott Kelly noted in a Twitter tweet. NASA is under presidential direction to retire the shuttle fleet this summer, let private companies take over trips to orbit and focus on getting astronauts to asteroids and Mars. There's been considerable disagreement among lawmakers and the space community on how best to accomplish this. "Godspeed Discovery," retired space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said in a Twitter update Thursday. "Prayers for a safe flight and wisdom for decision makers." This report includes information from The Associated Press and msnbc.com. Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

News stories from January, 2005

Columbia crew saw new atmospheric phenomenon January 19, 2005 by Maggie McKee http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6897 A new atmospheric phenomenon was caught on video by the crew of the space shuttle Columbia just days before the shuttle broke apart, new findings suggest. Astronauts relayed the video to NASA in real-time during their 16-day flight. But the agency did not release the full data to researchers until several months after the mission's tragic end on 1 February 2003. All seven crewmembers were killed when the shuttle exploded while re-entering the atmosphere. Yoav Yair of the Open University in Ra'anana, Israel, and colleagues spent more than a year analysing the video, which was originally taken to study atmospheric dust. But a single frame of the video - representing just 33 milliseconds - shows a mysterious reddish glow in the night sky on 20 January 2003. "I'm not sure what we saw," says Yair. "I just know it wasn't something we were used to seeing - it was something extraordinary." The glow occurred about 150 kilometres above the ocean near Madagascar and does not appear to be linked with thunderstorms. That contrasts sharply with other ephemeral events at similar altitudes, which glimmer into being when electrical current travels upward from lightning clouds at altitudes of about 10 km. Called sprites and elves, these events take the shape of jellyfish, downward-pointing carrots, or doughnuts, and tend to occur within a horizontal distance of 70 km from lightning. Wrong type of lighting   The upper red line is the Earth's horizon, with the last glow of sunset visible to the left. The fleeting flash of the TIGER, below the shuttle, is circled (Image: MEIDEX Science team/ISA/NASA) But the closest lighting picked up by the shuttle's video camera was 800 kilometres away from the unexplained glow, which has been dubbed a TIGER (Transient Ionospheric Glow Emission in  Red). Most sprites and elves emerge within a few milliseconds of the nearest lightning strike, but the TIGER took 250 milliseconds to leap into view after this lightning struck, suggesting the two events were not linked. Even a far-distant lightning storm is unlikely to have caused the TIGER, says Yair. Some theorists think that powerful lightning bolts may send out beams of electrons that get shot to far-flung places along Earth's magnetic field lines. In fact, a different lightning bolt did strike at the right time around Cyprus - the predicted starting point of a magnetic "loop" that ends at Madagascar. But it was the wrong type of strike, sending negative charge toward the ground rather than the predicted positive charge. Walter Petersen, a lightning expert at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, US, who is not part of the team, agrees that the new event appears unrelated to lightning. "My next guess is some kind of meteor - something coming down into the atmosphere from above," he told New Scientist. But Yair says the new observation does not fit the profile of a meteor. Meteors cause the atmosphere to glow more brightly than this event, and they trace out long streaks that can be seen for hundreds of milliseconds - much longer than the TIGER. Even more new atmospheric "species" may turn up with future observations from satellites or the International Space Station, says Yair. And he adds that the observation of the TIGER adds to the scientific discoveries of the mission, honouring the lives of the lost astronauts. "Of course, it's no consolation. But it shows the astronauts didn't die for nothing - some science was achieved," he told New Scientist.

News stories from April, 2004

STATUS REPORT
Date Released: Thursday, April 01, 2004
Source: NASA Office of Inspector General

NASA OIG: Final Report on Internal Controls Over Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) Costs

Download Full Report (PDF)

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Office of Inspector General
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001
Reply to Attn of: W
March 16, 2004
 

TO: A/Special Assistant to the Administrator
D/Chief Engineer
M/Associate Administrator for Space Flight
O/Assistant Administrator for Institutional and Corporate Management
Q/Associate Administrator for Safety and Mission Assurance
LaRC/A/Center Director
 

FROM: W/Assistant Inspector General for Auditing

SUBJECT: Final Report on Internal Controls Over Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) Costs (Report Number IG-04-013)

We conducted this audit to determine whether the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) established controls to ensure that 1) expenditures were reasonable, necessary, and properly accounted for and 2) goods and services were acquired in accordance with the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). As of September 30, 2003, CAIB costs, which were funded through NASA's appropriation, totaled $16.9 million.

To accomplish our objectives we identified and assessed CAIB processes for controlling expenditures and ensuring goods and services were acquired in accordance with FAR. We also reviewed documentation supporting procurement actions and other expenditures totaling $9.1 million.

We concluded that within 2 months of beginning operations, the CAIB Executive Secretary for Management established effective processes for controlling expenditures and ensuring contracts were in accordance with FAR. Although our review of procurement actions and other expenditures led us to question payments totaling $215,215 (2.4 percent of those reviewed), we conclude that they occurred for unique reasons and did not represent systemic weaknesses in controls. We are, however, recommending that NASA seek a voluntary refund of $30,563 for an overpayment to the CAIB's primary support contractor.

The Executive Secretary's accomplishment in establishing and implementing effective internal controls reflects positively on the quality and commitment of the CAIB's support staff. This accomplishment is noteworthy given that the CAIB was established on the day of the Columbia accident, and it began its work without a pre-established framework for controlling its financial and procurement activities. We believe that NASA can use the experience of the CAIB support staff to improve its process for establishing and conducting major mishap investigation boards. To that end, we are recommending that NASA revise the Contingency Action Plan for Space Flight Operations to include a framework for establishing a support staff and ensuring that necessary financial and procurement controls are implemented upon the initiation of a major mishap board. The enclosure contains details on the scope, methodology, findings and recommendations of our audit. NASA management has agreed to action that is responsive to our findings and recommendations. We will follow up to determine if the actions have been completed. If you have any questions please contact me at 358-2572.

[Original signed by]

David M. Cushing

Enclosure
Audit Report on Columbia Accident Investigation Board Financial and Procurement Management

cc:
A/Administrator
B/Chief Financial Officer
C/Director
G/General Counsel
Q/Associate Administrator
M-2/Audit Liaison Representative
OJD/Director, Management Systems Division
JSC/Center Director
KSC/Center Director
LaRC/Branch Head, Supply and Simplified Acquisition Branch, Office of Procurement
JSC/BD5/Audit Liaison Representative KSC/QA-D/ Audit Liaison Representative
LaRC/R/Audit Liaison Representative

Download Full Report (PDF)

News stories from March, 2004

News stories from February, 2004

News stories from January, 2004

Columbia's Final Minutes
The second-by-second account of the shuttle's last minutes

By Michael Cabbage and William Harwood
January 27, 2004

EDITOR'S NOTE: From "Comm Check ... The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia," by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, which is being published Tuesday by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. Cabbage is the space editor of the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel; Harwood is a veteran space reporter for CBS News. Printed by permission.

"The most complicated machine ever built got knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam. I don't know how any of us could have seen that coming. The message that sends me is, we are walking the razor's edge. This is a dangerous business and it does not take much to knock you off."

-- Flight director Paul Hill

Shuttle wings are made of aluminum, the upper and lower surfaces separated by spars and trusses that form a boxlike internal framework. The main landing gear wheel well boxes are located toward the front of each wing, nestled up against the side of the orbiter's fuselage just behind the leading edge.

Behind its protective insulation, the front of a shuttle wing is flat, made up of a panel of aluminum honeycomb material known as the leading edge spar. To give the wing its aerodynamic shape, and to protect it from the most extreme temperatures of re-entry, 22 reinforced-carbon carbon panels are bolted side by side on that flat front surface, creating a smoothly curving leading edge. So-called spanner beams, made out of a heat-resistant alloy called Inconel, provide rigidity. To seal the gaps between RCC panels, thin carbon-composite strips called T-seals are bolted in place to provide a smooth surface along the entire leading edge.

During re-entry, the shuttle's nose is pitched up 40 degrees, which subjects the lower halves of the RCC panels to the most extreme heating. The fittings used to attach the RCC panels to the main spar are protected by heat-resistant insulation that melts at 3,200 degrees.

Whatever happened to Columbia had utterly destroyed this complex system.

Twenty-seven truckloads of wreckage were hauled to Kennedy Space Center between Feb. 5 and May 6. More than 25,000 searchers, who scoured a debris "footprint" that was 645 miles long, found 84,900 individual pieces, about 38 percent of the space shuttle. Each piece or component was cleaned, decontaminated, bar-coded, photographed and entered into a computer database. Wreckage from Columbia's wings, fuselage, and nose section was laid out on a grid in the Reusable Launch Vehicle Hangar near Kennedy's shuttle runway. The most critical RCC panels and attachment fittings -- those numbered 1 through 13 and nearest the fuselage -- were mounted on a full-scale clear plastic mockup of the rounded leading edge that allowed investigators to see each piece in relationship to its neighbors. It also allowed them to map out exactly where the heat went after it entered the leading edge.

The work at KSC was buttressed by analysis by Johnson Space Center engineers of data from the orbiter's Modular Auxiliary Data System, or MADS, recorder and amateur video images of Columbia's disintegration. The inch-wide MADS tape contained information from 570 sensors; it was found by searchers in Hemphill, Texas, on March 19, six weeks after Columbia disintegrated. Ultimately, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board was able to conclude, without qualification, that the foam impact was the root cause of the accident; that the impact had knocked a 6- to 10-inch hole in the lower half of RCC panel 8 on the shuttle's left wing; and that a plume of super-heated plasma entering through that breach had destroyed the wing and triggered the destruction of the orbiter.

The team concluded the foam broke away from the left bipod ramp 81.7 seconds after liftoff and hit the underside of Columbia's left wing two-tenths of a second later. The foam measured 21 to 27 inches long by 12 to 18 inches wide. It was tumbling at 18 revolutions per second. Before the foam separated, the shuttle -- and the foam -- had a velocity of 1,568 mph, about twice the speed of sound. Because of its low density, the foam rapidly decelerated once in the airstream, slowing by 550 mph in that two-tenths of a second. The foam didn't fall on to the leading edge of the left wing as much as the shuttle ran into it from below. The relative speed of the collision was more than 500 mph, delivering more than a ton of force.

On July 7, investigators using a nitrogen-powered cannon fired a 1,200-cubic-inch block of foam weighing 1.67 pounds at RCC panel 8, taken from the shuttle Atlantis. Traveling at 530 mph, the foam blew a ragged 16-inch hole in the RCC panel, vividly demonstrating how much damage foam could do.

***

With the dramatic foam shot at RCC panel 8, all the pieces of the puzzle were finally in place. There was little doubt about what had doomed Columbia and its crew. A second-by-second time line of the final working scenario provided a gripping account of the shuttle's final minutes.

At 8:44:09 a.m. Eastern time on Feb. 1, 2003, Columbia was a half-hour from home. The shuttle had just dropped below an altitude of 76 miles, slipping into the discernible atmosphere 900 miles northwest of Honolulu.

During re-entry, the shuttle compresses the thin air in front of it, creating two shock waves. Those shock waves intersect around RCC panel 9, subjecting panels in that area to the most extreme heating. But the compression of the air in front of the shuttle forms a so-called boundary layer, a region just a few inches thick that resists further compression and acts as a natural insulator. A few inches away from the leading edge, just beyond the boundary layer, molecules are torn apart and temperatures can exceed 10,000 degrees. But the boundary layer keeps temperatures on the leading edge RCC panels at around 3,000 degrees.

A smooth surface is essential for the boundary layer to form and is crucial to a shuttle's survival during the plunge to Earth. If the boundary layer is disturbed for any reason, its insulating effect can be compromised by high-temperature turbulence, subjecting the shuttle's tiles and RCC panels to much more heat than they were designed to handle.

But even as the Columbia astronauts chatted about the light show outside, the hole in Columbia's left wing was disrupting that boundary layer. Ever more air molecules were shooting into the inside of the wing at RCC panel 8 and slamming into the insulation protecting the panel attachment fittings, swirling through the cavity and spreading out to either side. At that altitude, the effect was small. But the shuttle was descending, and the air was getting thicker with each passing second. With Columbia in a 40-degree nose-up orientation, the plume entering the breach in RCC panel 8 was aimed at the upper attachment fittings and insulation. The insulation began melting, and the front face of the left wing's aluminum honeycomb forward spar -- the only barrier between the plume and the interior of the wing -- began heating up.

At 8:48:39 a.m., just four minutes and 30 seconds after Columbia had dipped into the atmosphere, a sensor mounted behind the forward spar, near the point where RCC panel 9 was bolted to the other side, measured an unusual increase in stress. The spar was softening.

About a minute later -- five and a half minutes after entry interface -- the shuttle's flight computers ordered a turn to the right. Up until this point, the shuttle had simply been falling into the atmosphere, wings level, nose up and pointed straight ahead. Now, the ship's flight computers began actively guiding the shuttle toward Kennedy's runway. The shuttle's nose smoothly swung 80 degrees to the right.

Less than 20 seconds after the maneuver, sensors mounted on Columbia's left rear rocket pod measured an unusual change in temperature. Wind tunnel testing would later show some of the hot air blasting into the RCC cavity was exiting through the vents on the upper surface of the wing, carrying thin clouds of metallic vapor from melted insulation.

The firestorm inside the RCC cavity was rapidly increasing in intensity. The boundary layer around the leading edge breach was severely disrupted, and the flow of super-heated air over the lower surface of the wing exposed the protective tiles there to much higher temperatures than they were designed to withstand. Insulation and RCC panel support fittings behind the breach continued to burn away.

Within a few seconds of 8:52:16 a.m. -- the exact time is unknown -- the deadly plume burned its way through the forward wing spar and into the interior of the wing.

The shuttle was still 300 miles from the coast of California. The crew still had no idea anything was wrong.

But with the boundary layer disrupted, the temperature of the atoms and molecules blasting into the wing probably exceeded 8,000 degrees near the leading edge breach itself. Hot gas began flowing into the wheel well through vents around landing gear door hinges. At 8:52:17 a.m., the first unusual sensor reading flashed on a computer screen in mission control: a slight increase in temperature in the hydraulic fluid running through a brake line leading to the left main landing gear.

Columbia's left wing was burning up from the inside out. Twelve seconds after the brake line temperature reading showed up in mission control, the shuttle's flight computers noticed the effects of the damage for the first time as a force, or drag, began pulling the shuttle's nose to the left. After assessing the data for a few seconds, the computers sent commands to the wing flaps, or elevons, on both wings to push the shuttle's nose slightly to the right to balance it out.

On the flight deck, shuttle commander Rick Husband and rookie pilot William "Willie" McCool remained oblivious to their ship's ongoing destruction. They might have noticed the elevon movement on their forward computer displays, but the adjustments were small and would not have caused concern.

Columbia finally crossed the coast of California north of San Francisco at 8:53:28 a.m. at an altitude of 45 miles and a velocity of 15,800 mph. By then, the orbiter was in severe distress.

Scores of amateur shuttle watchers in California and Nevada had gotten up before dawn to watch Columbia's fiery descent. Even first-time observers were struck by the appearance of the shuttle's plasma trail. The super-heated air left in the shuttle's wake glowed in the dark sky like a phosphorescent contrail.

The plume shooting into the wing from the front spar breach may have burned a hole through the upper skin of the wing during this period, perhaps at the same time that many observers on the ground saw a bright flash.

By 8:54 a.m., just 32 seconds after Columbia had crossed the coast -- and just a minute and 44 seconds after the forward spar had been breached -- the outboard wall of the left main landing gear wheel well began melting. A scant 11 seconds after that, the shuttle's flight computers detected another change in the way Columbia's flight path was being affected.

It was as if the left wing had suddenly gained additional lift. The flight computers instantly responded, adjusting Columbia's elevons yet again to exactly counteract the two unwanted motions.

The shuttle stayed on course. Husband and McCool may have noticed the elevon movements as the autopilot responded, but again, they made no attempt to contact mission control for an explanation. In all likelihood, they still believed the entry was proceeding normally.

The increased lift initially puzzled investigators until they pieced together the plume's path through the wing's interior. The melting of the support spars and trusses just behind the forward spar caused the upper and lower wing surfaces to lose their rigidity. The lower wing, which was directly affected by the increasing pressure of the air, bowed inward, forming a depression. It started out small, but as the seconds ticked by and the wing's interior got even hotter, it grew alarmingly. Over the next five minutes, the depression probably grew to some 20 feet in length and 4 feet in width, a concave area more than 5 inches deep. Wind-tunnel testing and computer simulations later showed such a depression could explain the reaction of Columbia's flight computers.

In mission control, the first clear sign of a problem aboard Columbia was the loss of data from sensors in the left wing's hydraulic system. The wires leading to those sensors had been part of a cable bundle attached to the outboard wall of the left landing gear wheel well.

As Columbia was crossing the border between California and Nevada, the shuttle's attitude was down to 43.1 miles. But its velocity was still a blistering 22.5 times the speed of sound. It was 8:54:25 a.m.

Observers on the ground saw or photographed more than 10 debris-shedding events in the next few moments.

At 8:58:03 a.m., Columbia's flight computers detected a sharp change in the aerodynamic forces acting on the shuttle as the depression in the lower surface of the left wing presumably increased in size. At the same time, the drag acting to pull the nose farther to the left continued to increase. Approaching the Texas border, the flight computers again ordered the elevons to counteract the unwanted forces. Several debris-shedding events, indicating the wing was losing additional insulation and structure, were noticed by ground observers.

Months later, Air Force Lt. Col. Pat Goodman, a CAIB investigator, speculated the sudden change in the shuttle's flying characteristics was caused by a major change in the wing's shape. "I believe you can make a case ... that the wing begins to collapse," Goodman said. But the crew still would not have noticed any dramatic change.

They did, however, notice the loss of tire pressure data. The computers triggered an alarm in the cockpit and displayed a message to alert Husband to possible problems with the landing gear. This was the crew's first notification of potential trouble. Husband called mission control, presumably to report the message -- "And, uh, Hou ... " but his transmission was cut off.

Astronaut Charles Hobaugh, sitting to Cain's immediate right, radioed Columbia to let Husband know the flight control team was aware of the alarm and the lost tire data. He added, "And we did not copy your last" to let Husband know he needed to repeat whatever he had been trying to say earlier.

By now, the drag and roll forces acting on Columbia were beginning to reach the point where the elevons could no longer keep the shuttle properly oriented. In seconds, they would reach the limit of their motion.

Husband, perhaps beginning to realize major problems were developing, heard Hobaugh's call and tried to respond.

"Roger, uh, buh ... " It was 8:59:32 a.m. and Columbia was approaching Dallas. Seconds earlier, data from the shuttle suddenly froze on the computer screens in mission control. Down arrows or the letter S, for "static," had appeared on the screens, indicating the numbers were no longer being updated. As it turned out, data were, in fact, still flowing down from Columbia. The signals were garbled, however, and the computers in mission control were programmed not to display potentially corrupted information. Investigators later would be able to extract some of the data. That information, combined with readings stored in the MADS recorder, and analysis of recovered wreckage, eventually allowed investigators to develop a rough time line of events stretching another one minute and 50 seconds beyond Husband's final transmission.

For the astronauts, the final sequence was mercifully brief, but no doubt terrifying.

The left wing had suffered so much damage by now that nothing could be done to keep the nose pointed in the right direction. First two and then four right-side rocket thrusters were automatically commanded to fire in a futile bid to offset the forces pulling the nose to the left. A master alarm sounded in the cockpit as the elevon control circuitry failed. Columbia's nose yawed farther to the left, toward Earth, as the spacecraft began rolling to its right.

In all likelihood, all or part of the presumably collapsed wing suddenly folded over and broke off. At 8:59:46 a.m., a large piece of debris was seen separating from the shuttle. Columbia's backup flight system computer began generating a string of fault messages. Two more large pieces of debris fell away from the shuttle within two seconds of each other starting at 9:00:01 a.m. One of these may have been the shuttle's vertical tail fin ripping off in the hypersonic airstream. The other could have been a large piece of the left-side rocket pod. No one knows.

"Everything just wants to fall over at that point," Cain said. "Because again, this is just like a barn door in wind. If that wing came off as we were falling -- pitching down and falling over ... it is likely that the vehicle then probably broke apart in mid-body area." But not immediately.

At 9:00:02 a.m., two seconds of relatively clean data reached the ground, providing a snapshot of Columbia's condition at that moment.

Columbia's three hydraulic power units were still running, along with the ship's three electrical generators. The main engine compartment was intact, and the communications and navigation equipment in the crew module were functioning normally. The shuttle's life support systems were operational. Air pressure was stable, and the temperature was a comfortable 71.6 degrees.

But all three hydraulic power units had lost pressure, and the ship's reservoirs of hydraulic fluid were empty. The shuttle's cooling system had shut down. Multiple alarm messages intended to alert the crew to problems were being generated by the computer system. Extreme temperatures were being recorded by sensors on the belly of the orbiter and along the left side of the fuselage. The electrical system was showing signs of multiple shorts.

As of 9:00:04 a.m., when the final two seconds of telemetry ended, the fuselage was still intact, along with the right wing and the right rear rocket pod. All or part of the left wing was gone. The condition of the vertical tail fin was unknown.

Just before telemetry stopped, data from the backup flight system computer indicated one of the two cockpit "joysticks," used to manually fly the spacecraft on final approach to the runway, was moved beyond its normal position. That's one way for a pilot to deactivate the autopilot. But investigators do not believe Husband or McCool was attempting to take over manual control. More likely, one of the pilots inadvertently bumped his hand controller during those horrifying final few seconds. The shuttle's digital autopilot remained engaged through the final loss of signal.

Finally, at 9:00:19 a.m., the fuselage began breaking apart. The shuttle was 37 miles up and still traveling 18 times the speed of sound.

A study done for the CAIB concluded the shuttle's heavily reinforced crew module and nose section broke away from the fuselage relatively intact, separating at the bulkhead that marks the dividing line between the cargo bay and the forward fuselage.

Challenger's crew module had also broken away in one piece when the shuttle disintegrated during launch 17 years earlier. As with Challenger, the forces acting on Columbia's crew during this period were not violent enough to cause injury, and investigators believe the astronauts probably survived the initial breakup of the orbiter.

Like Challenger's crew, the Columbia astronauts met their fates alone and the details will never be known. Clark presumably was still videotaping on the flight deck when the alarms began blaring and the shuttle yawed out of control. But the outer portions of the tape -- the portions that might have shown at least the initial moments of the shuttle's destruction -- were burned away.

Investigators concluded the module fell intact for 38 seconds after main vehicle breakup, plunging 60,000 feet to an altitude of 26 miles before it began to disintegrate from the combined effects of aerodynamic stress and extreme temperatures. From the debris analysis, investigators believe the module was probably destroyed over a 24-second period beginning at 9:00:58 a.m. During that period, the module fell another 35,000 feet, to an altitude of 19 miles or so.

Investigators believe the module began breaking up at the beginning of that window. If any of the astronauts were still alive at that point, death would have been instantaneous, the result of blunt force trauma, including hypersonic wind blast, and lack of oxygen. About 45 percent of the crew module was recovered near Hemphill, Texas, including pieces of the forward and aft main bulkheads, the frames from the forward cockpit windows, the crew airlock, and all of the hatches. About three-quarters of the flight deck instrument panels were found, along with 80 percent of the mid-deck floor panels and numerous parts from the crew's seats and attached safety equipment. From an analysis of pressure suit components and helmets, investigators concluded three astronauts had not yet donned their gloves when breakup began and one was not wearing his or her helmet. In the end, however, having sealed pressure suits would have made no difference.

But investigators were struck by the way the crew modules of both Challenger and Columbia broke away relatively intact. The survivability study concluded relatively modest design changes might enable future crews to survive long enough to bail out.

But Columbia's crew had no chance. The astronauts fell to Earth amid a cloud of wreckage and debris.

One of the crew members came to rest beside a country road near Hemphill. The remains were found by a 59-year-old chemical engineer and Vietnam veteran named Roger Coday, who called the sheriff and then watched from the porch of his mobile home as a funeral director drove by to collect them.

"The astronauts have always been my heroes," said Coday, who that afternoon fashioned a cross out of two cedar logs he had cut earlier and erected it at the place where the astronaut had fallen to Earth.

"It's there and we still maintain it," he said eight months after the disaster, still wondering who the astronaut was. "I am a very devout Christian, and I prayed for that person's soul."

COPYRIGHT © 2004 BY MICHAEL CABBAGE AND WILLIAM HARWOOD

Part of Columbia astronaut's diary found in Texas

January 26, 2004

HOUSTON (AP) — Sections of a diary belonging to one of the seven astronauts killed last year when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas were found a few months ago and returned to his family, according to a published report.

		Ilan Ramon was one of the seven astronauts lost on Columbia on February 1, 2003.
		Photo courtesy NASA

The Jerusalem Post reported that sections of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon's diary were found in a Texas field with other debris.

The diary was submitted to the Israel Police for help in deciphering what was written, since the pages were written in Hebrew and some of the pages were full of holes, the newspaper reported.

Johnson Space Center spokesman James Hartsfield confirmed on Friday that any personal items found among the debris were returned to the astronauts' families.

"Out of respect for the privacy of the families we will not identify those items," he said.

A woman who answered the phone Friday at the Houston home of Ramon's widow said Rona Ramon didn't want to comment.

Columbia broke apart as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1 after searing gases penetrated a gash in a wing. NASA doesn't expect to launch another shuttle until next fall at the earliest.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

News stories from December, 2003

BUTTERFLY ON A BULLET
Exhuming Columbia, one piece at a time
Early investigators had to rely on informed guesswork. But clues were puring in.

December 23, 2003

By Robert Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer

By the Milk River on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana, Chauncy Birdtail woke up the day Columbia crashed the way he did most mornings — worried.

As a part-time firefighter, Birdtail, 26, spent too many weeks in smoldering mountain wastes far from his wife and three children.

Like many members of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes, he struggled for steady work. To make ends meet, he had a part-time job filling in for an elementary school janitor.

Now his wife was pregnant again. He also faced an overdue drunk-driving fine and had no idea how to earn the $900 to pay it off.

The space shuttle was the furthest thing from his mind.

Then the U.S. Forest Service put out a call for firefighters to join the search for debris.

Birdtail hesitated. If he stayed behind, there was still a chance he could make his janitor's job into something full time.

On the other hand, he needed that $900. The Forest Service was paying $11.64 an hour. There was no way he could earn that kind of money at home.

Birdtail said goodbye to his family one more time and, like thousands of others, joined the search for Columbia.

Investigators were anxious to find recorders, cameras and computers, anything with a memory, especially the craft's most precious electronic repository — its flight data recorder.

The FBI, the National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Transportation Safety Board all joined NASA at Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, La., within hours of the accident, then fanned into counties in East Texas and Louisiana.

Searchers slashed through lowland thickets of 2-inch thorns, hoping luck would lead them to anything that could further the investigation.

One morning, NASA recovery operations chief David Whittle looked up from his desk at Barksdale and realized that 5,600 people were under his authority for the day, searching for wreckage in an area almost the size of Connecticut.

To quicken the recovery of debris, Whittle pressed into service two satellites, a U-2 surveillance aircraft, 37 helicopters and seven other airplanes. He tried to hire a blimp. He quickly learned that the debris was too small to be seen from the air, the vegetation too thick.

People had to search on foot.

Chauncy Birdtail and other recruits walked in rows 10 feet apart. They shook debris from trees, tore it free of thorn thickets. They dug it up from golf courses, swept it from schoolyards and pried it off the windshields of cars.

At the murky bottom of Toledo Bend Lake, along the border between Texas and Louisiana, 60 divers felt among the submerged tree stumps. They made more than 3,300 dives. They found no debris.

When searchers came across a fragment, they marked its position with a flag.

"You got to holler out when you find what you think is a shuttle piece," Birdtail said.

They noted the location of each possible specimen of human flesh with a pink ribbon.

Every new find was logged with its GPS coordinates. Searchers tested all pieces for toxic chemicals and fumes, then sealed them in plastic sandwich bags at the rate of 1,000 pieces a day.

In three weeks of searching, Birdtail had found a shuttle circuit board, a gasket seal, a scrap of insulation and a piece of the fuselage the size of a storm door.

After a 12-hour day in the field, he and his crew would return to their camp tents. In the evening, NASA workers showed them videos about the space shuttle or handed out bumper stickers and souvenir pins.

When days passed without an additional discovery, the contract firefighter got depressed.

"You push and push. I was really in the downs because I didn't have no finds," Birdtail said. "The copperheads would chase you. You see a water moccasin every day. I was just wanting to go home."

One evening, an astronaut came by to talk with the firefighters about the life in the sky.

Birdtail had a question for the first astronaut he had ever seen: How much do you get paid?

The astronaut instead pointed out a moving spark in the sky.

"I will show you Alpha," she said. It was the International Space Station passing overhead.

"It looked like a big, bright old star," Birdtail said, "but it was moving so fast, not like a comet or nothing, but at its own little speed. That was cool."

The men and women in the blue flight suits seemed to materialize from the debris itself.

Whittle had not expected NASA astronauts themselves to commandeer the search for human remains.

"I'm not sure who gave them authority to do that," Whittle said. "It wasn't according to plan…. The crew like to take care of their own."

When a crucial piece of wreckage was discovered, an astronaut frequently would ferry it personally to a laboratory for analysis, as if no one else could be trusted with its care.

In time, every major technical meeting or public hearing had one or more astronauts in attendance. They seemed to offer themselves as living reminders of what had been lost and, perhaps, in atonement for survivor's guilt.

As indentured servants of spaceflight, NASA's astronauts were both powerful and powerless.

The lives at stake were theirs, and they risked them willingly. But if they raised too many questions, they risked losing their only chance to fly in space, or possibly killing the shuttle program itself.

Adding to the pressure, the space agency routinely hired and trained far more astronauts than could ever be accommodated on scheduled shuttle flights, the agency's inspector general reported earlier this year.

Consequently, astronauts now waited years longer than their predecessors for a shuttle flight. In the interim, they trained, handled engineering jobs and performed public relations functions.

In public, they were careful to display all the scripted spontaneity of Disneyland tour guides. About five a year resigned.

During the recovery operation, the astronauts took charge of everything the Columbia crew had touched, worn or used during the mission, including the twisted wreckage of the compartment that had sheltered them.

They sequestered the crew module wreckage in a locked corner of the reconstruction hangar at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Most accident investigators were refused access. Computer files containing information about the module were encrypted. Photographs of the wreckage were locked away or kept on secure computers.

In all, searchers recovered about half of the crew module, according to the agency's internal reports.

It had been ripped apart by aerodynamic stress over about a half a minute — "tormented," one investigator said.

NASA launched an internal investigation of the crew wreckage and, for a time, kept it secret from everyone else involved in the reconstruction effort and the independent accident investigation.

No one would say whether the special handling of crew-related debris was driven by a sense of delicacy or shame.

Lacking comprehensive data from Columbia's onboard electronics, NASA accident investigators in February and early March had to rely on engineering intuition and technical analysis — informed guesswork.

Investigators were intrigued by a blurred image of the shuttle taken by two off-duty Air Force officers at the Starfire Optical Range in Albuquerque.

A volunteer — Julian Christou, a research specialist at the Center for Adaptive Optics at UC Santa Cruz — sharpened the picture through days of intensive computerized image enhancement, using techniques developed to clarify images of distant galaxies.

Even with his best efforts, the image of Columbia remained a smudge, but it revealed signs of an unusual disturbance around the leading edge of the left wing. It could have been caused by a crack, a dent or a tear in its skin.

Engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center looked at the data and wondered how that could match the only clues they had to work with: Columbia's last seconds of telemetry signals transmitted to Mission Control in Houston.

The signals showed four failing sensors in the wheel well and abnormal temperature readings from two sensors along the back of the left fuselage.

What damage near the front of the craft would cause a flow pattern that would affect temperatures at the rear?

"Whatever that damage was, it was moving the flow field around," said aerodynamics expert Bill Scallion, who has been with NASA since it was founded. "You get a tremendous amount of heating when you come in at 25,000 feet a second."

They tested their ideas with scale models of the shuttle in Langley's hypersonic wind tunnels among the groves of pin oak and pine outside Hampton, Va.

A team led by Thomas Horvath, an expert in aero-heating and hypersonic flight, used a ceramic model constructed for the Challenger investigation 17 years before.

The model was coated with a temperature-sensitive phosphor that glowed in different hues when heated. By tracing the shifting bands of color, they could map the heat enveloping the spacecraft.

They quickly made 70 such models.

To simulate a damaged tile, they cut out a tiny piece of tape and, using tweezers and a magnifying glass, fastened it to the model wing.

They put the tape in a different spot along the leading edge of the left wing on each model.

To imitate the effect of a damaged wheel well, they also poked a tiny dimple in the wing.

For two weeks, they tested their 70 creations at up to 18 times the speed of sound, using infrared cameras to reveal the flowing currents of heat.

They discovered that by positioning the tape near the middle of the wing's front edge, they could divert the thermal currents across the fuselage in a way that mimicked the sensor readings.

The accident had revealed a secret.

Homesick and scared, Chauncy Birdtail was running from a water moccasin when he saw a black box 20 feet away, cushioned in the damp carpet of pine needles.

He caught his breath.

"I thought it might be a microwave or a piece of a refrigerator," Birdtail recalled, "but it was the wrong color. I was so excited it brought me out of the snake shivers."

He scrambled toward it.

It was about an hour after lunch, about seven miles from Hemphill, Texas, 46 days after the accident.

Weighed down by search gear, Birdtail found it hard to move quickly. He had on a hard hat, goggles, a red backpack, a yellow Nomex shirt and green Nomex pants layered over by chain-saw chaps designed to blunt the briars.

Birdtail had seen nothing like this before. He was afraid to touch it.

The 58-pound black case was about the size of two videocassette recorders. Its top had cracked. He could see circuit boards and loops of magnetic tape.

His crew mates saw it and started shouting.

When the NASA supervisor showed up and located its serial number, he immediately radioed headquarters at Barksdale.

Birdtail had found the flight data recorder — the piece of wreckage at the top of NASA's search list.

The 22-year-old instrument, known officially as the Orbiter Experiment recorder, held all the information from the shuttle's sensors, readings on the ship's temperatures, pressures and other data during ascent and reentry.

All of that data spooled onto 9,200 feet of 1-inch tape on two reels the size of medium pizzas.

The recorder had been housed under a crew seat, its data to be downloaded only after landing.

"Our jaws dropped when we saw it," said John Hunt, a senior avionics expert at the United Space Alliance, which runs shuttle operations for NASA.

Inside the case, the tape had unwound in a tangle around the capstans and twisted against the recording heads. The impact had nicked and pinched it into a hundred folds, then stretched it into a fragile thread.

All of it was waterlogged.

An astronaut flew the box to Houston for inspection and then to Minnesota for cleaning and repair.

It was the most direct memory of the shuttle's last flight that investigators would find.

"There it was," Birdtail said, "some answers, anyway, for the astronauts … what happened to them while they was riding home."

"My tear things on my eyes started juicing. I was thinking these space people probably need to find out how they died. I was feeling all that for them."

Shuttles Will Return to Flight Upgraded With Added Technology

Wednesday December 24, 2004
9:19 AM EST

 

By Jim Banke
Senior Producer,
Cape Canaveral Bureau, SPACE.com

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- When the next space shuttle lifts off, perhaps as early as September, an upgraded model of the decades-old spaceship will be doing the flying.

Packed full of additional technology intended to make the astronauts safer, most of the improvements won't be obvious when you watch the launch on television.

"The space shuttle won't look any different than what you remember it from the last time it flew," said NASA (news - websites) spokesman Kyle Herring.

"It's like if you have work done on your car's engine. Your car won't look any different. But if you open the hood, all of a sudden you will see some changes," Herring said.

Those changes will be included as the direct result of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's final report, released in August, which detailed 15 recommendations NASA must do before resuming shuttle flights. Another 14 must be adopted as soon as possible.

A recent analysis showed that the changes will cost NASA an additional $280 million.

Chief among those: incorporating the ability to detect damage to the shuttle's heat protection system of tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) material and then repair that damage while still in space.

Another major task: redesigning the shuttle's external tank so large chunks of insulating foam won't fall and threaten the shuttle's heat shield in the manner that led to the Columbia tragedy in February.

A chunk of insulating foam fell from Columbia's external tank and struck the left wing during its Jan. 16 launch, breaking open a hole that allowed hot gases to enter the wing during re-entry on Feb. 1, triggering the disaster.

And while the CAIB report cited many cultural issues within NASA management as contributing to the tragedy, it's the technical fixes that will be more quickly introduced to the shuttle program.

"The Administrator's minced no words that we will respond to and meet every recommendation of the CAIB report," Herring said. "There is some flexibility there in how you meet them, but they will be met before we fly."

Expect these changes to the shuttle system when Atlantis or Discovery flies the STS-114 mission to the International Space Station (news - websites) in late 2004:

Leading Edge Sensors

Although not a requirement for return to flight, officials are planning to add some two dozen sensors to the area behind the shuttle's wing leading edges.

The sensors will be able to detect the force -- no matter how small or large -- of any object striking the wing during the mission and radio that information to Mission Control as it happens.

"That will provide basically near real-time data to tell us if anything has hit the orbiter," Herring said.

If a sensor picks up a hit of some kind then mission managers will be able to tell the astronauts where to look to survey any possible damage to the RCC composite material that protects the wing and the shuttle's nose from the hottest temperatures of re-entry.

Officials hope that the sensor system can be proven reliable enough that the need to do in-space inspections with cameras and lasers won't be required some day -- saving valuable time on the flight plan and weight for other cargo.

The sensors are not new technology, and similar devices have been flown in space before, but this would be the first time the instrumentation will be used in this location.

"That's all being developed and although it's not a requirement for return to flight, we really are optimistic it's going to be there," Herring said.

Rocketcam View

Mission managers wanting to see any damage inflicted on the shuttle's heat shield during launch will be aided by a set of rocketcams that will be bolted to the external tank and pointed at key areas of the spaceplane.

"Essentially they'll be able to show us a more close up and personal view of the orbiter from the outside that we ever had before," Herring said.

Rocketcams have become increasingly popular during the past couple of years, beaming down live views of a launch from the perspective of the rocket. More common on unmanned launchers, a single rocketcam was employed during an October 2002 shuttle mission.

A rear-facing camera on the tank of a shuttle Atlantis launch provided a dramatic and unprecedented view of the 18-story vehicle climbing toward space. The only hiccup came at solid rocket booster separation when the camera lens was obscured by exhaust from the motors that push the boosters away.

Officials plan to change the rocketcam locations to avoid repeating that problem, which has serendipitously provided a better view of the shuttle, Herring said.

Space Heater

Although still a small change, the replacement of insulating foam with heaters on the shuttle's external tank will provide a visual clue to the keenest of observers that something is different.

Known as the "bipod ramp" area, the original block of hand-shaved insulating foam meant to prevent ice buildup at that location will be replaced by electric heaters. It was a chunk of foam from this ramp that triggered the Columbia tragedy.

While the hardware design is approved, engineers have yet to fully study how the fix will change the aerodynamics of the tank during launch.

Officials say they don't have any worries, but have decided to take the time and effort of building a new scale model of the shuttle for conducting wind tunnel tests early next summer.

The same effort was done during the 1970s, and although the model used then was retrieved from storage and dusted off, engineers chose to construct a new model that more faithfully represented the current configuration.

"It was proven that that approach was very successful in modeling aerodynamic flows, thermal, all of the aspects of an ascent profile," Herring said.

Once finalized and completely approved, the design will be incorporated on all future tanks. Several tanks that now are in storage in the Vehicle Assembly Building eventually will be refurbished and modified with the same fix.

Boom Town

The ability to inspect in space almost every square inch of the shuttle will be made possible with the use of a 50-foot-long extension, or boom, to the shuttle's robot arm.

"It's two segments of a robot arm that are spares that are being connected together, and then a high-tech laser sensor package and camera will be located on the end to basically allow our visual reach to become twice what it is now with the shuttle's robot arm," Herring said.

Getting the boom and laser/camera package, along with the required software, to work together as a system has been something of a challenge. But tests have progressed far enough to prove the sensor package will be able to detect damage.

Herring said this is another example of taking proven technology and finding a new use for it, rather than having to develop or invent some new gadget that could be more costly or add time to the return to flight process.

Ace Repair

How ever the discovery of damage to a shuttle's heat shield is made -- by wing sensor, rocketcam or in-flight inspection -- astronauts on all future missions will be equipped with a repair kit that will allow them to take a spacewalk and solve the problem.

Officials so far have the repair of missing or damaged heat protection tiles fairly well in hand. The process of applying the material works well and has been proven in training runs on aircraft flights that create brief moments of weightlessness.

Herring said the materials have been selected and several companies could be selected as the source -- a decision that is expected to be made in January.

Tougher still is figuring out how to repair the RCC panels that make up the wing leading edge. The composite material is handcrafted, takes months to manufacture and must be shaped for the specific area of the wing it's being used on.

Several promising options are being looked at, and the expectation is that an RCC repair kit will soon be available, Herring said.

But it's not available yet.

The total time remaining before the shuttle flies again could wind up depending on when the RCC repair kit is available.

News stories from November, 2003

November 25, 2003

Pricetag for shuttle fixes: $280 million

By John Kelly
FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL -- A team of outside experts is investigating whether NASA's inspection program is good enough to make sure the shuttles and external fuel tanks are safe.

The safety reviews at Kennedy Space Center and the Louisiana tank factory were not among the changes demanded by the board that investigated the Feb. 1 Columbia accident.

One of the board's 13 members, U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, urged the studies because he felt the Columbia report did not go far enough to prevent another disaster.

So Monday, NASA released a new version of its plan to get the shuttles back to space. The update outlines dozens of extra actions the agency is taking.

It also estimates NASA will spend at least $280 million in 2003 and 2004 to make the changes ordered by the board. That's the first price cited for shuttle reforms, from fixing the fuel tank foam that doomed Columbia to creating a new safety and engineering center.

NASA officials said the estimates, shown to members of Congress on Friday, were preliminary and do not include the cost of several important and potentially expensive fixes. The estimate is not a request to increase the $3.8 billion-per-year shuttle budget.

"Instead of flying, we're doing research and development to get back to flying," NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said. "This is the first jab at estimating the cost of all of that."

The updated return-to-flight plan focuses heavily on activities at Kennedy Space Center, notably the quality control and inspections done while workers ready the shuttles for launch.

Drawing from interviews with more than 200 shuttle workers, the accident board made "observations" about the number and quality of inspections NASA does to double-check work by contractors such as United Space Alliance.

Deal went further. He wrote an add-on chapter to the board's report. In it, he argued the board should have mandated tougher pre-flight inspections before the next launch instead of just noting the concern as an "observation." Deal said the issues he raised needed extra attention to "prevent the next accident from occurring."

NASA responded by assembling experts from the Defense Department, Federal Aviation Administration and private companies to do a "top-to-bottom" review of the inspections process. The group has finished its inquiry and will make recommendations to shuttle managers later this year. NASA did not release details of the team's findings or recommendations.

Also, NASA temporarily made it harder to remove items from the list of components and procedures that must be checked by agency inspectors prior to launch. The number of such "government mandatory inspection points" plummeted over the years as NASA handed over more control of shuttle work to its contractors.

Deal's report made similar recommendations about quality control and inspections at the New Orleans-area plant where the external tanks are built by Lockheed Martin Corp.

Deal could not be reached Monday for comment about the NASA plan.

Three specific shuttle system failures that could lead to catastrophe were addressed too, even though they did not cause the Columbia accident. They are:

Metal rings that connect the two solid rocket boosters to the 15-story orange fuel tank might lack the strength to do the job. NASA promised to do tests to make sure the rings are tough enough to withstand 1.4 times the stress they experience during launch. That's always been a rule, but shuttle officials waived the requirement before Columbia's launch.

Failures in the thick posts that hold shuttles to the launch pad could cause a shuttle to break up shortly after liftoff. The posts failed without disastrous results during the launch just before Columbia. But NASA kept flying without redesigning the system. NASA said Monday it will change how the posts are installed and inspected before the next flight.

Salty, corrosive moisture at the shuttles' ocean-front home cause hidden damage to critical parts such heatshield panels that protect the front of orbiter wings. That can lead to the type of fatal heat breach that downed Columbia. Shuttle engineers are studying corrosion concerns, but have not yet identified specific solutions.

Few of those changes are included in the $280 million worth of return to flight costs outlined in the report. That preliminary budget focused on changes already in the works.

The vast majority of those costs are associated with eliminating the problem of foam insulation shedding from the external fuel tank during launch, damaging the shuttle heat shield.

The biggest item by far is the $65 million pegged for redesigning the tank.

Another $44 million is planned for improving ground cameras scattered across the Cape, tracking shuttles as they roar off the pad. Faulty cameras gave engineers blurry or unusable pictures of the debris strike. That left mission managers without critical information for deciding if Columbia was badly damaged and needed emergency help. High-definition television cameras are planned.

Developing ways to inspect and repair heat shield tiles in orbit could cost $57 million. A new safety and engineering center at Langley Research Center in Virginia will cost $45 million.

News stories from October, 2003

Oct 28, 6:25 PM

Cabin resilience may lead to survivability features

By John Kelly
FLORIDA TODAY

Columbia's crew cabin stayed intact longer than the rest of the shuttle, and its condition could help NASA develop ways to increase astronauts' chances of surviving future accidents.

A study included among hundreds of new pages of documents released Tuesday by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said the survival of the Columbia cabin was similar to what happened to the same part of Challenger after that shuttle exploded in 1986.

The work, by a special NASA team formed at the request of the accident investigators, said data from both accidents should be used to investigate crew escape techniques.

Future NASA space vehicles should incorporate the knowledge gained in the Challenger and Columbia accidents "in assessing the feasibility of designing vehicles that will provide for crew survival even in the face of a mishap that results in the loss of the vehicle," the report said.

In releasing the additional documentation, the accident board and NASA stressed the findings and recommendations of individual teams that did work to support the investigation did not reflect the conclusions of the accident board.

In the board's official final report, investigators did not rule on whether NASA should develop a crew-escape system for the remaining space shuttles. Nor did it recommend as a condition of returning the ships to flight that the crew compartment be strengthened to increase the chance of astronauts surviving.

The report did not provide specific details about how the crew died or how long the seven might have survived, only that the compartment was intact for almost a minute longer than the rest of the ship.

In general, the report said the astronauts did not burn to death. They died from suffocation when the cabin did finally rip apart and from the force of colliding with other objects at incredibly high speeds as the wreckage fell to the ground.

The report also recommended future crews be carefully trained to wear all of their protective gear. The forensic review showed three of the seven astronauts were not wearing their gloves and one was not wearing a helmet. The report said, however, that none of that would have increased the astronauts' chances of surviving the Columbia break-up.

Shuttle debris recovery duties fall to KSC
Oct 14, 11:12 PM
By Chris Kridler
FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL -- The center for recovering shuttle debris moved to Kennedy Space Center this week from Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The pieces from Columbia already were moved from a hangar to a storage area in the Vehicle Assembly Building, and NASA is considering several requests to study the debris. As pieces trickle in, they will be sent directly to KSC instead of JSC.

Also, KSC will answer the toll-free phone line people use to report debris, (866) 446-6603. It is illegal for private citizens to keep debris from the orbiter, which disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1. More discoveries are expected as hunting season gets under way in east Texas, in the area of the main debris field.

"Every now and then, we get some pieces that are sent to us," NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham said.

In addition, "we're still getting calls from Challenger," he said. "People think they find pieces of Challenger on the beach, and who do they call?"

It's been years since a verified piece of Challenger debris was discovered, he said, though NASA knows where much of the shuttle has settled on the ocean floor. The shuttle exploded after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986.

The duties of the Columbia Recovery Office will be handled by existing employees, Buckingham said.

News stories from September, 2003

 NASA readies debris for storage

Some shuttle remains might go to museum

Sep 11, 9:48 PM

By Todd Halvorson

FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL -- Shuttle Columbia's remains will begin moving to a final resting place next week. But unlike debris from Challenger, some wreckage will be available for scientific research and perhaps public display.

"Be it closure or whatever, it's a good feeling to know we're going to try to keep the legacy of research that Columbia stood for versus sealing her up under concrete," NASA vehicle engineer Scott Thurston said Thursday.

NASA still hasn't decided whether any of the 84,900 pieces of recovered debris ultimately will be given to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. But the institution has first dibs on all excess NASA property.

High-ranking officials at NASA headquarters are conferring with the families of Columbia's seven fallen astronauts on the matter.

"We're trying to comply with their wishes," said Thurston. "We don't want to upset the families. They've undergone a tragedy."

More than 40 tons of Columbia wreckage -- or about 38 percent of the vehicle -- was recovered during three-month search for debris in east Texas and Louisiana. The debris then was trucked to Kennedy Space Center, where it was reconstructed as part of an investigation into the Feb. 1 accident.

Workers on Monday will begin moving the debris to the 16th floor of NASA's 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building from a hangar near the KSC runway.

There, it will be stored in a 6,800-square-foot room where temperatures will be kept at 65 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity levels will be kept at 50 percent. The controlled atmosphere is meant to preserve the debris for researchers.

The move is expected to be complete by Oct. 1.

NASA in June announced its intention to make some of the debris available to researchers. The agency already has received 20 proposals, Thurston said.

Among those interested are engineers working on NASA's planned Orbital Space Plane and university researchers studying next-generation spaceships.

Items drawing the most attention: the shuttle's composite carbon wing panels and thermal tiles, both of which protect the orbiter from intense heat encountered during atmospheric reentry.

A breach in one of Columbia's wing panels -- caused by a chunk of foam insulation that fell off the shuttle's external tank -- allowed hot gasses to trigger the ship's disintegration.

Meanwhile, shuttle program engineers already have obtained crucial shuttle fuel line bearings from Columbia for testing, Thurston said.

Concerns the cracked bearings could break apart and trigger a catastrophic main engine shutdown in flight prompted an extensive engineering analysis before Columbia's Jan. 16 launch.

Debris from the 1986 Challenger explosion was buried in two abandoned Minuteman missile silos at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

News stories from August, 2003

Foam hitting orbiter nothing new

Concern over 'in-flight anomaly' gradually diminished over 20 years

Aug 26, 9:32 PM

By John Kelly

FLORIDA TODAY

WASHINGTON -- A fateful moment in the shuttle Columbia disaster actually happened months before launch.

In October, a big chunk of foam came off the external tank and struck one of shuttle Atlantis' booster rockets. During the next few weeks, that debris strike came up several times as NASA managers worked to clear Endeavour for its November flight to space station.

Every time before, when big foam chunks had broken free from what's called the bipod area of the fuel tank, NASA treated it as an "in-flight anomaly." That designation prompts a higher level of attention to fixing a problem before the next shuttle flies.

But this time with Atlantis, managers decided the foam debris hit was not an in-flight anomaly. Tank engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center were asked to find out why the foam shed from the tank and propose a fix. But flights could go on.

The change was the culmination of two decades of declining concern about foam debris within the shuttle program, a decision the Columbia Accident Investigation Board identified as "pivotal" to the accident that would occur several months later.

That decision to go ahead with Endeavour's flight and later Columbia's was far from the only bad choice NASA made about the foam debris problem that has plagued the shuttle program since the first launch in 1981.

The accident board "audited" NASA records to identify damage from foam debris on at least 79 of the 113 shuttle flights to date, and larger bipod foam debris on at least seven flights, each time tearing up the delicate heat-shield tiles on the orbiter's belly.

The findings nearly mirror those of Florida Today's own review of more than two decades worth of shuttle documents, which found documentation of foam debris on at least 74 missions.

The board and the newspaper audits discovered NASA made incremental attempts during the years to understand and fix the problem. However, as shuttle after shuttle returned home safely with foam-battered heat shields, NASA gained confidence that it was merely an irritating maintenance problem.

Agency engineers believed strongly that the lightweight foam could not possibly do enough damage to bring down an orbiter. The board said that assumption, and many others about the foam, have been disproved by experiments prompted by the accident.

"The persistent uncertainty about the causes of foam loss and potential orbiter damage results from a lack of thorough hazard analysis and engineering attention," the board's report said.

Columbia lifted imagination

From maiden voyage to tragic end, Columbia always magical

Aug. 26, 2003

By Billy Cox

FLORIDA TODAY

That tight lump in your throat came as a true surprise during the sky-shredding sunrise of April 12, 1981.

The fact that you were spending your birthday at the Kennedy Space Center press site was incidental; you certainly weren't sentimental about getting older, not anymore. In fact, you were in danger of growing cynical about damn near everything.

Disco was still sloshing over the sides of a new decade. Styx, REO Speedwagon and Rush (not Limbaugh) had a hammerlock on the heavy rotation, and if you wanted to hear Lou Reed or The Clash, you had to buy the vinyl. The hits cranking out of John Lennon's "Double Fantasy" album were bleak skips reminding you that the smartest Beatle had been murdered, murdered, murdered.

The Soviets were still in Afghanistan long after we'd punished our own athletes by boycotting the Moscow Olympics. And oh, by the way, this just in: Pope John Paul II has been gunned down in Rome.

Couldn't anyone do anything right?

A few months earlier, America celebrated the release of 53 American hostages from Iran like it was V-J Day, but the sad truth was, they were stranded because Murphy's Law had cooked up a sirocco that left two military rescue aircraft in flames and eight troops dead in a Persian desert. But you didn't have to go to the other side of the world to witness grand-scale futility: Cocoa Beach joined the club when the shoddy Harbour Cay condo tower collapsed on 34 construction workers, killing 11.

The news got so bad that Elton John said he wouldn't live in America's turbulence "if they paid me 100 pounds a minute." From the first homicide ever recorded at Disneyland (an 18-year-old stabbed to death) to an assassination attempt on President Reagan by a lunatic addicted to Martin Scorcese's "Taxi Driver," the repetition of failure created a zone where all expectations were dark.

That was the world Columbia was born into, and escaped from, 22 years ago.

The first time you laid eyes on her was at night, as you drove east along the Bennett Causeway toward Cape Canaveral. She was unsullied and breathtaking, bathed in criss-crossed spotlights on the barrier island like some Hollywood angel, her entire wardrobe, even the external fuel tank, white as that of a virgin bride. She reduced you to a cliche with your very first words: "Oh my god."

Just days before the maiden voyage, pilgrims began arriving in numbers the Civil Defense experts put at somewhere between 500,000 and a million. That seemed absurd, considering Brevard's entire population was 273,000. Yet when you prowled the colonies of campers and vans, amid the aroma of barbecue, they had crowded the riverbanks with such economy, you could picture yourself leaping from roof to roof for a quarter-mile stretch without touching the ground.

The pubs in Cape Canaveral stayed open all night on the eve of the scheduled Friday morning premiere, and Cocoa Beach bartenders geared up with red-white-and-blue Shuttle Shooter specials. It felt like the stories you'd read about during the Mercury/Apollo days. The air was charged with rumors of celebrity sightings: Jerry Brown, Liza Minelli, John Denver, Cab Calloway, Steven Spielberg, Pat Boone, George Lucas, Robert Redford, Neil Armstrong, Nichelle "Lt. Uhura" Nichols.

You weren't sure what to expect last month during a funereal viewing billed as the "Columbia Reconstruction Hangar Walk Through," when 11,000 NASA employees and families were invited to tour the ruins of America's first space shuttle. But you knew you had to go. Because the bird was as much a part of your own history now as Tobacco Road Christmas photos and letters from old girlfriends.

You were flooded by flashbacks as the NASA bus left the KSC Visitor Complex on a hot July morning and made way for the autopsy room inside a hangar optimistically intended for the next generation of space vehicles. Along the way, guide Robert Owler rattled off Columbia's staggering numbers over the microphone:

Twenty-eight missions covering roughly 123 million miles (you did the conversions: the equivalent of more than 200 round trips from Earth to the Moon). A spectacular accident scene 10 miles wide and 280 miles long. Some 84,833 pieces recovered, and yet, just 38 percent of Columbia's dry body weight accounted for. She'd been so thoroughly obliterated, the average piece of debris weighed a little more than a pound.

Owler, a member of the reconstruction team, knew his numbers like preachers know the Scriptures. "For the first few weeks, it was kind of tough on us all," he said. "There are a lot of teardrops on that hangar floor."

Owler said Columbia's remains were laid out on the slab upside down, since her belly was most crucial to investigators. He advised visitors to note the difference between the right and the left wings. There were mental-health counselors on duty, just in case.

You'd already seen the photos, so you knew what to expect. Still, when you stepped into the hangar, the shock was visceral. You never dreamed you'd get within an arm's length of what was once the most complex aircraft ever dispatched into the high frontier. Now that you were here, you couldn't recognize Columbia with a blueprint chart.

The first challenge was optical, the bewilderment of having no focal reference point amid the tediously re-articulated chaos of blasted mid-decks and fuselage paneling and thruster fragments. So your gaze drifted upward, from the morgue floor to the ceiling, gauging the negative composition, the vacuum of what wasn't there.

The second challenge was trying to connect this static exhibition of mangled technology to the atmospheric violence responsible for creating it. You'd seen the replays of Columbia's tumbling fireball a billion times on TV, at different stages, from multiple angles. Here were the results, stark but blank. Proof without comprehension.

You wandered the corridors of the display grid, looking for familiar shapes amid the curiosities. The most prominent item stood, literally, nearly 90 degrees from the floor on its fulcrum. The debris analyst said it was a 16-foot long strip of aluminum from the belly structure. "From what we can tell," he said, "this was found wrapped around a tree."

The landing gear, strut and wheel intact – you recognized those things. Fire extinguisher bottles from the cabin. Another team member deciphered those round balls to the rear as helium tanks, weighing anywhere from 60 to 100 pounds on empty. "We recovered all 34 of them," he said.

The shadow of what Columbia once was began to materialize, vaguely, in clinical increments of explanation and deduction. The payload bay here, the tunnel airlock assembly there. And sure enough, over yonder, the left wing was as sketchy as a mirage, its leading edge of reinforced carbon-carbon panels – designed to withstand temperatures of 2,300 degrees – missing as if devoured.

But it was the cabin window frame, panels 1 through 6 intact, that packed the wallop.

Propped up by boards to face the crowds, honored with an arrangement of roses, the forward frame "looks like goggles," remarked a visitor. This was where you rubbernecked and came to a dead stop, like at a car wreck, compelled by tiny details, the chunks of glass embedded in the sills, the clots of pine straw and dried mud. You could relate to this.

You remembered the beginning, just south of Jetty Park at night, before the launch, tromping through a stand of secretive Australian pines to observe the communion unfurling beneath the Milky Way. To the north stood launch pad 39A, out of sight but scattering an aura of reflected light far above the horizon. In the opposite direction, as far as you could see, bonfires and lanterns awaited the new sensation. Bottle rockets whistled and popped Independence Day.

Even so, after a computer glitch pushed Columbia's debut to early Sunday morning, you found yourself at the NASA press site with 4,000 other media, expecting the worst. You paced and wandered, amped up on caffeine, sleepless for nearly 48 hours, making small talk with some Brits, eavesdropping on foreign tongues to no avail, alert for mindless distractions.

At exactly 7 a.m., the digital countdown clock struck zero and the entire world compressed into a hypnotic vertical window of flames and chemical clouds. Columbia's crackling engines stripped the very wallpaper off the dawn, and as she struggled to leave the Earth, her heart pounded through your shoes, clean up into your shoulders.

You were right there with it, from the get-go, tracking her from sea level, then unclenching with her as she climbed away from it all, away from the shootings and the lousy TV shows and the politics and all other manner of mortal foibles. Your fashionable detachment collapsed, and there you were, jumping up and down like a kid in a ballpark.

"Go, baby! Go!" We'd done something right, something huge, and it kept on going and going, higher and higher, like it would never come down again, and --"Go! Go!" – even when it vanished for good, you were still up there, suspended forever in the blink of a moment where myths and gods are no less real than bones of scorched titanium.

Foam Tests Hold Water

Findings contradict NASA engineers

Aug 24, 8:51 PM

By John Kelly

FLORIDA TODAY

Interactive graphics Foam damage: Weather, foam may have allowed icy buildup Falling foam could have damaged left wing Flash video, new angle of debris hitting shuttle Foam impact test from three angles

WASHINGTON -- Tests prompted by the Columbia accident proved the foam insulation surrounding the shuttle fleet's 15-story external fuel tanks can absorb large amounts of water.

The finding is significant because foam filled with water or ice would be heavier than dry foam, thus making it capable of doing more damage if it smashed into the shuttle's heat shield during flight. A piece of foam insulation fell off of Columbia's tank during liftoff in January and struck the shuttle's left wing. It apparently caused enough damage to doom the ship during reentry on Feb. 1.

The ongoing research at NASA and universities across the country is helping NASA make progress toward fixing the foam debris problem. The problem has plagued the shuttle program since the first launch in 1981. It is an issue that must be resolved before the three remaining shuttles can fly again.

"It would be great if, in the end, I could feel I had contributed to eliminating this problem," said Douglas Osheroff, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Stanford University who serves on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and did some of the foam tests in his college lab.

Some of the experiments prove what Florida Today reported in March: two types of foam that have most often come off shuttle external tanks are handcrafted in ways that make them vulnerable to soaking up moisture.

NASA engineers insisted in the months since the Columbia accident that the foam is impervious to moisture.

"There's a lot of common wisdom about this foam," Osheroff said. "Sometimes common wisdom is not very wise."

The board's final report on the accident, set to be released Tuesday, will criticize NASA for not understanding the material properties of the foam and other shuttle parts.

Faulty assumptions

The independent investigators found NASA's faulty assumptions about foam colored its decisions to treat the persistent debris damage as an acceptable risk. Every shuttle ever launched has come home battered by foam insulation, ice and other debris.

Florida Today found foam from the tank hit shuttles on at least 74 of 113 missions to date. Incremental fixes were made because the foam was tearing up the critical heat-shield tiles. That extra maintenance needed between flights cost the agency and shuttle contractor time and money.

Yet the shuttles kept flying because, early in the program, engineers grew confident the lightweight foam could not possibly do enough damage to down a shuttle. In that context, mission managers decided Columbia would get home safe despite having seen launch films showing a large chunk of foam splattering against the shuttle's left wing.

Set a goal

The accident board's report will not recommend specific engineering solutions, but will urge NASA to meet the original shuttle requirement that nothing should hit the orbiter in flight.

"We may not be able to recommend that NASA stop any foam loss, but we would like to see them make that the goal," Osheroff said. "It should be a goal to have zero foam coming off the tank."

The researchers started out experimenting to find out how the foam failed on Columbia's flight, but they have branched out seeking to identify the causes of the foam shedding in general.

Water absorption is becoming one promising line of inquiry.

At Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, a NASA researcher recreated the environment the foam experiences when the external tank is filled with a half-million gallons of cryogenic fuels, exposing one side of the foam to temperatures as cold as 423 degrees below zero. The other side is exposed to the elements, including the typically humid air at the shuttles' seaside launch pads.

Water absorbed

In that simulation, the foam did soak up water.

Osheroff and some Stanford University graduate students conducted similar tests on a nine-square-inch piece of foam and found it absorbed 4.5 grams of water over 24 hours. "That basically doubles the mass of the foam," Osheroff said. He noted that the tank normally only endures those conditions for six or seven hours before a normal launch, unless there are delays.

"One interesting question is can water intrinsically make the foam less strong?" Osheroff said. "If it doubles in mass and it's subjected to these intense vibrations, maybe there's an issue there. The water does not contribute to the strength, that's for sure."

NASA discounted any suggestion that the foam that struck Columbia harbored hidden water or ice. Even after the accident, when scientists and other experts noted that similar foams could absorb moisture, NASA said its foam was unique.

NASA believed the material's cells are so tightly packed together that even water or gas molecules can't get inside. The foam is sprayed on the tank in layers, mostly by robots, and the outer surface hardens into a rind to further protect it from moist air outside.

Holes in foam

Florida Today reported in March, however, that the foam is made differently for the area around the bipod, where two struts connect the tank to the orbiter. That area, which is just below the pointy top end of the bullet-shaped fuel tank, is where the vast majority of foam has come loose during 22 years of shuttle flights.

Workers shave off that hardened outer rind when applying the foam and cut it to form the aerodynamic bipod ramps. It was a piece of foam from this area that hit Columbia, and NASA plans to eliminate those pieces of foam altogether before returning the remaing shuttles to flight.

Workers also poke tiny holes in the foam to vent gas trapped inside air pockets in the insulation. This is done so the gas does not rapidly expand later and blast pieces of foam off the tank. But the holes also provide a way for moisture to get inside the foam.

The scientists found that the foam that has not had the rind shaved off "absorbs much less weight," Osheroff said.

Questions remain

The piece of foam that hit Columbia could have contained hidden water or ice. It was unusually wet and humid during the 39 days Columbia sat on the launch pad and weather conditions the night the tank was filled with supercold propellants offered a near-perfect environment for moisture and ice to seep into the foam.

There is no proof that moisture or ice helped cause the 1.67-pound piece of bipod foam to break free from Columbia's tank. Investigators are convinced the cause was a combination of aerodynamic forces and defects in the foam ramp.

What scientists don't know yet is whether the moisture soaking into the foam can weaken it somehow. More work is being done on that issue. NASA's external tank manager did not respond to a request for an interview.

"The easy solution is not to let the water in at all," Osheroff said.

One suggested solution is "painting" or covering the foam with some kind of waterproof sealant. NASA used to paint the tank white, but stopped to reduce the weight of the shuttle.

Osheroff and others are not suggesting "painting" the entire tank, however. They will focus on the relatively small areas most susceptible to absorbing water and foam shedding.

"I'm convinced," he said, "that the weight gain due to uptake of water is comparable to the paint."

More experimentation is needed on many fronts, Osheroff said. Water is far from the only issue.

For example, Osheroff has suggested that NASA study whether problems that crop up during application of the spray-on foam can introduce defects and weak bonds.

During the investigation, the board found that some of the foam, including the bipod ramps, contained tiny air pockets, voids and weak bonds. All of those problems can contribute to foam coming off the tank when combined with the intense forces experienced during launch.

NASA might revise shuttle flight paths to curb risks

By Michael Cabbage | Sentinel Space Editor
Posted August 1, 2003

CAPE CANAVERAL -- NASA is studying possible changes to the space shuttle's flight paths during landing to minimize risk to people on the ground.

A July 16 internal National Aeronautics and Space Administration document obtained by the Orlando Sentinel indicates the space agency is, for the first time, assessing the risk associated with shuttle landings at Kennedy Space Center, Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California's Mojave Desert and New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range.

The most likely result could be to restrict certain landing approaches to the shuttle's backup runway at Edwards. According to the document, public risk is by far the greatest for shuttle landings at Edwards that fly over the densely populated Los Angeles basin.

Additional options being analyzed include eliminating landing approaches over other heavily populated areas, modifying the way the shuttle maneuvers during re-entry and possibly using alternate runways at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base and foreign sites. While some of those alternatives are considered long shots, any changes would be implemented before the fleet's three remaining orbiters return to flight next year.

"Assessing public risk is a new requirement to the shuttle program," the NASA document says. "NASA should evaluate risk, select criteria and alter flight rules to manage risk."

The goal is to expose as few people as possible to the risk of falling debris in case another shuttle suffers a catastrophe during landing like Columbia's breakup over Texas on Feb. 1. No one on the ground was injured. But more than 42 tons of shuttle fragments -- some weighing hundreds of pounds -- rained on a 2,400-square-mile corridor in mostly rural east-central Texas and western Louisiana.

Even so, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board doesn't plan to press NASA for changes in landing procedures. A July 8 presentation on the Columbia accident and debris hazards done for the board by ACTA Inc., a risk-management and -analysis company, concluded: "A lack of casualties was the expected event."

"We think something NASA should include in planning is risk assessment of debris," board spokeswoman Laura Brown said, "but it will not be a major part of the board's report."

No major changes

A draft version of the ACTA study determined the risk of injury to people on the ground or to other aircraft from Columbia's breakup was minimal. That risk likely wouldn't have risen much even if the breakup had occurred over a large urban area, the board-commissioned study concluded.

The investigation board has found parallels with civil aviation. Each year, thousands of airplanes -- many larger than Columbia and flying at much lower altitudes -- crisscross the country, causing few, if any, deaths on the ground. That comparison has helped lead NASA managers and investigators to agree that it may be unnecessary to make major changes to shuttle landings.

"I can't imagine that we would want to change the landing trajectory and course simply to avoid that in the future," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said in June. "That would be the equivalent of stopping all commercial airline traffic in all metropolitan areas."

NASA never has done a study, however, to assess the risk from falling debris during shuttle landings, although launch risks are well-documented. Engineers now are working to evaluate the risk for each landing route. Those routes vary according to the shuttle's orbit and the landing site.

The shuttle flies to three basic orbits designated by the angle of the orbit to Earth's equator: 51.6 degrees for missions to the space station, 28.5 degrees for missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope and 39 degrees for many space-science missions. The orbit helps determine the path the shuttle must take to return home.

Another factor is whether the shuttle is landing on a so-called ascending or descending node.

The shuttle crosses the equator twice during each 90-minute orbit. The part of the orbit where the shuttle crosses from the south headed north is called an ascending node. The part of the orbit where the shuttle heads from north to south is called a descending node.

NASA has begun calculating population densities and public risk along various 35-mile-wide ground tracks leading to all three landing sites. The tracks -- and the accompanying risk -- change according to which orbit the shuttle is headed home from and whether it is landing on an ascending or descending node. According to NASA's preliminary analysis, the riskiest landings are ascending-node touchdowns from all three orbits at Edwards that fly over the Los Angeles area. Some ascending-node landings at KSC also pass near Mexico City, one of the world's most populous urban areas.

The shuttle landing site with the lowest overall risk is White Sands. However, that location's windswept gypsum-sand runways have hosted only a single shuttle landing -- Columbia in March 1982 -- because, in part, of sand that was blown inside the orbiter. Landing-support facilities at White Sands also are limited.

Lowering the risk

The shuttle program is working to figure out what is an acceptable level of risk.

Once that happens, NASA plans to modify flight rules to restrict landing opportunities that exceed that level. NASA also is assessing the overflight risk involved with ferrying the shuttle back to KSC for processing and launch atop a modified jumbo jet after landings at Edwards and White Sands.

Besides risk and population studies, engineers have begun looking at the types of failures the shuttle might suffer while re-entering Earth's atmosphere and how that might affect its flight path. Analysts are cataloging the likely size and makeup of pieces that would make it to the ground under different kinds of breakups.

Another study is under way to examine whether risk can be reduced for a given landing opportunity by changing how the shuttle maneuvers during re-entry. The shuttle performs a series of four left and right banks called S-turns during landing to slow down before reaching the runway. Engineers are looking at whether switching the direction of the first bank could cut risk to populated areas.

Vandenberg AFB considered

NASA also is evaluating new potential landing sites at Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's central coast and unspecified foreign runways. Landings at foreign sites are considered unlikely, however, because of security concerns and the difficulty with ferrying the orbiter back to KSC.

The final result could be few, if any, changes to the way the shuttle has landed for more than two decades.

Some critics have voiced concern that had Columbia broken up moments earlier over the Dallas-Fort Worth area, casualties could have been enormous. Many NASA managers, as well as board investigators, say those concerns are exaggerated.

"Even if it had come down over Dallas-Fort Worth," one manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center said, "the debris would have been so spread out that the probability is low that anyone would have been killed."

Gwyneth K. Shaw of the Sentinel staff contributed to this report from Washington. Michael Cabbage can be reached at 321-639-0522 or mcabbage@orlandosentinel.com.

News stories from July, 2003

Report: Crew sensitivities hurt accident probe

No evidence fire erupted inside cabin before disintegration

Jul 17, 10:48 PM

By John Kelly and Todd Halvorson
FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL -- Less than half of shuttle Columbia's crew cabin was recovered after the Feb. 1 disaster and extraordinary efforts to guard its sensitive remains hindered the investigation into the accident.

A report by the team that reconstructed Columbia also said there is no evidence fire erupted inside the two-level crew cabin before the shuttle disintegrated in the skies over Texas.

Superhot gases damaged the cabin less than other parts of the $2 billion spaceship, the report said. Among the items recovered: parts of cabin walls, window frames and its mid-deck floor along with remnants of the spacesuits that were aboard.

"The condition of the recovered debris items varied widely; from highly melted, twisted and torn, to near pristine," the document said.

The 160-page report did not directly deal with the astronauts' final moments. Officials with NASA and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board have repeatedly declined to discuss those matters out of respect for the astronauts' families.

But the document sheds new light on the remarkable effort to reconstruct America's first shuttle and the emotional difficulties of handling the crew cabin and the astronauts' personal effects.

It also shows NASA was concerned astronaut items could be stolen and sold. And the report recommended NASA draft a standard protocol for dealing with crew cabin debris in the future.

Spanning five months, the endeavor involved hauling more than 40 tons of wreckage to Kennedy Space Center from Texas and Louisiana aboard 27 tractor-trailers.

Search and recovery teams took extreme care with any part of the crew cabin, particularly the personal effects of the seven astronauts killed in the accident.

A process was set up in the field "to segregate and protect those types of debris to ensure they were not exposed to public or media viewing and to prevent theft," the report said.

Sensitive items were packed in boxes and labeled. Drivers escorted those boxes in the cabs of transport trucks from Barksdale Air Force Base in the northwest corner of Louisiana.

A select team of astronauts was put in charge of handling the crew cabin debris once it arrived at a KSC hangar where the debris was stored and analyzed. They cordoned off that debris and kept it out of view. Some pieces were locked up.

"Crew personal and sensitive items were kept segregated even within the crew module area because of their potential emotional impact and also their potential financial value," the report said.

The astronauts' personal items and commemorative objects sent into space by the agency itself "were kept in a locked cabinet in the segregated area as an extra measure of security."

Even photographs of astronauts' personal effects were kept in a password-secured section of a computer database containing debris information

The authors of the report, who led the reconstruction effort, said the overall handling of cabin debris "was exceptional and accommodated the appropriate level of discretion to protect the interests of NASA and the families."

However, some issues were encountered during the effort. Most of the investigators examining orbiter debris were not allowed access to the crew module area, and that hampered their effort to determine the cause of the accident.

"Understandably, there were some sensitivity issues that had to be taken into consideration when dealing with the human aspect of space flight, but it was very difficult to determine failure scenarios when only looking at a fraction of the debris for the forward section of the vehicle," the report said.

"Strictly from an investigative perspective, it was burdensome having the interior crew module structure segregated from the rest of the structure and only observable to a select few."

The report also said engineers involved in the reconstruction effort received "little direction concerning the level of investigation to be performed on the crew module" from NASA and independent accident investigators.

The team initially planned to analyze the crew cabin debris using the same processes applied to the rest of the ship. However, much later in the investigation, they learned that NASA had commissioned a separate crew module investigation without their knowledge.

"An earlier understanding of the crew module reconstruction initiative could have facilitated the investigation," the report said.

The problems prompted the team to make a recommendation. They urged NASA to write standards for future investigations dealing with "legal status and handling of crew personal effects, handling sensitive items like crew helmets, physical access to the crew module related debris and accessibility of data records and photographs."

The reconstruction team, meanwhile, came to the same conclusion as the broader investigative team about the technical cause of the accident. Relying upon high-tech forensic analysis of the 83,900 pieces of recovered debris, the team said hot gases breached the leading edge of the shuttle's left wing during re-entry.
 

National Desk | July 9, 2003, Wednesday
Earlier Shuttle Flight Had Gas Enter Wing on Return

By JOHN SCHWARTZ and MATTHEW L. WALD (NYT) 1160 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 14 , Column 1

ABSTRACT - NASA releases documents showing that space shuttle Columbia was not first to have superheated gas invade its left wing on re-entering Earth's atmosphere; documents show that shuttle Atlantis went into orbit in 2000 with quarter-inch breach in wing's leading edge, allowing blowtorch-hot plasma into wing on re-entry; unlike Columbia accident, in which entire crew was killed, Atlantis incident resulted in only minor damage, leaving wing's inner structure intact; Prof Paul A Czysz, expert not involved in Columbia investigation, says Atlantis incident should have put NASA on high alert about wing damage; documents are released by NASA under Freedom of Information Act request (M) The space shuttle Columbia was not the first to have superheated gas invade its left wing on re-entering Earth's atmosphere, according to documents released yesterday by NASA.

In 2000, the documents show, the shuttle Atlantis went into orbit with a quarter-inch breach in the wing's leading edge, allowing blowtorch-hot plasma into the wing on re-entry. But unlike the accident that destroyed the Columbia on Feb. 1 and killed its crew of seven, the incident resulted in only minor damage, leaving the wing's inner structure intact.

Jul 8, 10:51 PM

Wings breached 3 times

Hot gases penetrated orbiters before shuttle tragedy

By John Kelly and Todd Halvorson
FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL -- Superhot gases burned through shuttle wings on at least three missions before the Feb. 1 loss of Columbia, causing significant but less severe damage to orbiters, internal NASA documents show.

What's more, the shuttle's composite carbon wing panels -- which protect the ships and astronauts from intense heat encountered during atmospheric re-entry -- were damaged but not breached on at least nine additional missions, records show.

NASA already is launching an effort to gauge the integrity of its reinforced carbon carbon panels, which serve as thermal armor for the front edge of shuttle wings.

The agency also will use more high-tech means for inspecting the $800,000 panels, such as ultrasonic and electric current examinations.

Both endeavors are being carried out in response to a recommendation from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. Both are to be completed before NASA returns it's remaining three shuttles to flight.

"There are teams that are evaluating all aspects of the vehicle to posture us to return to flight as soon and safely as possible," said Kyle Herring, a spokesman for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We're going do everything we can, obviously, to do those kinds of inspections to ensure that the vehicle is safe."

One of the panels on Columbia's left wing was struck by a 1.7-pound piece of foam insulation that broke free from the shuttle's 15-story external tank 81 seconds after a Jan. 16 launch.

Accident investigators say the debris strike damaged the panel so badly that hot gases penetrated the wing during atmospheric re-entry, causing the ship to disintegrate over East Texas.

All seven astronauts aboard were killed.

A Florida Today review of mission and runway inspection reports as well as separate NASA problem reports, many of which the newspaper obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, showed that damage to the leading edge of the shuttles' wings is not uncommon or new.

The three previous breaches are significant.

The composite carbon panels encounter temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit during atmospheric re-entry. A penetration of hot gases, consequently, can lead to the loss of a $2 billion shuttle and its astronaut crew.

The problem dates back to the early days of the shuttle program.

On NASA's second shuttle flight in November 1981, hot gases blasted past Columbia's wing panels near a spot where they join with heat-shield tiles on the underside of the orbiter, according to a mission report.

The searing heat scorched and burned through a fiber barrier used to fill gaps between heat-shield components. The gases streaked an aluminum spar inside one of wing, the report says.

NASA subsequently modified the thermal barrier and saw less damage on the next flight.

A similar problem, however, cropped up again on NASA's fifth shuttle flight in November 1982 -- another Columbia mission.

A jet of hot gas melted a small hole in a tile-covered metal bar connected to a wing panel. It damaged internal insulation but none of the metal components inside the wing, a mission report says.

No damage was noted on the next flight.

A more recent incident came at the end of a May 2000 Atlantis mission to the International Space Station. On that flight, hot gases penetrated a dislodged seal between two panels on the shuttle's left wing.

A subsequent investigation showed the seal had been installed improperly during a shuttle overhaul, creating a quarter-inch gap that served as a "substantial flow path" for hot gases, a NASA document says.

Charred and scorched as a result: Internal components made of Inconel and titanium – metals that have melting points between 2,500 and 3,000 degrees, respectively.

The damage was repaired and NASA ordered changes in the way that seals between wing panels are installed.

Less threatening but still significant damage has been more common.

Micrometeoroids and launch debris strikes dented or cracked wing panels on at least nine missions between April 1991 and March 2001, NASA records show.

Wing panels also have been damaged by exposure to extreme temperatures and pressures encountered during flight. And zinc primer leaching off the launch tower has corroded them.

The lesser damage has ranged from small pits to larger cracks.

Investigators have raised concerns about whether the panels weaken with age too. Only three of Columbia's panels were replaced during its 22 years of flight.

Investigators, meanwhile, think even a relatively small crack in a wing panel could doom a shuttle crew. The damage done to Columbia, however, likely was more dramatic.

In a test Monday, a 1.7-pound chunk of foam blasted a 16-inch hole in a shuttle wing panel. Investigators say the experiment at San Antonio's Southwest Research Institute was the most realistic simulation of the debris hit that downed Columbia.

Superhot gases breached shuttle in 2000

Tuesday, July 8, 2003 Posted: 5:34 PM EDT (2134 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Superheated gases breached the left wing of shuttle Atlantis during its fiery return to earth in hauntingly similar fashion to the demise of Columbia nearly three years later, according to internal NASA documents.

Unlike Columbia, Atlantis suffered no irreparable damage during the May 2000 episode and, after repairs, returned to flight just four months later. NASA ordered fleetwide changes in how employees install protective wing panels and sealant materials.

The small leak through a seam in Atlantis' wing during its return from the international space station was disclosed in documents sought by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.

The mission commander was James Halsell, a shuttle veteran who is coordinating NASA's effort to return the shuttles to flight.

One of the seven Atlantis astronauts, Mary Ellen Weber, said NASA never told her about the breach, which was not discovered until the shuttle had landed.

"There are thousands and thousands of things that can go wrong, and the crew is very much aware this can happen," Weber said. "Certainly, when you learn about this, if it had progressed, it could have been much more dire."

Weber operated the robotic arm aboard Atlantis and flew aboard Discovery in July 1995. She said NASA may have reported the wing damage to other crew members.

Attempts by AP to reach the other astronauts by telephone through family members and NASA offices in Houston and Washington were unsuccessful; one Atlantis crewman was a Russian cosmonaut and another has left NASA to return to the Air Force.

NASA spokesman James Hartsfield said crews and engineers generally participate in two months of meetings to discuss their experiences and spacecraft conditions.

He could not say whether the shuttle's commander or pilot was told about the wing breach, which NASA blamed on incorrectly installed sealant material.

Some experts expressed surprise that superheated gases ever had leaked inside a shuttle's wing. Although protective wing panels have been found damaged, even cracked, the Columbia disaster was widely believed outside NASA to have been the first such breach.

"Very little information about the flaws of the tile system ever make it into the open literature, so those of us who work on this ... seldom hear much about serious problems such as this one," said Steven P. Schneider, an associate professor at Purdue University's Aerospace Sciences Lab. "I've never heard this sort of leak occurred."

NASA said it later determined Atlantis' exterior wing panels were not damaged by the overheating despite being discolored from the high temperatures.

Aluminum structures inside the wing "looked outstanding," NASA said. Other parts immediately behind the wing panels were covered with a glassy material, apparently from melted insulating tile and other sealant material.

Hartsfield said all damaged parts were replaced.

Oversight board ordered changes

The space agency formally reported the damage to its Program Requirements Control Board, an internal safety oversight body, which ordered fleetwide improvements in the installation of sealant materials before Atlantis was allowed to launch for its mission in September 2000.

Atlantis is expected to be the next shuttle into space when NASA is cleared to resume flights.

Weber, now an associate vice president at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, described Atlantis' return to Earth as mostly routine and remembered seeing an orange glow from hot gases dancing outside the shuttle windows.

Although damage inside Atlantis' left wing was detected post-flight, NASA worried about the shuttle's return even before the discovery.

During liftoff, a 6-inch chunk of ice had smashed against the back edge of the right wing; so experts deemed it prudent to adjust Atlantis' flight to rapidly cool its wings prior to the fiery trip through the atmosphere, NASA documents showed.

It was impossible to know whether this cooling technique, called a thermal conditioning maneuver, also helped minimize heat damage inside Atlantis' defective left wing. NASA later determined damage on the right wing was relatively minor.

The board investigating Columbia's February 1 breakup determined that superheated gases penetrated protective wing panels that had been loosened by insulating foam that broke off its external fuel tank on liftoff and smashed against the shuttle.

Investigators believe searing re-entry temperatures melted key structures inside until Columbia tumbled out of control and broke apart at close to 13,000 miles per hour, killing its seven astronauts.

NASA did not consider ordering the thermal conditioning maneuver on Columbia because it believed such a move would have interfered with efforts to warm Columbia's landing gear tires for a safe landing.

NASA blamed the Atlantis damage on improper installation of a seal between two protective panels on the shuttle's left wing, "called a butterfly gap filler," at the Boeing Co. plant in Palmdale, California, during an overhaul of Atlantis in late 1997.

The mistake went unnoticed during subsequent inspections because the part could not be seen without removing protective panels, NASA said.

Engineers found the damage on Atlantis while investigating the mystery of a partially melted insulating tile. Removing two protective wing panels nearby and peering inside the wing structure, they determined the dislodged seal had created "a substantial flow path," according to NASA's internal reports.

The gap measured just over one-quarter inch, about the width of a paperclip or a No. 2 pencil.

The protective panels, insulators and other hardware inside the left wing "shows various signs of overheating," NASA reported. Photographs showed charred and scorched components, including parts made from titanium and inconel, two of the most heat-resistant materials on the shuttle. Titanium melts about 3,000 degrees; inconel melts about 2,550 degrees.

Investigators examining Columbia's breakup remain uncertain over the size of the gap that permitted hot gases to penetrate that shuttle's wing. But they believe it was as small as a one-inch slit running vertically up the wing for nearly 30 inches.

In a test Monday, a chunk of foam blew open a dramatic 16-inch hole in parts of a mock-up of a shuttle wing.

Temperatures during a shuttle's return can climb to almost 3,000 degrees -- nearly one-third as hot as the surface of the sun -- along parts of the spacecraft, especially the leading edges of its wings. Damage there is considerably more likely to doom a shuttle than anywhere else.

NASA requires immediate repairs when damage to the wing's protective panels exceeds four-hundredths of an inch, about the thickness of a dime.

News stories from June, 2003

NASA E-Mails Show 'No Concern' About Foam

Posted on Mon, Jun. 30, 2003

TED BRIDIS
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Even as NASA engineers debated possible damage, a flight director e-mailed Columbia's astronauts to say there was "absolutely no concern" that breakaway foam that struck the space shuttle might endanger its safe return. The shuttle's commander cheerily replied, "Thanks a million!"

Flight director J.S. "Steve" Stich conveyed his assurance to Columbia's commander and pilot on Jan. 23, according to documents disclosed Monday. At the time, engineers inside NASA continued to debate and study whether insulating foam that smashed against Columbia's wing on liftoff might have fatally damaged materials protecting the shuttle during its fiery descent.

Such materials included the gray-colored wing panels made from a material called reinforced carbon carbon, known within NASA as RCC, and insulating tiles covering other parts of the spacecraft.

"Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage," Stich wrote to Columbia's commander, Rick D. Husband, and pilot, William C. McCool. "We have seen the same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry. That is all for now. It's a pleasure working with you every day."

Husband, a veteran shuttle astronaut, replied two days later, on Jan. 25, "Thanks a million, Steve! And thanks for the great work on your part."

Husband replied separately to an e-mail Jan. 24 from another flight director, Jeffrey M. Hanley, who sent a video clip showing the foam striking near Columbia's left wing during liftoff. Husband wrote back early Jan. 27, "Thanks Jeff! And thanks for the super work! We appreciate it."

Investigators are increasingly convinced a chunk of foam from the external tank smashed against Columbia's left wing, loosening a protective panel along the leading edge. That could have permitted searing temperatures to penetrate the spacecraft during its fiery return Feb. 1, melting key structures aboard Columbia until it tumbled out of control at nearly 13,000 miles per hour. All seven astronauts died.

NASA has said previously that Columbia's crew was apprised within days of the foam investigation and a Jan. 27 conclusion that the shuttle would return safely. But the crew members - and NASA's brass - were not told about an intense debate among some midlevel engineers over concerns Columbia's left wing might burn off and cause the deaths of the crew. Some preliminary, internal documents shared among other engineers predicted as early as Jan. 21 that despite any damage Columbia "maintains safe return capability."

Previously disclosed notes from five high-level meetings during Columbia's mission showed that shuttle managers hardly mentioned the subject and largely dismissed it conclusively on Jan. 27 as "not a safety of flight concern." When they did consider the foam strike, during a Jan. 21 meeting, it was the final agenda item - after discussions about minor water leaks and a broken camera on board.

NASA spokesman Kyle Herring said Stich's Jan. 23 e-mail assurance was not sent to Columbia's crew as a formal, operational dispatch and was based on ground assessments at the time. Herring said if NASA had concluded that Columbia's return would be risky, "then obviously more information would have been provided to the crew through channels other than a personal e-mail."

All Husband's messages carried the designation, "This is private/personal mail and not for release to media." NASA released printouts of the exchanges under the Freedom of Information Act and published them on its Web site.

The space agency also released pages of cartoons and humor material laced with inside-NASA jokes sent to Columbia's crew throughout the 16-day mission. One listed 10 phrases from astronauts who previously flew only to the International Space Station, including one gentle stab at the age of Columbia, NASA's oldest shuttle: "I didn't realize Columbia still flew!"

New threat to shuttle safety found

Board warns of faults in connecting bolts

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, June 12 — Investigators said Thursday they discovered a dangerous new threat to America’s remaining three space shuttles, a fault affecting the heavy bolts that connect the powerful solid-rocket boosters to the external fuel tank. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, studying the fiery breakup of the Feb. 1 shuttle flight over the southwestern United States, said it worried that parts from these 2-foot-long bolts could break free shortly after liftoff and smash against delicate areas on spacecraft during future missions.

BOARD OFFICIALS SAID the fault involves a “bolt catcher,” a container mounted on the fuel tank designed to capture fragments of the attachment bolts immediately after NASA jettisons the powerful booster rockets about 28 miles into the shuttle’s ascent.

Retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman, the head of the board, said investigators determined that the bolt catcher was “not as robust as we would want.” In testing, the bolt catcher was incapable of withstanding more energy than the explosive power in pyrotechnic charges used to break them in half during the jettison.

“We found there’s no margin,” Gehman said.

Air Force Maj. General John Barry, a board member, indicated the flaw could delay NASA’s next shuttle launch.

“This is a possible return-to-flight issue,” said Barry, calling the bolts a “pretty heavy piece of machinery.” When the bolts break, each half weighs roughly 40 pounds. If such a bolt fragment were to strike a shuttle wing, he said, “That could be potentially catastrophic to the orbiter.”

The 150-foot-tall rocket boosters are mounted on either side of a shuttle’s external fuel tank and provide nearly all the tremendous thrust needed to enter orbit. They are designed to fall away safely into the ocean for later recovery by NASA.

COLUMBIA THEORY UNCHANGED

Board members said they do not believe the breakaway bolts — which use explosive devices during the jettison to break the attachment — contributed to the Columbia disaster. But they expressed concern that bolt fragments could cause similarly fatal damage to another shuttle’s protective tiles or panels on future missions.

The board said some radars during Columbia’s flight detected an unusual item — possibly half a bolt — falling away from the shuttle 126 seconds after liftoff, the same time its booster rockets jettisoned. But officials stressed there was no evidence a bolt struck Columbia.

“We’re not changing our working scenario,” Barry said.

Investigators indicated they remain convinced that a chunk of foam from the external tank smashed against Columbia’s left wing, loosening a protective panel along the leading edge. That permitted searing temperatures to penetrate the spacecraft during its fiery return 16 days later, melting key structures aboard Columbia until it tumbled out of control at nearly 13,000 miles per hour. All seven astronauts died.

The explosive devices on the bolts sever the booster rockets from the external tank within 30 milliseconds of the command to detonate them. The procedure is exceedingly precise — and dangerous — because of risks that one booster might detach before another and send the shuttle tumbling off course or out of control.

FAILURE TO LEARN FROM MISTAKES

Earlier Thursday, some of America’s top space experts told the investigative board that NASA has failed to learn important lessons from past mistakes and should improve its oversight of shuttle contractors. But they said declining budgets might not have contributed directly to the tragedy.

The 13-member Columbia Accident Investigation Board held its final public hearing before it retreats behind closed doors to prepare its formal report on the disaster. The board has indicated it wants to finish prior to the August recess by lawmakers in Washington.

Marcia Smith, who studies the space program at the Congressional Research Service, reviewed for the board the history of NASA’s budget. But she cautioned that it would be difficult for investigators to directly tie any decline in shuttle funding to the February tragedy. The research service advises lawmakers on policy issues.

“It’s very difficult to tie this into events like the Columbia tragedy,” she said. She added that it was “not clear that an increased budget would have helped” NASA appreciates the risks that breakaway insulating foam might damage shuttles on takeoff.

The budget for the shuttle approved by lawmakers during the last decade peaked at $4.04 billion in 1993, according to congressional researchers. It fell steadily until it dropped as low as $2.93 billion in 1998 and has gradually risen to $3.27 billion for fiscal 2002.

NASA CHIEF: ‘EXTREME’ MEASURES

Tests conducted by the board last week provided powerful support for the theory that foam had cracked Columbia’s protective panel. Investigators fired a 1.68-pound foam chunk at 525 mph toward a similar panel, which cracked and was knocked out of alignment enough to create a dangerous gap in a shuttle wing.

Because such a barely visible crack was enough to cause the loss of Columbia and its seven astronauts, NASA engineers face “an extreme challenge” as they develop plans for returning the shuttles to space, NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe said Wednesday.

“We’ve got to create an inspection regime for future flights that will be extremely meticulous,” O’Keefe said.

When space shuttle flights resume, launches will be limited to daylight hours, O’Keefe said. This will allow cameras at the Kennedy Space Center to take high-resolution photos of the craft during its ascent to orbit. During Columbia’s January launch, some cameras failed to capture high-quality views of the speeding craft. Although there were pictures of the foam insulation hitting the wing, their quality was too poor for engineers to immediately calculate the extent of the damage.

O’Keefe also said that all but one of the anticipated future shuttle flights will go to the international space station. The station would provide a refuge for the astronauts and a platform to closely inspect any suspected damage. The sole exception, he said, is a late 2004 flight planned to maintain the Hubble Space Telescope. Shuttles that fly to the Hubble cannot also fly to the space station.
  
       © 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

COLUMBIA INVESTIGATION

Report on shuttle accident to slam NASA decisions, culture

By Michael Cabbage | Sentinel Space Editor
Posted June 6, 2003

HOUSTON -- NASA's poor risk management, questionable policy decisions and constant budget battles were among the root causes of the shuttle Columbia accident, according to an upcoming report by the board investigating the mishap.

A detailed 10-page draft outline of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report obtained by the Orlando Sentinel presents a sweeping, hard-hitting review of the technical, organizational and political factors that resulted in America's second space-shuttle disaster. The report traces the accident's causes from the program's origins in the late 1960s to Columbia's breakup over central Texas on Feb. 1.

"It is intended to be the base line for a very serious public-policy debate on the future of the safety of the shuttle program and its role in the manned space flight program," retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman, the investigation board's chairman, said recently.

The report's outline suggests investigators will identify a debris strike on the shuttle's left wing during launch as the "probable cause" that triggered the mishap. However, as the 13-member board consistently has pledged, the report goes far beyond an engineering analysis of Columbia's final moments to examine the bigger institutional and historical issues that allowed the disaster to occur.

Many of the issues covered in the outline come as no surprise after being discussed repeatedly in the board's hearings and news conferences during the past four months. Others, however, have received little public mention.

The report remains a work in progress and some parts likely will change. But according to a May revision of the report outline, major concerns include:

• How repeated debris strikes on the orbiters became an accepted risk over time.

• The system the National Aeronautics and Space Administration uses to identify, track and dispose of in-flight problems.

• Communication breakdowns and the performance of shuttle managers during Columbia's flight.

• Schedule pressures created by building and re-supplying the international space station.

• Management turmoil caused by flip-flopping shuttle-program authority between the agency's headquarters in Washington and Johnson Space Center in Houston.

• NASA's indecision in recent years on whether to replace the fleet or upgrade it and concerns the shuttle program was being "managed as if nearing its end."

• How budget pressures and the transfer of oversight responsibilities from NASA to private contractors affected safety.

• The planned 10-chapter report -- described as "voluminous" by Gehman -- will include a number of specific recommendations. The study also will contain a section on general "conditions necessary for return to flight" that discusses items such as management reforms and re-certification of aging shuttle components to make sure they remain in good condition.

• After interviewing more than 250 witnesses, board members are relocating from Houston to Washington as the investigation winds down and the writing picks up. The target date for the report's release is July 24, the day before Congress leaves on its summer recess.

• "I believe it's attainable," Gehman said recently. "But if it turns out to be too hard for us to do a good job, then we'll miss that goal. It's much more important that we get it right."
  
  In the beginning

• The report's first three chapters will largely be a straightforward narrative of the origins of the shuttle program, events leading up to Columbia's launch and the orbiter's final flight. The chapters set the stage for the rest of the report.

• Chapter 1, titled "The Evolution Of The Space Shuttle," discusses how the project "emerged from the post-Apollo space flight program, its design tradeoffs resulting from political and budgetary decisions made in the early 1970s, its development, testing and initial flights, the Challenger accident and the shuttle's current role."

• The report's second chapter describes preparations before liftoff. And Chapter 3, "Columbia's Final Flight," documents the shuttle's launch, activities in orbit and re-entry.

• The report's next three chapters detail the board's findings on the direct, contributing and root causes of the accident. The mechanics of Columbia's breakup while returning to Earth are explained in Chapter 4, which begins with a "statement of probable cause."

• In recent weeks, the board has adopted a scenario that says a breach in the protective heat armor on the leading edge of Columbia's left wing allowed blowtorch-like gases to destroy the shuttle as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere. A chunk of foam estimated to weigh about 2 pounds broke off the ship's external fuel tank and smacked into the leading edge 82 seconds after Columbia's liftoff on Jan. 16.

• So far, investigators have been reluctant to conclude publicly that the foam strike was the cause of that breach. That could be changing. A recent impact test at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio appears to suggest the strike could have created an opening between the reinforced carbon-carbon panels that line the wing's leading edge.

• "I think it moves us a significant step toward establishing that as an initiating event," board member Scott Hubbard said Wednesday.

• A more definitive impact test scheduled for Thursday was canceled because of bad weather in San Antonio. It has been rescheduled for today.

• The report rules out other possible causes considered early in the investigation. Among them: Shuttle system failures. Willful damage. Crew error. Columbia's onboard science laboratory. Micrometeorites and space-debris strikes. An unusual re-entry triggered by a rough wing surface on the shuttle.
  
  NASA decision-making

• A key part of the report is Chapter 5. According to the outline, the chapter is "a discussion of the factors that combined to destroy Columbia" beyond the direct causes that tore the ship apart.

• Those factors primarily are NASA decisions made before and during the 16-day mission. The beginning of the chapter deals with the Mission Management Team's performance and the group's quick dismissal of concerns about the debris strike.

• Here, the report critiques engineers' questionable use of a computer database called Crater to predict Columbia's damage. The section also recounts the internal e-mail debate among engineers on the foam impact and their unsuccessful requests for images of Columbia in orbit using spy satellites or military telescopes. This communications breakdown led the board to issue an interim recommendation April 17 asking that NASA reach agreements with intelligence agencies to make such photos a standard requirement for future flights.

• "What seems to have evolved is that higher-level decision-makers came to the conclusion that there wasn't a safety-of-flight issue, in part, based on an analysis done by analysts who sort of wanted the pictures," board member Steve Wallace said recently. "It's a difficult and frustrating story to try to put together."

• A chapter subsection, titled "The Machine Was Talking, but NASA Failed to Separate Signals From Noise," addresses the pivotal issue of how managers became comfortable with events once considered problems.

• Specifically, foam strikes on the orbiter occurred almost every launch and violated flight rules. Nevertheless, missions continued as NASA officials grew confident over time that the impacts were only a maintenance issue and no threat to safety.

• "You've heard NASA use the terminology 'in family' and 'out of family,' " said Air Force Gen. Kenneth Hess, a member of the investigation board. "Well, the family of foam loss just kept getting bigger and bigger. So you never got to a point where you could make a real hard distinction that something was unusual."

• The outline draws a comparison to the 1986 Challenger accident, when shuttle managers ignored concerns about a critical seal in the ship's solid rocket boosters and proceeded with the launch. The comparison is accompanied by an analysis of NASA's system for identifying, tracking and dealing with in-flight issues.

• The chapter ends with a discussion of shuttle processing issues, including questions about how the ships are certified as ready for launch. NASA's inability to gauge the effects of shuttle aging is examined, along with the lack of nondestructive tests to adequately measure wear on the heat-resistant panels that line the wings' leading edges. The board already has made an interim recommendation to NASA to improve those inspections.
  
  Root causes

• The underlying historical and institutional problems that led to Columbia's breakup are outlined in Chapter 6, "Root Causes of the Accident."

• The chapter goes back to the shuttle's birth in the 1960s to trace the political, budgetary and organizational pressures that shaped the program. A common thread is the never-ending drive to slash the shuttle's budget.

• Before Challenger, budget pressures forced concessions in the shuttle's design, limited the number of orbiters that were built and prompted an unrealistic goal of 24 flights per year. Since Challenger, budget issues have reduced the program's spending power by 40 percent during the past decade, led to shuttle job cuts and limited planned upgrades to the fleet and its infrastructure.

• "I'm not going to tell you that our conclusion necessarily will be that you need more money," Gehman said. "But we clearly are going to attempt to have specific, direct and unequivocal recommendations on the relationship of budgets and what it costs to operate a program like this."

• The chapter also examines the relationship between NASA and shuttle contractors.

• A subject of particular interest is whether NASA's 1996 shuttle-operations contract with United Space Alliance -- a partnership between aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin -- helped erode safety by offering incentives for meeting schedules and cutting costs. In the process, some safety checks were shifted from government to industry. Others were eliminated entirely.

• "There's two issues here," Gehman said. "One is contractor performance, which we are looking at, along with all the other performance matters. . . . The second is whether or not the contract is suitable for the purpose of this program."

• Chapter 6 analyzes three other major issues as well: turmoil caused by the shift of shuttle management from Washington to Johnson Space Center in 1996, then back to Washington in 2002; the creation of a "Shuttle-International Space Station Complex" and concerns that station resupply duties "prompt reluctance" to delay shuttle launches to the outpost; and work-force problems caused by transferring shuttle jobs from Southern California to Texas and Florida.
  
  Looking forward

• The report devotes a full chapter to how NASA manages risk.

• Chapter 7 -- "Managing Risky Technology" -- compares shuttle operations to other high-risk enterprises, including offshore oil rigs, aircraft carriers and nuclear reactors. The outline draws a parallel between the aging Concorde supersonic jet and the shuttle.

• "Like the shuttle," the outline says, "[the Concorde is] a small fleet of old aircraft that are emblematic of national pride."

• Much of the chapter scrutinizes NASA's Safety and Mission Assurance division, including its budget, size and independence. The section also investigates how management decisions and technical information are communicated up and down the chain of command, and whether NASA headquarters is "increasingly disengaged from the shuttle program's technical management."

• Chapter 7 concludes by examining if NASA has learned anything from countless reports, studies and shuttle assessments in the past.

• Parts of the report's final three chapters focus on the future. Chapter 8, "A Look Ahead," discusses conditions necessary for return to flight, as well as whether a more realistic method of assessing shuttle safety or a new space vehicle are needed.

• Chapter 9 contains board observations gleaned during the investigation that aren't necessarily related to the accident. Those observations include paperwork lapses in certifying flight controllers and work-force morale issues. Chapter 10, the final section, summarizes the report's findings and recommendations.

• The report will give shuttle managers an unprecedented road map for the future that goes well beyond the specifics of the Columbia accident. How far NASA and Congress go in following that road map remains to be seen.

"We can do NASA and the shuttle program a world of good if we take a very broad and complex view of this and go after multiple causes and multiple flaws and shore them all up," Gehman said. "We would not be doing the nation a service if we only got 40 percent of the problem."

Michael Cabbage can be reached at mcabbage@orlandosentinel.com or 321-639-0522.

News stories from May, 2003

Columbia Probe Has Possible Breakthrough

Fri May 30, 2:07 AM ET

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - In what could be a breakthrough in the Columbia accident inquiry, foam shot at a fiberglass mock-up of a space shuttle wing knocked loose a seal — the same type of piece that investigators believe was damaged during liftoff.

"We're not drawing any conclusions," said Air Force Lt. Col. Woody Woodyard, a spokesman for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "We've got to analyze the data and evaluate all the data before we can draw any conclusions."

But he described Thursday's result as "significant."

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board suspects a seal along the leading edge of Columbia's left wing was damaged when struck by a chunk of foam insulation that broke off the fuel tank during launch.

In the first and only shot of the day at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, a 1.67-pound piece of real space shuttle foam was fired at the fiberglass leading edge at 533 mph. The foam blasted through the 33-foot barrel of a nitrogen-pressurized gun toward pretend panel No. 6 on the leading edge, tilted at a 20-degree angle.

Upon impact, the adjacent seal lifted and pulled toward panel No. 7, leaving an opening about 22 inches long, Woodyard said. The width of the gap ranged from the thickness of a dime to more than a quarter-inch.

All the parts in the abbreviated leading edge were fiberglass and came from the never-launched shuttle prototype Enterprise (news - websites), which is housed at the Smithsonian Institution (news - websites) in Washington, Woodyard said. In highly anticipated testing in June, researchers plan to shoot foam at real carbon-composite wing pieces that actually flew in space.

Fiberglass is about 2 1/2 times more resilient than the carbon composite material that makes up real wing panels and seals, Woodyard said. That would suggest that a real panel or seal would have been even more damaged by a foam strike.

Thursday's result was within impact predictions, Woodyard said. Earlier this month, researchers in San Antonio fired foam at the silica-glass thermal tiles that cover much of the space shuttles, but little if any damage resulted — also no surprise.

On Wednesday, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said a mystery object that floated away from the shuttle on Flight Day 2 back in January almost certainly was half of a leading-edge seal. Such a long, narrow slit would be enough to let in the scorching gases of atmospheric re-entry, and that hole likely would have grown as the shuttle continued its descent, enough to cause its breakup over Texas on Feb. 1.

All seven astronauts were killed, just minutes short of their Florida homecoming.

The board's chairman, retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., has been reluctant to pin the blame on the foam strike, saying he lacks hard proof. He also has stressed that the impact tests in San Antonio will show whether foam could damage a shuttle wing — not whether it actually did. But others on the 13-member panel are convinced the foam led to the shuttle's destruction.

A final report by the board is expected by the end of July.

On the Net:

Columbia Accident Investigation Board: www.caib.us

Secret NASA testimony threatens shuttle probe

May 19, 6:10 PM

FLORIDA TODAY

Columbia's remains get last look before final report written

Saturday, May 17, 2003 Posted: 6:28 PM EDT (2228 GMT)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- With the last truckload of Columbia wreckage delivered, the accident investigation board looked over the broken and charred remains of the space shuttle Saturday, paying especially close attention to what little is left of the left wing.

A hole along the wing's leading edge doomed the spaceship during its dive through the
atmosphere 31/2 months ago.

Burned electronic units from the space shuttle Columbia sit on a shelf at the Kennedy Space Center.

"We saw the things today which we believe are compelling pieces of evidence that tell us how the heat got into the vehicle and where the flaw started," said the chief investigator, retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr..

Gehman said he and other board members felt it was their duty to see the wreckage one last time as a group, before winding up their investigation and writing their final report. He hopes to have the report completed by the end of July.

"There are a number of pieces of debris out here which are extraordinarily significant that contribute directly to our investigation, and we wanted to see if, as a jury, we came to the same conclusion that our experts have," said Gehman, standing in a Kennedy Space Center hangar filled with shuttle wreckage.

Gehman said he sees no reason why NASA cannot resume shuttle flights, although he would not estimate when.

"The board has not come across any showstoppers that, in our minds, would prevent the shuttle from returning to flight," he said. "Now, how high is the stack of return-to-flight items going to be when we get finished, I can't tell you right now. But right now, it looks to me like it's manageable."

Gehman and five others on the 13-member board observed up close the spray of molten aluminum and small drops of melted metal on certain wing parts, and the knifelike edges of the wing panel remnants near the spot where the deadly heat penetrated. The board suspects the hole was created by a chunk of foam insulation that broke off the fuel tank at liftoff and slammed into that very part of the wing.

NASA's reconstruction team has put back together, as best it could, the leading edge of the left wing, using 3-D plexiglass molds and scraps of salvaged carbon panels. Tiles from the underside of the wing are displayed on a long wooden table, like a giant, burned jigsaw puzzle missing many of its pieces. Other shuttle parts are stacked on metal racks or flat wooden crates, or in plastic bins.

"The work that was done here turned out to be more significant than we thought it would have been at the beginning," Gehman said.

More than 84,000 pieces of Columbia have been recovered and transported to the space center from Texas and Louisiana. The total weight -- nearly 85,000 pounds -- represents 38 percent of the shuttle. NASA had expected to collect no more than 20 percent, said launch director Mike Leinbach, who's heading the space agency's reconstruction team.

"This has shocked a lot of people we got this much back," Leinbach said, adding that the variety of damage is also amazing.

"You can see the nose landing gear and the tires are not in too bad of shape. And then those boxes on the back wall, each one of those boxes could have a thousand pieces no bigger than a piece of paper," Leinbach said. "It's very difficult to put in words how you feel when you look at the variety of the damage that Columbia sustained, and how well she put up a fight."

Almost all the wreckage will be available to researchers interested in re-entering hypersonic spacecraft. Most of the crew cabin will be off-limits, however, because of the high emotions and sensitivity surrounding those pieces, Leinbach said. All seven astronauts were strapped into their seats in the cabin, when the shuttle broke apart over Texas on February 1.

Sixteen more minutes, and Columbia would have landed on the Kennedy Space Center runway, just a few minutes' walk from the hangar that now holds the ship's remains.

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Public pays tab for NASA, then is told to get lost

Published May 13, 2003

Admiral Harold Gehman, who is in charge of investigating the shuttle Columbia accident, must be having flashbacks to his secretive investigation of the USS Cole terrorist attack.

Evidently, he also doesn't think the public should be in on his investigation into the Columbia disaster.

Gehman, appointed by NASA, thinks nobody other than his panel should know all the details of the Columbia report.

We're not to worry our pretty little heads about what transpired in all those secret interviews with NASA officials. We're just to assume the panel asked the right questions of the right people, reached the right conclusions and made the right recommendations.

At least we're not alone.

Gehman also put Congress on his do-not-need-to-know list.
Why not just move the entire proceeding over to Guantanamo?

I don't doubt the Admiral's integrity. I do question whether a military man used to working in secrecy should be the information gatekeeper for a very public tragedy.

How did all this come about?

NASA has been quietly paying the civilian board members on Gehman's panel. This allows them to be classified as government employees and conduct business in secret.

If you recall, these are the same civilian board members that were put on the panel to ensure its independence and credibility. But if you are getting up to $2,500 a week, it raises questions about your willingness to bite the hand that writes the check.

There was skepticism about Gehman's panel as soon as NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe formed it.
Critics, including many in Congress, raised the question of independence and objectivity. O'Keefe and Gehman answered by changing the charter more than once and by bringing in outside experts.

The criticism waned. But now comes this display of arrogance.

Not only will the public be excluded from interviews of key NASA officials, it also will be excluded from details of those interviews when the panel's report on the Columbia disaster is released.

I could understand it if there were some compelling need for secrecy, as was the case with Gehman's investigation of the USS Cole. But embarrassing mistakes by NASA managers hardly qualify as state secrets.

The public paid for the shuttle.

The public saw its seven astronauts killed when the orbiter disintegrated.

The public turned out in droves to help NASA recover debris.

The public is paying for the investigation.

The public will pay the billions this accident eventually will cost.

Given all that, I think the public has a right to know what happened. We should know the involvement of every top NASA official associated with Columbia from its launch to its demise.

We should have names and versions of events, not necessarily in the context of assigning blame but to understand what happened and create a historical record.

The idea that secrecy is the only way to guarantee NASA managers will talk openly is nonsense.

You put people under oath and you ask them questions. If they don't answer the questions, you remove them from their jobs and, if need be, you prosecute them.

That formula worked well during the investigation of Challenger.

Mike Thomas can be reached at 407-420-5525 or mthomas@orlandosentinel.com.

 

 

 

Shuttle cover-up claims
May 12, 2003

MIAMI: Claims of a cover-up are surrounding the Columbia space shuttle tragedy – after it emerged supposedly independent civilians on the board probing the disaster are on the NASA payroll.

The five were added to reassure Congress and the public the board would be fully independent. But they are being paid $250,000 a year to take advantage of rules allowing boards composed solely of "federal employees" to conduct business in secret.

Yesterday public-policy critics said the salaries call into question whether the board is truly independent from the agency it is investigating.

"Three words – conflict of interest," said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "The upshot is, we don't have an independent investigating board. This means NASA is investigating itself. This defeats the whole purpose of having an independent inquiry."

If the civilians had not been hired by NASA, a federal law would have required the investigating board to meet publicly, justify any closed-door sessions and keep transcripts and minutes that would ultimately become public records.

Each of the 13 board members is now classified as a federal employee. Besides the five civilians and chairman, other members include four active-duty military officers, two federal transportation officials and a NASA executive. And as a result, the board says it is legally permitted to meet in secret and promise "confidentiality" to NASA employees and others among the more than 200 individuals it has interviewed.

Last Tuesday, board chairman Harold Gehman said that transcripts of these interviews will be kept secret from the general public, and even from Congress. Said Gehman, a retired admiral who is being paid at the rate of $250,000 per year, "Those are never going to see the light of day."

He elaborated in a prepared statement Friday night: "The board determined it could provide a much deeper and richer review of NASA policies and procedures if it employed standard safety investigation procedures, which are incompatible with (open-government) provisions."

The statement did not respond to a question about his pay.

Gehman's insistence on confidentiality has rankled members of Congress, who say the board's report – now expected in July – must be accompanied by the documents that drove the conclusions. And "What they did was hire outsiders and convert them into an internal board. It's just baffling."

Each of Gehman's five civilian board members insists that accepting money from NASA has in no way compromised the investigation. And indeed, board members and Gehman have been publicly critical of the space agency and its management "culture," questioning whether it has paid adequate attention to maintenance of the aging shuttle fleet and tolerated potentially unsafe conditions.

But one of those five, former astronaut Sally Ride, acknowledges that the public may see the board differently.

"I don't see it an issue for the Board members to be on the federal payroll – this board, unlike most pro-bono government committees, is essentially a full-time job (for which people should receive some compensation)," Ride wrote in an e-mail to the Orlando Sentinel last week. "But one might ask whether it should be NASA's payroll."

Texas man indicted in theft of toilet from shuttle debris

By CHRISTINE S. DIAMOND
Cox News Service
May 11, 2003

LUFKIN, Texas -- A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted a Texas man for stealing a toilet from the space shuttle Columbia.

Daniel Christopher Williams, 27, of Sabine County, is the fifth person indicted in East Texas for stealing debris from the shuttle, which disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1. He was indicted on a charge of theft of government property.

The technical name of the piece Williams is accused of withholding from NASA's recovery efforts is "compactor tank assembly."

Duncan Woodford, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, said he could not comment on how authorities learned of the alleged theft.

Williams also was indicted by a grand jury meeting in Beaumont on a charge of a felon in possession of a firearm, a Winchester 30.30 rifle. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Williams was convicted of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle in Galveston County in 1995.

If convicted, Williams faces up to 10 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000 on each count.

Sheriff's offices in Sabine and San Augustine counties, along with the FBI, NASA and the Office of the Inspector General, are investigating this case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Malcolm Bales, with the Lufkin office, is prosecuting the case.

"The U.S. Attorney's Office and NASA remind everyone that all debris is United States government property and is critical to the investigation of the shuttle accident," a U.S. Attorney's Office press release states. "Any and all debris from the accident is to be left alone and reported to government authorities. Unauthorized persons found in possession of accident debris will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law."

Two suspects previously charged with stealing shuttle debris, Merrie Hipp of Henderson and Stephen F. Austin State University student Bradley Gaudet, are set to stand trial on May 13 in Lufkin before Chief U.S. District Judge John Hannah Jr. Robert Hagan II, a Harrison County constable, and Jeffrey D. Arriola, a former Angelina County sheriff's deputy, are set to stand trial May 19, in Beaumont.

May 10, 2003, 12:20PM

Shuttle impact tests show no sign of major damage

Results may not counter breakup theory

By MARK CARREAU
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

Tests conducted in the past week to determine the impact force of loose insulation on the space shuttle's thermal protection system have produced no visual evidence of major damage, sources said Friday.

The tests are intended to reveal whether insulation that came loose from shuttle Columbia's fuel tank could have punctured the spacecraft's left wing and triggered its fatal Feb. 1 breakup, a leading theory that emerged soon after the disaster.

The results of the first salvos -- aimed at thermal tiles like those found on the landing gear door of the Columbia -- still are under evaluation. They don't necessarily indicate what researchers will find when they begin foam impact tests on reinforced carbon-carbon panels like those found on the leading edge of Columbia's left wing, a source close to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said Friday.

"We didn't predict high damage to the (underside and landing gear) tile," a source familiar with the San Antonio testing said Friday. "I don't think the results so far are unexpected. I don't think we expected any significant damage."

The investigative panel, which is sponsoring the impact testing as part of its inquiry into the causes of the shuttle tragedy, believes the breakup was precipitated by a breach in the leading edge of the left wing. But the 13-member board earlier this week said is it not ready to declare the foam blow as the cause of the damage that triggered a thermal and structural failure of the shuttle.

"Even if the foam testing does break the (carbon panels), that doesn't prove that that's what happened. It just proves that it could have happened," board Chairman Harold Gehman said Tuesday. "If we do major damage to the leading edge, that still doesn't prove it. That just proves it's plausible."

The board source said the impact tests had nothing to do with the panel's assessment.

Foam impact testing on the reinforced carbon-carbon panels at the San Antonio facility is expected to start in early June, though some effort is under way to move up the evaluations.

The tests -- being conducted at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio using a nitrogen gas-fueled cannon -- aim to reconstruct the conditions that Columbia was subject to when it lifted off on Jan. 16.

Within 82 seconds of the launch, a chunk of foam insulation from the forward region of the fuel tank peeled away and struck the underside of the shuttle's left wing.

Initially, NASA mission managers believed the impact -- then believed to have occurred on the underside of the wing near or against the left landing gear door -- did not represent a safety hazard, though a number of engineers questioned that assessment internally.

In the weeks after the accident, the Gehman panel suspected the fatal breakup was caused by a two-to-three pound chunk of foam insulation that struck the underside of the wing, possibly damaging a vulnerable landing gear door seal.

Through subsequent analysis of film and video of the liftoff recorded by ground-based cameras, experts determined the foam hit the underside of the wing at its leading edge.

The impact zone appears to have included some of the 22 U-shaped carbon-composite panels that lined the leading edge of Columbia's left wing, specifically panels five through nine -- a region near the fuselage. Data from a recovered flight recorder and telemetry radioed directly to Mission Control at Johnson Space Center before the breakup suggest the actual wing breach occurred in panels eight or nine, the board said earlier this week.

The incomplete results of the impact tests on the underside of the wing are not considered an indication of what will happen when foam samples are fired at leading edge carbon panels, an investigative source said Friday.

At 22 years, Columbia was the oldest of NASA's four shuttles, and investigators believe deterioration of the carbon panels or other wing components over the years may have weakened the materials enough to make them susceptible to damage from the kind of hit the shuttle took Jan. 16.

One of the issues investigators have uncovered is an internal oxidation, or corrosion, of the carbon panels caused by a zinc oxide paint primer used on the shuttle's launch pads at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The tests slated for San Antonio next month will include older carbon panels flown on other space shuttles.

NASA never studied debris risks
Earlier breakup would have exposed 3 times the people

By John Kelly and

Todd HalvorsonFLORIDA TODAY

May 10, 2003

HOUSTON -- A 3-foot-wide steel ball slammed onto the runway at the Nacogdoches airport.

Another hunk of shuttle Columbia ripped through the roof of a local dentist's office, which might have been filled with people if it were not a Saturday morning.  And a 3-by-4-foot metal slab crashed into a bank parking lot near a drive-up ATM.

In all, the mangled fragments of the shuttle that rained down on mostly rural east Texas on Feb. 1 weighed about 80,000 pounds. Some pieces were so small they may never be found; others were so large that people inside NASA were amazed nobody on the ground was killed or maimed.  It could have been much worse.

A Florida Today analysis shows NASA narrowly skirted what could have been an unprecedented disaster on the ground: Raining debris on thousands of people and homes in suburban Dallas-Fort Worth.

The computer analysis of debris field maps, flight trajectory data and U.S. Census records shows that had the spaceship broken up less than one minute earlier -- roughly 130 miles to the west -- nearly three times as many people and homes would have been exposed to falling wreckage.

Yet, in 22 years of shuttle flights, NASA has never studied where wreckage would fall during a re-entry catastrophe -- the kind of analysis the U.S. Air Force routinely does for space launches and that the agency typically does before it lets unmanned spacecraft fall back to Earth.

The Florida Today evaluation shows that the 25-mile-wide, and 215-mile-long zone where most of the debris fell in east Texas contained about 216,000 people and 87,000 homes. The biggest population center along the way: Nacogdoches, a town with about 30,000 residents.

But a break-up about a minute earlier would have dropped hot, heavy debris onto an area with about 632,000 people and 248,000 homes. That includes the south suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth, a sprawling area packed with busy thoroughfares, churches, schools, neighborhoods and shopping centers.

Also along the shuttle's flight path that Saturday morning: The San Francisco bay area, Las Vegas and Albuquerque, N.M. The ship broke apart before it was to fly over areas near New Orleans, Tampa and Orlando on its way to Kennedy Space Center.

Why not study potential wreckage patterns?

"I think it's probably because they didn't want to contemplate it breaking up," said Lou Ullian, former chief safety officer for the U.S. Air Force's Eastern Range, which among other things studies potential fallout from failed shuttle and rocket launches. "They didn't think it would happen."

The probability of death and destruction on the ground would have escalated if wreckage had fallen over more densely populated areas, said William Ailor of The Aerospace Corp., one of the world's leading experts on debris from re-entering spacecraft.

Risky perception

The 1986 Challenger disaster and a long history of spectacular government and commercial rocket explosions have fostered the perception that the launch is the riskiest part of a space flight.

To date, however, three of four fatal spaceflight accidents -- including two Russian Soyuz descents in 1967 and 1971 -- have come during failed descents to Earth. Seven astronauts and four cosmonauts were killed during those mishaps.

The hazards posed by a shuttle's fiery plunge back through the atmosphere were pointed out in a 1995 risk assessment done for NASA by Science Applications International Corp.

The NASA contractor noted the re-entry and landing phases of a shuttle flight account for 40 percent of the risk during a mission.

Ranking possible causes of a catastrophe by their likelihood, the company said five of the top 25 mission risks involved failure of the shuttle's thermal protection system. Investigators now believe that system of tiles, thermal blankets and reinforced carbon panels failed during Columbia's Feb. 1 re-entry, allowing gases as hot as 3,000 degrees to bore into the aluminum structure and rip the vehicle apart.

"A surprising result of this study was that the risk of descent may be on the same order of magnitude as ascent," the analysis concluded. "But the short time under which risk is realized during ascent makes it much more noticeable."

To date, the agency has not mapped potential debris footprints during a shuttle re-entry accident or the risk to unwitting residents on the ground.

The reason: the agency focuses its risk reduction efforts on making certain shuttle orbiters are safe enough to protect astronaut crews during re-entry, NASA safety chief Bryan O'Connor said.

"And so what our assessment says is that if this thing is safe enough to fly human beings in for an entry and a landing, then we feel that that's adequate safety for the public that's underneath the flight path," the former astronaut said.

Perhaps the closest examination of such a scenario came before the 1989 shuttle launch of NASA'splutonium-powered Galileo spacecraft, which was sent on a mission to study Jupiter and its moons.

Completed in 1988, the study considered what would happen to the spacecraft, and its controversial power source, if a failure in flight prompted an "uncontrolled" re-entry of the shuttle.

The study assumed the orbiter would remain mostly intact, but would tumble out of control, with the Galileo spacecraft and its upper stage booster popping out of the shuttle's cargo bay as the ship broke up.

Florida Today obtained a copy of the study. It does not address the potential for ground casualties or injuries from falling shuttle debris.

Unusual trajectory

Columbia's re-entry trajectory was a rarity, one dictated by launching into a particular orbit to maximize data collection during Earth observation experiments.

Almost all planned shuttle missions in the future are to be launched to the International Space Station. Those ships would typically take one of two routes back to NASA's primary shuttle landing site at Kennedy Space Center:

A route that passes over Seattle and cities across the nation's heartland on the way to KSC.

A path that crosses over Central America near the Yucatan Peninsula before heading over the Gulf of Mexico on the way to its base in Brevard County.

The latter would minimize the number of populated areas the shuttle flies over, but also would reduce flexibility for the shuttle program.

"It's not like you have a lot of choices," Ailor said. "You're dealing with orbits and landing opportunities that force you into certain trajectories. It could be very limiting to say you can't fly over any populated areas."

Another option: Landing shuttles at a back-up site at Edwards Air Force Base in California. But most routes to the base in the Mojave Desert cross the Los Angeles area. And landing in California comes at a cost.

NASA typically spends nearly $1 million to ferry orbiters from California to Florida piggy-back on modified 747 jumbo jets. The cross-country trips pose their own problems. They expose the spacecraft to bad weather and run the risk that a shuttle could fall off its carrier over populated areas.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, meanwhile, will consider the risk of re-entry trajectories over populated areas before publishing its report in July.

The board has a space debris expert from the Federal Aviation Administration checking into what's necessary to thoroughly analyze the trajectory options. Ultimately, the board must decide whether it's wise, or necessary, to do an exhaustive study and make specific recommendations. Instead, board members said a more general observation is likely -- suggesting NASA assess the risks of falling shuttle wreckage and study options for re-entry flight paths that avoid heavily-populated areas.

One board member, Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hess, said debris pictures on TV likely were sobering enough that NASA's already working on that.

"It's so dad-gum obvious," Hess said.

NASA, meanwhile, is waiting to hear from the accident board.

"We obviously are concerned about public safety," NASA's O'Connor said. "We are also waiting to see if the accident board will give us any advice in this area because I know they're looking at this, and I just can't prejudge what's going to come out of all that."

Lawmakers Seek Access to NASA Testimony
'Privileged' Statements on Columbia Won't See 'Light of Day,' Panel Chief Says

By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 9, 2003; Page A03

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32379-2003May8.html

Lawmakers and the board investigating the Columbia space shuttle disaster are locked in a dispute over congressional demands for access to information gleaned from hundreds of "privileged interviews" that investigators have conducted with NASA officials, engineers and others directly involved in the failed mission.

Although the board has conducted nine public hearings into the Feb. 1 accident that killed the seven crew members, the most sensitive testimony about NASA decision making and management practices has been taken behind closed doors. Board Chairman Harold W. Gehman Jr., a retired admiral, has said that he is more concerned about pinpointing the causes of the accident and recommending corrective changes than in publicly pointing a finger of blame.

But key Republicans and Democrats on the House Science Committee said yesterday that the testimony from 200 witnesses is essential to their understanding of the accident, and they vowed to press Gehman and the board for access.

The lawmakers, including Science Committee Chairman Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), said they received assurances during a meeting with Gehman last week that they and their staffs could see expurgated copies of the transcripts, with the names of the witnesses removed. They said they were also promised full access to other data and material generated by the probe.

"As long as confidentiality is being taken care of, there is no reason for members of Congress not to see all the information that has been available to the board during this investigation," said Rohrabacher, chairman of the space and aeronautics subcommittee. "Members of Congress are elected by the people in order to look at information."

However, Gehman said in Houston this week that the transcripts of closed-door interviews "are never going to see the light of day," and that his "offer [to Congress] does not include looking at privileged witness statements."

The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates civilian airplane crashes, routinely makes public the transcripts or summaries of interviews with witnesses and the transcripts of "relevant" cockpit recordings of pilot conversations, spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz said. Sometimes, however, the board has withheld information that was deemed "proprietary" by an airplane manufacturer.

"I don't know of any occasion where we got testimony from somebody where there wouldn't at least be a summary of the interview placed in the public docket," Lopatkiewicz said.

For the past three months, the Columbia accident board has focused on determining the chain of events that led to the disintegration of the orbiter over Texas. On Tuesday, Gehman laid out the board's "working scenario" of what went wrong, beginning with a debris strike against the shuttle's left wing during liftoff on Jan. 16 and ending with superheated gases invading a breach in the wing's leading edge during the reentry.

But board members are also investigating long-standing management practices and the culture of decision making within NASA. They are questioning whether the agency had become too accepting of routine damage to the shuttle's critical heat-shielding.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Kenneth W. Hess, former astronaut Sally Ride and other board members have conducted exhaustive interviews with NASA engineers, contractors, senior officials and shuttle managers in an attempt to understand why NASA managers refused to seek photographs of the damaged space shuttle in orbit despite the repeated pleas of a Johnson Space Center damage assessment team.

Under the board's policy, none of that testimony will ever be shared with the public or members of Congress. And none will be summarized in the board's final report, which is due out this summer.

One board member described the extensive private briefings to investigators as a "tutorial" that has encouraged frank testimony by witnesses and will help the board members as they develop their final recommendations.

The board, which was formally appointed by NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe the day of the Columbia accident, adopted the approach typically used by the military in conducting accident investigations -- one that keeps most sensitive personnel and decision making matters private. Gehman said there is "a long, rich legal history" that supports this concept of executive privilege in military accident investigations, including two Supreme Court decisions, in 1963 and 1984.

"The only thing I know is that this process of conducting these investigations in a manner that's similar to the Department of Defense accident investigation has been upheld many times by the courts, and that's our position on this," Gehman told a reporter.

By contrast, the blue ribbon commission appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 to investigate the Challenger shuttle explosion carried out most of its business in public and used FBI agents to conduct many interviews.

Congress and Gehman, for the most part, have enjoyed good relations, despite the initial concern of Gordon and other Democrats that the board lacked adequate independence from NASA. With prodding from Congress and the board, O'Keefe issued a series of amendments to the panel's charter to allay those concerns.

News stories from April, 2003

Live worms from Columbia experiments found in shuttle wreckage

By MIKE SCHNEIDER
Associated Press
April 30, 2003, 3:41PM

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Hundreds of worms being used in a science experiment aboard the space shuttle Columbia have been found alive in the wreckage, NASA said today.

The worms, known as C. elegans, were found in debris found in Texas several weeks ago. Technicians sorting through the debris at Kennedy Space Center in Florida didn't open the containers of worms and dead moss cells until this week.

All seven astronauts were killed when the shuttle disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1. Columbia contained almost 60 scientific investigations.

"To my knowledge, these are the only live experiments that have been located and identified," said Bruce Buckingham, a NASA spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center.

The worms and moss were in the same nine-pound locker located in the mid-deck of the space shuttle. The worms were placed in six canisters, each holding eight petri dishes.

The worms, which are about the size of the tip of a pencil, were part of an experiment testing a new synthetic nutrient solution. The worms, which have a life cycle of between seven and 10 days, were four or five generations old, Buckingham said.

The experiment was put together by researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center in California.

The moss, known as Ceratodon, were used to study how a space flight environment influences cell growth. During Columbia's flight, shuttle commander Rick Husband sprayed the moss with a chemical that destroyed protein fiber. He also sprayed the moss with formaldehyde to preserve it. Seven of the eight aluminum canisters holding the moss were recovered.

The experiment was put together by an Ames Research Center researcher and Dr. Fred Sack at Ohio State University.

"The cells were surprisingly well-preserved, but we're analyzing how useful it's going to be," Sack said.

Researchers said they don't know if the worms will still have any scientific value since they were supposed to have been examined and unloaded from Columbia within hours of landing

"It's pretty astonishing to get the possibility of data after all that has happened," Sack said. "We never expected it. We expected a molten mass."

COLUMBIA LOST

Recovery of key shuttle seal could refocus investigation

By Michael Cabbage | Sentinel Space Editor
Posted April 29, 2003

CAPE CANAVERAL -- Investigators have found pieces of a key seal from the leading edge of Columbia's left wing that could revise an emerging theory on what caused the orbiter to break up during re-entry.

Two parts of a T-shaped seal thought to have filled the gap between a pair of critical reinforced carbon-carbon, or RCC, panels were identified last week, according to internal NASA documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel. The find is significant because it could narrow the possible causes of a breach in Columbia's protective heat armor that led to the ship's disintegration as it headed toward a Feb. 1 landing at Kennedy Space Center.

The RCC panels, numbered 8 and 9, are among 22 U-shaped thermal shields that guard the left wing's leading edge from temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees during the shuttle's fiery plunge home through Earth's atmosphere. The seal is a T-shaped rib of reinforced carbon-carbon that is custom fitted to protect the seam between the panels.

The seal and RCC panels in question are located in the same general area about midway down the leading edge where a 2-pound piece of foam insulation from Columbia's external fuel tank hit the orbiter 82 seconds after launch Jan. 16. Investigators suspect the strike created a breach that allowed blowtorch-like hot gases to destroy the wing, gradually causing the ship to break up 38 miles above Texas.

Identification of the seal fragments is important because investigators had been focusing on the possibility that the breach could have started between panels 8 and 9 if the seal had been damaged during launch. The two recovered segments are a 4-inch piece of the seal's apex and a longer portion of the rib below it -- parts of the seal's lower half that likely would have to be broken or knocked off to create the breach.

Recovery of the fragments, however, has cast doubt on that possibility.

A day after Columbia's launch, Air Force radar detected a piece of debris leaving the area of the shuttle in orbit. Engineers theorized the debris was a part of the ship that was damaged during launch and shaken loose.

Tests at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to compare the radar signature of the item seen drifting away with parts of the shuttle have eliminated everything except a T-seal and a piece of an RCC panel. But the seal fragments were found in Texas with other shuttle debris, making it less likely that part of the seal could have come off in orbit and been missing at the start of re-entry.

"There always has been the possibility it could be a piece of an RCC panel and not a T-seal," said Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "Even though the piece seen in space could have been consistent with a T-seal, it also could have been consistent with a piece of an RCC panel."

Analyses done by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration allow for both possibilities.

Last week, NASA engineers studying 10 disaster scenarios eliminated all of them except for one: a breach of the left wing's leading edge between RCC panels 5 and 9, likely the result of a hole in the bottom of RCC panel 8 or damage to the lower half of the seal between panels 8 and 9. An April 15 forensics study of shuttle debris concluded that "wing failure initiated in the panel 9 area" and "most likely at the panel 8 to 9 joint area." Investigators from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board also appear to be zeroing in on the same location.

Discovery of the T-seal fragments should do little to change the growing conviction that the breach occurred in the same general area of the left wing's leading edge. It could, however, force investigators to rethink what was emerging as a convenient explanation that appeared to fit all of the known facts.

Recovered shuttle debris made the seal a compelling suspect. Knife-edged pieces from the inside edges of RCC panels 8 and 9 show prolonged erosion from superhot gases. The worst erosion is along the seam between the panels where lengthy heat damage could occur if the seal between them were missing or broken.

Some uncertainty remains as to whether the fragments are from the seal between panels 8 and 9 or the seal between panels 10 and 11. If the seal is from between panels 8 and 9 as thought, however, analysts say any gap left by the portion of the T-seal that has not been found would be too small to have triggered the catastrophe.

Meanwhile, an engineering analysis done Thursday appears to provide new evidence that the breach started somewhere around panels 8 and 9.

Investigators have been studying unusual readings from a temperature sensor on an aluminum support behind panel 9 that were recorded during launch. The potentially important readings were recovered from a data recorder found March 19.

After foam debris hit the leading edge during launch, the sensor showed temperatures were rising faster than normal. Engineers compared the temperature increase with data from seven other Columbia launches between 1992 and 2002.

The analysis revealed that Columbia's final flight showed indications of warming earlier than in any of the other missions, at 310 seconds after liftoff. The sensor readings on the last launch also showed the highest temperature increase, despite being a winter launch with a temperature of 67 degrees at liftoff.

Michael Cabbage can be reached at 321-639-0522 or mcabbage@orlandosentinel.com.

COLUMBIA DISASTER

Key clue may be on '70s recorder

By Kevin Spear | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted April 7, 2003

HOUSTON -- The reel-to-reel tape recorder is approaching 35 years old. It dates from an era of eight-track car stereos; it's less advanced technologically than the videocassette recorder that sits in your living room; and it was abandoned long ago by the scientists who ordered it installed as original equipment on shuttle Columbia.

But today, this low-tech relic, with its 9,200 feet of magnetic recording tape, is providing NASA and the board investigating the Columbia disaster with a detailed look at what happened aboard the shuttle in the minutes before it broke apart over Texas on Feb. 1.

"I was really surprised to hear this thing -- one of my pets -- was flown and then found," said retired National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineer Robert L. Giesecke, who wrote specifications for the recorder in the late 1970s and assumed it had been replaced after he left the agency in 1995.

"By the 1990s, it was obsolete."

Found resting on a bed of leaves on a Texas hillside, the recorder -- which was turned on as Columbia began its re-entry of Earth's atmosphere -- is gradually offering up a detailed picture of how superhot gases penetrated and ultimately melted the orbiter's left wing.

Data from some of the roughly 670 still-functioning sensors show heat began building up in the wing just 80 seconds after Columbia began its re-entry.
That's more than three minutes before the orbiter's space-to-ground telemetry registered a temperature increase, board member Roger Tetrault said.
Board Chairman Harold W. Gehman Jr. has called the recorder readings a "treasure-trove."

Added Tetrault at a news briefing last week: "This data will help us significantly."

Now, he said, more than 100 engineers are studying temperature, vibration and aerodynamic-strain measurements to pinpoint where on the wing the thermal breach occurred.

Investigators suspect Columbia's left wing was damaged when hit by a 2-pound chunk of insulating foam during launch Jan. 16.

The board said radar analysis shows a likelihood that a piece of the wing -- an access panel near the wing's leading edge -- floated away from the shuttle on its second day in orbit.

Recorder data establish that within minutes after re-entry, temperatures of at least 450 degrees -- the maximum the sensors were designed to record before they failed -- invaded the hollow space behind the wing's leading-edge armor at a location within feet of where the foam is thought to have caused the damage.

About nine minutes into re-entry, a sensor on the tail behind the wing rose to 1,200 degrees -- twice as hot as normal. Tetrault said the increase may have been the result of "burning aluminum."

'It's a noncritical system'

Ironically, the so-called experiments, or OEX, recorder had long outlived its original usefulness. Even if it had stopped working on a launch day, NASA would not have been alarmed.

"It's a noncritical system," said Fred Ouellette, a shuttle manager at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "If it failed, we would still fly."
Yet failure hadn't been an issue.

"The OEX recorder was always there for us," said Rey Rivas, a Boeing Co. manager whose laboratory had taken care of the recorders. "I don't think we ever had any problems."

The device wasn't new when NASA purchased several in the late 1970s, in preparation for the start of shuttle flights in 1981. The Air Force had been using them to gather data from test flights of experimental planes.

Several companies, including Kodak and Bell & Howell, developed the 60-pound recorders, which were sold as a "Modular Airborne Recording 

System" but haven't been made in many years.

Its innards encased in a tough aluminum box, the recorder's twin tape reels, each the size of an automobile's steering wheel, were mounted in a
sandwiched, face-to-face configuration rather than a more conventional edge-to-edge arrangement. Each reel ran at its own speed.

Lifetime of spare parts

NASA purchased a "lifetime" batch of spare parts for the machines, Rivas said. His lab handled modifications and repairs for years.

More recently, the NASA Shuttle Logistics Depot, near Kennedy Space Center and part of the United Space Alliance shuttle-management contractor, has maintained the recorder.

At least one of the devices is for sale. A website that peddles "TechJunk" offers a recorder at a "make offer" price.

Jordan Rains of Houston said he bought one of the machines from NASA in 2001.

"Usually when they get rid of something, it's junk," he said.

Devices had 2 purposes

The space agency purchased the recorders for two purposes.

One was the high-profile Orbiter Experiments project, created by NASA scientists to observe the effects of launch, space and re-entry on the materials used to make the shuttle.

The other was the "development flight instrumentation" project, to enable NASA managers to monitor and verify that the shuttle would fly as designed.

In all, about 4,000 sensors for vibration, acceleration, stress, heating, acoustics, pressure and many other factors were installed in Columbia -- the first shuttle to fly into space -- with their data fed to the OEX and other recorders.

The OEX also received data from onboard cameras.

Through the years, both efforts wound down.

"The people interested in data got pretty good data and pulled out," said Jackson D. Harris, a retired NASA manager for the experiments.
More and more of the sensors and their wiring were removed, to save weight and maintenance.

Ultimately, only about 670 sensors still worked on Columbia's last flight, all of them routed into the otherwise-idle OEX recorder.

Only one other shuttle had been equipped with the recorder: Challenger.

Ouellette, a NASA shuttle manager, said recorder data were reviewed after each flight, to look for trends that might show a need to modify the shuttle.

He said he and other engineers he talked to don't remember any such modifications.

Burned gray from fall

When found on the Texas hillside, the recorder was seared an ashen gray, a sharp contrast to its normal lustrous black finish.

Investigators would learn later, with some surprise, that the device wasn't badly damaged. Only the "front porch," as Giesecke called it, was missing. That was a shelf extending from the recorder with attachment points for six cables.

A serious threat to the tape was hidden. A container of powdered desiccant -- moisture absorber -- had broken open inside. It could have groundraw spots into tape. The tape was cleaned by the Imation Corp. near St. Paul, Minn., and duplicated at Kennedy Space Center.

Unlikely discovery

It was something of a miracle the machine was ever found.

Of the 12,242 searchers who have walked the debris path in the past two months, 165 of them, mostly forest rangers and firefighters, have come from Florida.

On March 19, the Florida 4 team of 20 members set out across an area near Hemphill that had already been searched.

Art Baker, a Florida forest ranger from Okahumpka in Lake County, had joined the effort eight days earlier. All he had located were a few animal bones -- and germs that gave him strep throat and bronchitis.

Climbing a rise of scattered oaks and open space, Baker looked ahead 15 yards to beyond a log.

"There's a part," he called out, an alert that two or three other searchers echoed moments later.

"It was sitting there just like it fell," Baker said later. "Funny thing is, a NASA guy was telling us about the flight recorder the night before."

Leaves cushioned landing

Baker was amazed the machine had not disappeared into the Toledo Bend Reservoir or one of the many mud bogs in the area, or disintegrated during its 200,000-foot fall after Columbia broke up.

Instead, it had plopped down on a thick cushion of leaves and perhaps even slid a short distance.

"You couldn't really even see signs that it had dug in," Baker said.

His search team later paused for lunch. A muscular guy -- 6-feet-2, 200 pounds and from NASA, Baker thinks -- came striding past.

He carried the recorder, wrapped in clear plastic, on his left shoulder.

"That heavy?" Baker asked.

"Yep," the man grunted, not slowing to talk. NASA analysts were waiting.

Kevin Spear can be reached at 407-420-5062 or kspear@orlandosentinel.com.

Washington Times Article 04/01/2003

    "This looks to us like it had a pre-existing condition" when the shuttle entered the atmosphere, retired Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., chairman of the investigation board, said during a teleconference with reporters yesterday.

    Data from a sensor closest to the front edge of the left wing show temperatures rising as early as 8:49 a.m. EST. That was about five minutes after Columbia began its re-entry.

    The same sensor also showed temperatures rising quickly, Adm. Gehman said. The sensor was destroyed nine seconds after 8:52 a.m., when the shuttle was 300 miles from the California coast.

    Gases were eating their way through the damaged left wing, Adm. Gehman said. Once the second sensor began recording high temperatures, sensors throughout the left wing indicated higher temperatures, but some recorded falling temperatures. "They began doing some strange things," Adm. Gehman said.

                                                                                                                            --Washington Times

News stories from March, 2003

Mar 27, 10:20 PM

Columbia magnetic tape may reveal final moments

By Todd Halvorson
FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL -- A preliminary review of magnetic tape from shuttle Columbia's recovered flight recorder shows the device still might have been taking data seconds before the ship disintegrated, investigators said Thursday.

The time-consuming job of extracting and processing actual sensor data from the recorder isn't expected to begin until the tape is delivered to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston this weekend. Data review will begin next week.

But officials are hopeful sensor measurements from the recorder might help investigators pinpoint the cause of the Feb. 1 accident, which killed seven astronauts.

"This may be a huge piece of the puzzle," JSC spokesman Dave Youngman said. "Hopefully, fingers crossed, we'll get more information."

About the size of a videocassette recorder, the so-called Orbiter Experiments Support System was found in a pine forest outside Hemphill, Texas, on March 19. Investigators say the device was programmed to take 721 sensor measurements from the shuttle's wings, fuselage and vertical stabilizer, or tail.

Of particular interest to investigators will be 182 pressure measurements, 53 temperature measurements and 447 aerodynamic stress measurements. Among those are a series of measurements from sensors within the shuttle's left wing.

Investigators think hot gasses breached the ship's left wing, triggering the destruction of the$2 billion shuttle. They noted, however, that engineers still aren't certain whether the data might have been corrupted.

"Now we have to note that this (recorder) has been through a very severe environment," Hubbard said. "We don't know yet the quality of the data on there."

The tape was duplicated earlier this week at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. In doing so, engineers noted that a "time tag" showed that some type of imprint exists on the tape until 18 seconds after 9 a.m. on Feb. 1.

NASA's Mission Control Center lost contact with Columbia and its crew at 8:59:31 a.m. that day. The main body of the ship began breaking up at 9:00:23 a.m., or five seconds after the flight recorder apparently stopped operating.

Installed on Columbia before NASA's first shuttle flight in 1981, the recorder was designed to gather temperature, acceleration and vibration data to help engineers understand the stresses on the spacecraft during flight.

The device contains 9,400 feet of magnetic tape that permits up to two hours recording time. It was turned on 10 minutes before Columbia's Jan. 16 launch and then turned off about six minutes after the shuttle reached orbit.

The recorder was activated again 15 minutes before Columbia began its ill-fated, 45-minute plunge through the atmosphere.

The ship and its crew were lost over Texas about 16 minutes before a planned landing at KSC.

Mar 24, 7:55 PM

Shuttle tape in good condition

By Todd Halvorson
FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL -- Magnetic tape within a key flight data recorder survived the destruction of shuttle Columbia in astonishing condition, bolstering hopes that it might help investigators pinpoint the cause of the Feb. 1 accident.

"I think there's a lot of cautious optimism," Kyle Herring, a spokesman for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said Monday. "We're very hopeful it will yield some additional data that investigative teams don't have now."

Roughly the size of a videocassette recorder, the device could provide new clues to accident investigators.

Data beamed down from Columbia degraded about a minute before the ship broke up, becoming intermittent and, at points, unreliable. The recovered recorder contains data stored aboard the orbiter and not beamed back during the ship's atmospheric re-entry.

Discovered last week by a team of Florida firefighters in a pine forest near Hemphill, Texas, the recorder was found embedded in damp ground. But it was intact.

Columbia disintegrated at an altitude of roughly 200,000 feet, and much of the shuttle debris that has been discovered to date has shown severe damage from high temperatures or ground impact.

The tape within Columbia's recorder was stretched and broken between the supply and take-up reels of the device. But otherwise, it is in "remarkably good shape," Herring said.

Specialists at Imation Corp., a data storage company based in Oakdale, Minn., cleaned and stabilized the tape over the weekend. It is to be shipped as early as today to Kennedy Space Center, where it will be dubbed. The original and copies then will be forwarded to engineers in Houston.

Columbia was the only one of NASA's four shuttle orbiters equipped with this particular type of recorder, known as the Orbiter Experiment Support System.

Installed on the ship before NASA's first shuttle flight in 1981, the recorder was designed to gather temperature, acceleration and vibration data to help engineers understand the stresses on the spacecraft during flight.

The device contains 9,400 feet of magnetic tape that permits up to two hours recording time. It was turned on 10 minutes before the shuttle's Jan. 16 launch and then turned off about six minutes after the shuttle reached orbit.

The recorder was activated again 15 minutes before Columbia began its ill-fated return to Earth. About half of the tape was found on the take-up reel, raising hopes that it continued operating until the shuttle began breaking up.

Still to be determined is whether the device actually recorded data. Also in question: the quality of any data that might have been recorded.

Web posted Friday, March 21, 2003
Columbia data recorder found, may hold clues

The Associated Press

HOUSTON (AP) -- A data recorder has been found, fully intact, from the shattered Columbia and its magnetic tape may hold clues to the spaceship's destruction in the skies over Texas.

"It's very, very promising, but we just won't know how useful it's going to be until they're able to retrieve the data," Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the accident investigation board, said Wednesday night.

The recorder, found by a search team earlier in the day near Hemphill in East Texas, could hold valuable information about temperatures, aerodynamic pressures and vibrations on Columbia in its final minutes of flight, Brown said. She likened it to an airplane's black box.

"We have no way of knowing whether the data can be recovered," said Brown, who works for the FAA. But she added that if it can, "it will give us, hopefully, a lot of information about what was going on with the orbiter."

In fact, it could be one of the most significant pieces of shuttle debris found in the six weeks since the accident.

The discovery -- the recorder was right side up on a damp slope -- was all the more thrilling for NASA and the investigation board because it had been days since any major pieces of the shuttle had been found.

"It's very far between when we find things that are on our list of most wanted items," said NASA spokesman James Hartsfield. "But that excitement is tempered some by waiting to find out if, indeed, we can get data from it and, secondly, just what that data could tell us."

The recorder, which sustained some heat damage, arrived Thursday morning at Johnson Space Center. Hartsfield said it probably will be late next week, at the earliest, before experts devise a plan to analyze the 9,400 feet of magnetic tape.

"We want to be very careful how we deal with it," Hartsfield said. "So we're not in a rush here."

Brown said the recorder, called the orbiter experiments support system, or OEX, normally is turned on right before a shuttle begins its descent through the atmosphere and runs for one or two hours.

Columbia broke apart during its atmospheric re-entry on Feb. 1, just minutes short of a planned Florida touchdown.

The investigation board suspects the left wing of Columbia was breached, possibly by launch debris 16 days earlier, and that searing atmospheric gases penetrated the hole and carved a deadly path through the wing and into the left landing gear compartment. All seven astronauts were killed.

About 30,000 pieces of Columbia have been found, representing nearly 20 percent of the descending shuttle.

NASA's space shuttles have a variety of computers and data recorders, but nothing directly comparable to the black boxes on airplanes that give crash investigators detailed flight information.

Hartsfield said the recovered data recorder, about the size of an old videocassette recorder, is of a type used for the initial shuttle flights by Columbia back in the early 1980s to collect information from dozens of sensors. It was modified over the years and no longer was gathering the same type of data.

The recorder was housed beneath the lower floor of the crew cabin.

Earlier Wednesday, well before the recorder was found and identified, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said investigators may never find a single definitive cause for the catastrophe.

"We're six weeks into this and there's not going to be an 'ah-hah'," he told the NASA Advisory Council at Stennis Space Flight Center in Mississippi.

O'Keefe said contributing factors could include hardware failure, the breakdown of processes and procedures during the flight and bad judgment calls. He did not elaborate on those factors, but noted: "I bet it's going to be a combination of all three."

O'Keefe said he does, however, expect answers that will enable NASA to resume shuttle flights.

"My personal sense is that the problem is definable and the problem is fixable," he said.

In New Orleans, meanwhile, NASA's deputy associate administrator for spaceflight, Michael Kostelnik, led a meeting to discuss how to keep the space shuttles operating through 2015. The two-day session was billed as the beginning of the space agency's process of determining how to extend the life span of the three remaining shuttles.

The shuttles, which were built to fly no more than 100 missions, could be needed far longer than expected, Kostelnik said. Columbia, the oldest in the fleet, was making its 28th flight.

------

Mar 19, 11:56 PM

Shuttle Columbia's flight data recorder found

By Todd Halvorson
FLORIDA TODAY

HOUSTON -- Columbia accident investigators found a key flight data recorder Wednesday, a device that could shed new light on what was happening to the spacecraft before it disintegrated over east Texas on Feb. 1.

Searchers found the Orbital Experiment Support System near Hemphill, Texas, in the general region where most of the Columbia debris has been found.

About the size of a bread box, the instrument records on magnetic tape data such as temperatures, pressures, vibrations, acceleration, electrical currents and strains on the vehicle. The recorder was recovered intact and taken to Johnson Space Center, where it must be cleaned up before determining how to get to the data without damaging it.

The recorder starts up about 10 minutes before the shuttle reaches the first traces of the upper atmosphere. Investigators believe it would have continued to run until the vehicle broke up.

"It's a pretty promising find," said Air Force Lt. Col. Tyrone Woodyard, a spokesman for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "We're hoping it can provide us some indications of what was going on . . . But we have to be guarded."

To date, investigators have been forced to rely on telemetry data beamed back from the shuttle, video and photographs in attempt to piece together what destroyed the Columbia.

That information has helped NASA build a timeline of events as the orbiter crossed the southwestern United States on way to a planned landing at Kennedy Space Center.

March 18, 2003

Wind tunnel tests have yet to duplicate Columbia breakup, expert says

Associated Press

HOUSTON - Preliminary consideration of various possibilities has not yet pointed to one likely cause for the breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, NASA engineers told the accident investigation board today.

During its third public hearing, the board heard from engineers who are reconstructing the aerodynamics and thermodynamics of the shuttle's re-entry and trying to pinpoint what damage might have occurred and when it would have happened.

"You've asked the $64,000 question," Steven Labbe, chief of the Applied Aeroscience and Computational Fluid Dynamics Branch at Johnson Space Center, told the board when asked what caused the shuttle to break apart over Texas on Feb. 1, killing all seven astronauts.

The board suspects the left wing's heat-shielding tiles were breached, possibly by insulating foam or other material falling from the external fuel tank, when Columbia launched on Jan. 16. The breach could have let hot atmospheric gases penetrate the left wing during re-entry.

Initial wind tunnel tests on various possible types of damage - including holes in the wing's leading edge, missing reinforced carbon carbon panels on the vehicle's body and a gouge in the main landing gear door - have so far not duplicated the shuttle's catastrophic failure, Labbe said.

"We're going to be looking at multiple panels missing, where our future work will focus on. We'll do a survey of the wing leading edge and look at other scenarios," he said. "These are very preliminary results. It's premature to draw too many conclusions from these results. We're just getting started on this assessment."

On Monday, the board heard from shuttle officials and an expert on spacecraft re-entry, who all said a crucial clue to solving the accident could be in a piece of debris yet to be discovered in the western United States.

"If we can locate some of this (Western debris) ... that's going to make us immensely smarter on exactly how the failure started in the first place," said NASA flight director Paul Hill, who is leading debris recovery efforts in the West.

March 16, 2003

Evidence mounts showing how gas breached shuttle wing

Door supports theory of leading cause

By Todd Halvorson
FLORIDA TODAY

HOUSTON - A massive search for Columbia debris is yielding new clues that are shoring up a leading theory on the cause of the disaster, a source close to the investigation said Saturday.

Searchers have recovered internal parts of the shuttle's left main landing gear door that are shedding light on the way in which hot gasses likely breached Columbia's thermal protection system and doomed the orbiter.

The new evidence suggests hot gas entered a breach in thermal panels that protect the leading edge of the shuttle's left wing, shooting through the wing's interior before burning through the landing-gear compartment's closed door, ultimately spewing out before the wing itself began breaking up.

"That would be one way to explain it," said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Are there other ways to explain it? I'm sure there are other scenarios. But that is one way you could explain it."

Columbia disintegrated in the skies over East Texas on Feb. 1, killing all seven astronauts onboard. Investigators quickly turned their attention to debris that broke free from the shuttle's external tank about 81 seconds into the flight.

Early analysis of launch video indicated the debris -- thought to be foam insulation perhaps laced with ice -- struck the left wing of the orbiter near its leading edge or the landing gear compartment on that side of the ship.

However, a four-second video clip released by investigators Tuesday shows the debris -- now thought to be three separate pieces of foam that formed a cluster -- struck the lower part of the leading edge of the wing.

The leading edge of the wing is covered by 22 reinforcedcarbon-carbon panels that are designed to protect that structure from temperatures which reach about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit during re-entry.

The video shows the debris slamming into an area near so-called RCC panels 6, 7 and 8, potentially weakening those parts.

Heat-damaged pieces of the shuttle's left main landing gear door, meanwhile, are adding to the body of evidence.

Recently recovered and shipped to Kennedy Space Center, an internal "uplock pin" appears to have been subjected to extreme heat and sprayed with molten metal.

An associated titanium flange, meanwhile, "appears to have been eaten away by some kind of high blast of heat," the source said. "And because the melting temperature of titanium is somewhere around 3,000 degrees, that had to be a pretty hot event."

The uplock pin and the titanium flange are associated with the mechanical linkage used to open and close the wheel well doors.

The apparent spray of molten metal found on the pin, coupled with significant heat damage to both parts, are indications that hot gases entered the wheel well from inside the wing, rather than breaching the outside of the landing gear door.

Damage to the parts also suggests temperatures and pressures built up within the wheel well, an indicating the landing gear door remained closed until the eventual break-up of the vehicle.

Columbia investigators, meanwhile, still aren't ready to pinpoint the root cause of the accident.

"I would not want to say that we are moving along rapidly to finding the cause, because it remains to be elusive," retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman told reporters during a news conference Tuesday.

Mar 12, 12:50 AM

Wind shear may have made left wing vulnerable

Board examining age, other issues on Columbia

By Todd Halvorson
FLORIDA TODAY

HOUSTON -- A pre-planned steering adjustment by a booster rocket to counteract unusually high wind shear could have weakened the left wing of Columbia and contributed to the loss of the ship and its crew, investigators said Tuesday.

A variety of other factors -- such as the age of NASA's oldest orbiter, external tank repairs and the potential for undetected corrosion beneath the thermal armor that protects shuttle wings -- also could have played a role in the disaster, the officials said.

Six weeks after Columbia disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board still is working to determine the root cause of the accident, which killed seven astronauts.

But investigators said when a final report eventually is made, the disaster likely will be traced not to a single cause but to a complicated chain of events.

"If you agree with the theory that complex systems fail in complex ways, it isn't a matter of a bracket breaking," retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr. told reporters at a Houston news conference. "It's a matter of a whole series of unfortunate events."

Among various scenarios being contemplated by the board, the leading theories still revolve around damage to the leading edge of the shuttle's left wing.

New video angle: Video released by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board shows a different perspective of the chunk of foam hitting the underside of shuttle Columbia on Jan. 16. See video

Launch video and still photographs show three pieces of foam insulation, all clumped together, breaking free from the shuttle's 15-story external tank about 82 seconds into flight. The debris slammed into the lower part of the left wing's leading edge. It was immediately pulverized, and its remnants then slipped beneath the wing.

Investigators, however, do not think the debris alone could have caused enough damage to account for the accident. Rather, other factors likely are at play, board members said.

Among possible contributing causes: The age of shuttle Columbia, which was launched on its first flight in April 1981.

"One of the scenarios we're looking at is that it's possible that the foam striking a healthy orbiter would not have done enough damage to cause the loss of the vehicle," Gehman said.

But, he added, an "unhealthy orbiter" -- for instance, a spaceship weakened by more than two decades of normal wear and tear -- might have been vulnerable to the type of debris strike experienced during Columbia's Jan. 16 launch.

"A normal event which it could have survived at age 10, but maybe she couldn't survive it at age 21," Gehman said.

Gehman and other board members also said Columbia's wing might have been more susceptible to damage due to an unusual steering adjustment performed by Columbia's left-hand solid rocket motor during the shuttle's climb into orbit.

Before launch, engineers programmed the shuttle's boosters to make the second-largest steering adjustment in shuttle program history about 62 seconds into flight. The maneuver was made to counteract a high wind shear at the point during which the shuttle would be placed under maximum aerodynamic pressure.

The adjustment placed greater stress on the left side of the shuttle 20 seconds before the foam debris broke free from the ship's external tank and struck the leading edge of the wing.

"So we're trying to see if there's any reasoning or commonality in this thing that might give us an indication of greater stress on Columbia on launch than would normally be seen," board member Air Force Maj. Gen. John Barry said.

The board also revealed that minor damage was done to Columbia's tank during last August when it was disconnected from a set of solid rocket boosters. The boosters were needed for another mission that was launched in November.

Barry said the damage, which occurred in the area where foam debris broke off the tank, was fixed, and that the repairs passed inspections. Nevertheless, the investigators want to determine if the damage could have been a factor in the accident.

"This is one of those things that stands out as a little bit different and may or may not have contributed to the mishap," Barry said.

Meanwhile, investigators also are intrigued by pinhole damage done to the reinforced carbon carbon panels during six missions between 1991 and 2001. The U-shaped panels protect the leading edge of the wing from temperatures that can reach 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit during atmospheric re-entry.

Specifically, the investigators want to know whether corrosion could have cropped up and gone undetected during routine visual inspections of the exterior of the so-called RCC panels, weakening the shuttle's aluminum wings.

"Think of termites. Or if any of you are boaters, it's blisters on the fiberglass," Gehman said. "This RCC is built up in layers. The oxidization gets inside and starts opening up gaps from the inside out. And so the problem is when you do a visual inspection of the outside you never see it."

The board's complex detective work is expected to continue for several weeks if not months. At the same time, thousands of people still are scouring East Texas and other areas further west to locate Columbia debris.

To date, 39,300 pounds of Columbia debris have been recovered, or about 18 percent or 19 percent of the vehicle, Gehman said.

Four-thousand people still are involved in the search on a daily basis and investigators hope the onset of spring will yield additional pieces to the puzzle.

"Some of the debris that we're really interested in is under snow," Gehman said. "And we're hoping when people get outdoors, and farmers start plowing fields, and the snow melts, that more interesting debris farther west will start to emerge."

Mar 9, 11:45 PM

Data show possible autopilot override try

Official: information may be misleading

Associated Press

HOUSTON -- An attempt may have been made to override Columbia's autopilot in the final few seconds of its doomed flight, according to information received Sunday by the space shuttle's accident investigation board.

But, as an official close to the investigation stressed: "The data are really suspect. They can't ensure the integrity of any of the data, and some of the stuff that they're saying may be inaccurate or misinterpreted."

A NASA spokeswoman, Eileen Hawley, said the possible attempted override could have been unintentional; in other words, one of the pilots may have bumped the stick.

ABC News reported Sunday evening that data showed one of the crew may have tried to take over the space shuttle before its destruction above Texas on Feb. 1.

For weeks, in an attempt to reconstruct what went wrong during Columbia's re-entry, NASA and other experts have been analyzing data that were transmitted in the final 32 seconds of flight.

The last two seconds of data, which follow 25 seconds of nothing, indicate there was an input to disengage the autopilot system, the official said.

The data also suggest that the four steering jets that automatically began firing to try to counteract the increased drag on the left side of the spacecraft were no longer able to counteract the forces, the official said.

"It kind of indicates the orbiter was out of control, basically," the official said.

The autopilot never went off, possibly because there was not enough time for it to do so -- or perhaps because there was no attempt by the crew to override it, the official said.

"Had you had more data after two seconds, you might know whether it would have gone off or not," the official said. It is difficult if not impossible to know, with certainty, "whether that was unintentional or whether it was intentional or whether it even occurred at all," the official said.

Hawley pointed out that even before Columbia started re-entering the atmosphere, commander Rick Husband accidentally bumped the stick but quickly corrected for it.

Minutes later, "there is some evidence that the stick may have been bumped" again, Hawley said.

But she added that part of the problem is the data are intermittent, with a high error rate, "and to draw any conclusions from it would be really wrong."

The data also suggest there were no readings coming from Columbia's left orbital maneuvering system in the final two seconds, which could mean it broke off or was badly damaged, said the official close to the investigation.

NASA is reconstructing, as best it can, the timeline of Columbia as it flew across the Pacific, crossed the California coast and continued its descent over Nevada and New Mexico and Texas, en route to a Florida touchdown following a 16-day science mission.

All seven astronauts were killed.

The board, meanwhile, suspects that the searing gases of atmospheric re-entry probably entered the shuttle through a breach along the leading edge of the left wing. The blowtorch-like gases may have snaked their way through the wing and streamed out the left main gearing landing compartment.

Earlier in the investigation, the board believed the gases may have entered this left wheel well, but are more inclined now to think the gases were actually coming out, the official said.

"It's a strong theory. It has a certain amount of support," the official said.

The board is still trying to determine whether launch debris caused the breach. Insulating foam or other debris broke off Columbia's external fuel tank barely a minute into the flight on Jan. 16 and struck the left wing. On the NetColumbia accident investigation board: www.caib.us

March 4, 2003  5:27 p.m.

Warhead From Long-Range North Korean Missile Found in Alaska

By Ryu Jin
Staff Reporter

The warhead of a long-range missile test-fired by North Korea was found in the U.S. state of Alaska, a report to the National Assembly revealed yesterday.

According to a U.S. document, the last piece of a missile warhead fired by North Korea was found in Alaska.  Former Japanese foreign minister Taro Nakayama was quoted as saying in the report. "Washington, as well as Tokyo, has so far underrated Pyongyang's missile capabilities".

The report was the culmination of month long activities of the Assembly's overseas delegation to five countries over the North Korean nuclear crisis. The Assembly dispatched groups of lawmakers to the United States, Japan, China, Russia and European Union last month to collect information and opinions on the international issue.

The team sent to Japan, headed by Rep. Kim Hak-won of the United Liberal Democrats, reported, `Nakayama said Washington has come to put more emphasis on trilateral cooperation between South Korea, Japan and the United States since it recognized that the three countries are within the range of North Korean missiles.

According to the group dispatched to the U.S., American politicians had a wide range of opinions over the resolution of the nuclear issue, from a peaceful resolution to a military response.

Doves, such as Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and co-chairman of the Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation, called for a peaceful settlement of the current confrontation, by offering food, energy and other humanitarian aid to the poverty-stricken country, while urging the North to give up its nuclear ambitions.

Rep. Markey also said the North should return to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the U.S. should make a nonaggression pact with the communist North.

Hardliners, however, warned that the North's possession of nuclear weapons will instigate a nuclear race in the region, provoking Japan to also acquire nuclear weapons. Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, an Illinois Republican, said the U.S. might have to bomb the Yongbyon nuclear complex should the North try to export its nuclear material to other countries.

Over the controversy concerning the withdrawal of U.S. forces stationed here, most American legislators that the parliamentary delegation met said U.S. troops should stay on the peninsula as long as the Korean people want, the report said.

jinryu@koreatimes.co.kr
03-04-2003 17:27

Mar 4, 10:22 PM

Investigators find melted metal on heat shield tiles
By Kelly Young
FLORIDA TODAY

The Shuttle Blackout Myth Persists

Nikki Chandler

Mobile Radio Technology, Mar 1, 2003

When Mission Control in Houston lost all communication with the space shuttle Columbia during its return to Earth on Feb. 1, they knew something was terribly wrong.

In years past, the officials at Mission Control may not have blinked an eye when they lost a signal for a few minutes. But this was different because the communication blackout that used to occur as the shuttle entered the atmosphere no longer happens.

Back when a communication blackout was normal, the signal always came back after a few minutes, and Mission Control would hear the astronauts' voices again and would continue monitoring data.

This time, when communications and tracking of the shuttle were lost at 9 a.m. EST at an altitude of 203,000 feet over north central Texas, it never returned. The space shuttle had broken apart.

The media and other information services still report a communication blackout as a routine part of the shuttle's reentry into the atmosphere. But the blackout hasn't been an issue since December 1988, according to Roger Flaherty, deputy program manager for NASA's Tracking and Date Relay Satellite System.

The harshest environment

When the shuttle enters the Earth's atmosphere, tremendous heat builds up around the shuttle, and portions of the spacecraft's exterior reach 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat strips electrons from the air around the space shuttle, enveloping it in a sheath of ionized air that used to block communications anywhere from four to 16 minutes. The ionized particles around the shuttle are from ionization of the atmospheric gases as they are compressed and heated by the shock, or heated within the adjacent boundary layer. When the electron density rose high enough to exceed the critical plasma density of the link frequency, the result was significant attenuation or blackout.

The maximum heat buildup for Columbia probably occurred somewhere near an altitude of 200,000 feet while it was traveling around 12,500 miles per hour, which is about the time communication was lost for good.

Before the end of 1988, the shuttle entered blackout about 30 minutes before touchdown anywhere from 400,000 feet to about 200,000 feet. Radio signals between the spacecraft and the ground could not penetrate that sheath of ionized particles.

John Glenn reported in Newsweek that when he was watching the NASA channel in anticipation of the Columbia landing, he knew the agency had serious problems.

“Back in the old days, it was normal to lose contact for about four minutes during the highest heat of reentry, but the blackout period now is less,” wrote the former astronaut, who first orbited the Earth in 1962. “I turned to my wife, Annie, and said, ‘This is big-time trouble.’”

Of course, the blackout period is non-existent now, but older missions faced the loss of signals.

“In a sense, the blackout — the famous blackout — was part of space lore, the way it happened,” Flaherty said.

Mercury, Gemini and Apollo experienced several-minute blackouts during their atmospheric reentry phases. According to an article in The Interplanetary Network Progress Report from California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA conducted several experiments in the 1960s involving Earth atmospheric reentry. The article, written by D. D. Morabito, stated that the use of an X-band telemetry system over lower frequency bands was proposed. Another scientist compared predicted and measured communications blackout boundaries of atmospheric density and velocity profiles for Apollo.

No more blackouts

The solution came about after NASA launched the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System. The first satellite was launched in 1983, and the next two went into orbit in 1988 and 1989. (One TDRS satellite was lost in the 1986 Challenger accident.) The system was built to provide communications for all space flights, from launch to reentry.

When the shuttle enters the atmosphere, the brunt of the heat is on the underside of the orbiter. The thermo protection tiles are facedown, so the plasma or ionization layer is open at the trailing end behind the shuttle, providing a hole through which communications with the shuttle can be maintained with the TDRS. Even if the TDRS satellites had been in use when Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were in flight, the spacecrafts still may have experienced blackouts because of their body shapes.

“The worst was the old Mercury, Gemini and Apollo because they were round hemispherical domes,” said John Wickman, president of Wickman Spacecraft and Propulsion.

The shuttle is shaped more like a plane, so as it comes into the atmosphere belly-down, “the coolest part of the orbiter has no plasma or radiation that will interfere with the radio frequency communications from that edge,” Flaherty said.

NASA found that if the radio signal was sent back up to the satellite and then down to the ground, they didn't even need to try to communicate through the plasma layer.

“Ionization still occurs, but we don't try to send that signal through that layer. We send it up through the atmosphere, so we're sending it away from the layer. The layer is on the bottom where the orbiter is the hottest,” said Catherine Watson, NASA spokesperson.

The orbiter, or shuttle, has multiple conformed, S-band medium-gain antennas on a blister on the skin of the orbiter, according to Flaherty.

“The top of the orbiter has four S-band antennas — front left, front right, rear left, rear right — so that those antennas are commanded to optimize communications paths,” he said.

The orbiter primarily uses the S-band at 1,700 to 2,300 MHz for communications during entry. It supports voice, commands, telemetry and data files. The data rate is up to 192 kbps. The shuttle uses the Ku band (13.755 and 15.003 GHz) for communications while in space.

As the orbiter changes attitudes while preparing for landing, it automatically selects the antenna to optimize the communications link with the satellite. However, the antenna selection can be controlled from the ground if needed.

Even with a drop out here or there, communications is much more fluid than a total blackout for minutes.

NASA did not direct all of its plans for TDRS around solving this specific blackout, however.

“I think it was sort of serendipitous,” Flaherty said. “I think it may have been something people had thought about and said, ‘Gee, you know we're not shooting up through the plasma layer anymore, and there's a possibility by looking down on the orbiter here that we may be able to maintain communications right through what was then known as the blackout period.”

NASA launched what is known as the TDRS-3 satellite on Sept. 30. 1988, and the first two missions shortly after that would not have experienced the blackout period. The satellite's position as “west” supported shuttle communications.

Nine TDRS satellites have been launched into orbit since 1983. The ground station for this communications network is located in White Sands, N.M. This station contains the ground terminal communications relay equipment for the command, telemetry, tracking and control equipment of the TDRS.

“It's a very, very reliable system,” Flaherty said. “We're 99.91 percent proficient and that is for every minute of scheduled data over minutes of actual support.”

Each TDRS satellite contains two steerable single access antennas that provide dual-frequency single-access telecommunications at K and S band. The space-to-ground link antenna on the satellite provides the link between TDRS and the ground station. It's a two-meter parabolic reflector antenna. The satellite also has multiple-access antennas and an S-band omni directional antenna.

The initial fleet of TDRS satellites (TRDS 1-7) was built by TRW of Redondo Beach, Calif., but the last three (TDRS 8, I, J) were built by Boeing Satellite Systems.

“TDRS 8 is an operational spacecraft, and TDRS I and J have been launched and are in the process of being accepted by NASA at this time,” Flaherty said.

TDRS 8 was the first of the second-generation replenishment satellites.

Last words

With TDRS being fully operational, Mission Control was receiving telemetry and voice communications up until the moment the shuttle was seen breaking apart. With no blackout, continual communications may help investigators solve the mystery of the accident.

“The more communications, the more data you have, the better off we always are. For instance, we have gone to using TDRS and space-based relay to support launching vehicles,” Flaherty said. “We can get launch data throughout the entire launch period. If something does go wrong at least you can go back and look at the data and see if there are any telltales.”

As Columbia entered California air space, in fact, the first hints of trouble had surfaced, according to NASA. In the final seven minutes of the flight, Jeff Kling, the maintenance, mechanical arm and crew systems officer, reported a sudden and unexplained loss of data from spacecraft sensors, according to transcripts released by NASA.

“I just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle, the hydraulic return temperatures,” Kling said.

The flight director then asked if there was anything common to the sensors. Kling said there was no commonality, suggesting a general failure.

At that point, everything appeared normal with shuttle flight control.

Kling then said that landing gear tires had lost pressure.

Houston: “Columbia, Houston. We see your tire pressure messages, and we did not copy your last.”

Commander Rick Husband: “Roger, buh…”

He was cut off at 8:59 EST.

A capsule communicator tried a series of radio calls to Columbia with no response.

News stories from February, 2003

SPACE CENTER, Houston, Feb. 28, 2003

The Shuttle Crew's Final Moments

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/28/columbia/main542347.shtml

(CBS) In a videotape released Friday by NASA, Columbia astronauts in the final minutes of their lives sipped drinks, put on their gloves, joked and mugged for the camera, unaware of the catastrophe awaiting them. The cassette was found among shuttle wreckage three weeks ago. "Looks like a blast furnace," commander Rick Husband comments to his crew, referring to the bright flashes outside the cockpit windows as Columbia re-entered the atmosphere. "Yep, we're getting some G's (gravity)," replies his co-pilot, William McCool. "Let go of the card and it falls." "You definitely don't want to be outside now," Husband adds. Says Laurel Clark, seated behind them: "What, like we did before?" drawing a big laugh. The digital tape was discovered near Palestine in East Texas on Feb. 6 — five days after the shuttle disintegrated just 16 minutes away from its landing in Florida. The investigation board suspects a breach somewhere in the left wing let in superheated gases. The 13 minutes of tape also shows flight engineer Kalpana Chawla. All four are clad in orange flight suits, with their helmet visors up, and seen going through routine checklist activities in the cockpit. The other three astronauts were seated on the lower deck.

As CBS News Correspondent Bob Orr reports, when the tape opens, Columbia is 500,000 feet above the Pacific, west of Hawaii. The astronauts are routinely preparing for landing. Chawla is running down the reentry checklist. "We have ten minutes to get gloves on, Laurel do you need help?" asks Chawla. "Got them, almost, replies Clark. "After you get yours, then I'll get mine," says Chawla. As astronaut Clark takes the video camera from co-pilot McCool, Commander Husband tells the crew Columbia is closing in on the Earth's atmosphere. Husband is seen sipping from a drink pouch and, along with McCool, putting on gloves. The two women take turns smiling for the camera; Clark gives an especially wide grin. The astronauts are enjoying the ride and heading for home, clearly unaware that the same hot gasses are about to destroy the orbiter. NASA broadcast the tape on its television service early Friday afternoon. It was introduced by astronaut Scott Altman, who commanded the previous mission of Columbia, a year earlier. Altman said of the more than 250 tapes flown during the doomed flight, this was the only one recovered that had any recording left on it. Because of heat damage, the tape ends four minutes before the first sign of trouble, said an official close to the accident investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity. NASA acknowledged the existence of the tape on Tuesday. Officials wanted to make sure all the astronauts' families saw it before broadcasting it to the public. It holds no investigative value, officials said. The tape shows routine flight-deck activity beginning around 8:35 a.m. Feb. 1 and continues until 8:48 a.m., when the shuttle was over the eastern Pacific, southwest of San Francisco, at an altitude of less than 300,000 feet. Eleven minutes later, Mission Control lost contact with Columbia. And 32 seconds after that, all communication ceased as the spaceship shattered over Texas. The video was shot with a small onboard camera mounted to the right of McCool, at the front of the cockpit, NASA said. He removes the camera at one point and hands it to Clark to continue filming. Columbia was 38 miles up, traveling Mach 18 or 18 times the speed of sound, when it came apart. The fact that the video cassette was preserved is "remarkable," said Charles Figley, director of the Traumatology Institute at Florida State University. "Some might view it as a miracle," Figley said. "Suddenly here is a postcard of these men and women." He added that the video should provide additional peace of mind for the astronauts' families, because it shows them happy and doing what they loved. NASA officials said Husband was notified about the tank debris that smacked into the left wing barely a minute after liftoff on Jan. 16 and also the results of the engineering analysis that concluded any damage to the thermal tiles posed no safety threat. Flight controller Jeffrey Kling, who was the first one in Mission Control to report problems in the left wing during Columbia's plunge through the atmosphere, said earlier this week that Husband seemed to be satisfied with the engineering results that were relayed to him. The astronauts seated in Columbia's lower deck were Michael Anderson, David Brown and the first Israeli in space, Ilan Ramon.

NASA Mishap Response Status #07
Thursday, Feb. 20, 2003 - 6 p.m.CST
Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas

"Columbia Began Losing Pieces Over California"
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS - Feb. 18, 2003, Filed at 8:38 p.m. ET

Excerpts:

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) -- Space shuttle Columbia began losing pieces over the California coast well before it disintegrated over Texas, the accident investigation board reported Tuesday, finally confirming what astronomers and amateur skywatchers have been saying from Day One.

But board member James Hallock, a physicist and chief of the Transportation Department's aviation safety division, said the fragments were probably so small they burned up before reaching the ground.

He said the conclusion that the space shuttle was shedding pieces a full six minutes before it came apart over Texas was based on images of the doomed flight. Astronomers and amateurs on the West Coast photographed and videotaped the shuttle's final minutes.

``Obviously, it would be very important to understand what those pieces are, particularly the ones that started falling off at the very beginning,'' because they would shed light on the earliest stages of the breakup, he said.

However, Hallock said the pieces that came off early did not seem to be very big, judging from the light reflected off them.

``For us to find something that far back along the path, I think it's going to have to be a pretty substantial piece of the shuttle itself,'' he said.

Moreover, he added: ``That's a lot of area to be looking. ... We have the Grand Canyon area and all of the areas of Southern California, the mountainous area and stuff like this, that even if we could home in on some of these things, it's going to be very difficult to find it. But we sure would like to see it.''

In their second news conference in as many weeks, the board members also said they are not convinced the debris that hit the left wing shortly after liftoff on Jan. 16 was insulating foam from the external fuel tank. It is possible the debris was actually ice or much heavier insulating material behind the foam, they said.

Hallock said the suspected breach in Columbia's left wing had to have been bigger than a pinhole, in order to allow the superheated gases surrounding the ship to penetrate the hull.

In other news:

-- The board said it hopes to hold its first public hearing next week, possibly on Feb. 27, to listen to non-NASA experts who have theories about what destroyed the shuttle. The hearing will be held somewhere in the Houston area. The board has been criticized by some U.S. lawmakers as being too closely tied to NASA.

``We will invite experts who are not associated with any U.S. government program who have theories or hypothesis, who have written to us or provided research documents, to express to us their opinions,'' said board chairman Harold Gehman Jr., a retired Navy admiral. ``That way we get input ... not by any government agency.''

-- The board split into three teams Tuesday -- materials, operations and technology -- and began delving into what may have caused a breach in the shuttle's left wing.

-- An Air Force telescope in Maui took pictures of Columbia as the shuttle orbited overhead during its mission. Gehman said the images were being analyzed and it was too soon to know whether they may hold clues to the shuttle's demise.

-- An external fuel tank identical to the one used by Columbia has been impounded at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans and will be tested. If any destructive testing is performed, engineers need to be careful because ``we only get one shot at it,'' Gehman said.

-- Nearly 4,000 pieces of debris have been shipped to Florida's Kennedy Space Center, of which 2,600 have been identified and cataloged, Gehman said. Investigators hope to partially assemble the pieces to help them figure out what happened to the space shuttle. An additional 10,000 pieces are headed to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and Kennedy.

It is impossible to calculate how much of Columbia the recovered pieces represent, the board said. In terms of weight, it represents only a tiny portion because so much of the wreckage is small, like fragments of insulation.

In the more than two weeks since the tragedy, the NASA-appointed board has publicly put forth just one hypothesis: that the superheated gases surrounding the spaceship during its descent through the atmosphere penetrated the left wing.

Still a major focus of the investigation is the supposed 2 1/2-pound chunk of rigid insulating foam that broke off Columbia's external fuel tank shortly after liftoff and slammed into the left wing at more than 500 mph.

NASA concluded while Columbia was still in orbit that any damage caused by the foam was slight and posed no safety threat. But engineers are now redoing their analysis to see if they made a mistake or missed something.

Air Force Maj. Gen. John Barry, a member of the investigating board, identified four previous launches, as far back as 1983, in which foam from the same part of the fuel tank struck a shuttle's thermal tiles.  ``We've got some backtracking to do,'' he said.

The board has yet to order any foam or thermal tile impact tests, Gehman said. Over the years, NASA has shot .22-caliber bullets, BB pellets and even ice at tiles, and the board wants to read up on this ``enormous library of testing'' first, he said.

``Before we go ordering NASA to do things, the first thing we're doing is getting smart,'' Gehman said.

The board began its work within hours of Columbia's breakup on Feb. 1.  The shuttle was traveling at 18 times the speed of sound and was just minutes away from a Florida touchdown when contact was lost. All seven astronauts aboard were killed.

The newest member of the 10-person panel, former Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall, will join her colleagues later this week. Additional members are being sought to include more scientific experts and quell criticism from members of Congress who contend the board is not independent enough of NASA.

Data shows Columbia was still fighting to maintain control in final seconds

Posted on Sat, Feb. 15, 2003

BY ROBYN SURIANO

The Orlando Sentinel

HOUSTON - (KRT) - New information from 32 seconds of garbled data show that shuttle Columbia's flight control system was still trying to guide the orbiter even after NASA lost contact with the ship, the agency said Saturday.

NASA has been working feverishly to resurrect information from the data, which Columbia continued to transmit after Mission Control lost contact with the seven-member crew on Feb. 1.

Much of the data may be too unreliable to be useful. But officials said Saturday that they have retrieved enough credible information to determine that two more jets were firing on Columbia's right side when Commander Rick Husband was cut off in mid-sentence "Roger, uh…"

NASA could not say precisely when the thrusters fired in that 32-second timeframe. But the new jets are different from two others - located on the right, rear of the vehicle - that were known to be firing about 1 1/2 seconds before contact was lost at 8:59 a.m. EST while the ship soared over Texas.

It's unclear what the new information means about the status of the crew in that 32-second period, and it does not shed light on what caused the shuttle to break apart, killing astronauts Husband, William McCool, Mike Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and David Brown.

But the data show Columbia was fighting fiercely to maintain control in its final seconds.

"It tells them the computers were still trying to do what they're supposed to do," said NASA spokesman Kyle Herring. "These two additional jets were trying to compensate for the increasing drag on the left."

At the moment contact was lost, Columbia was in a planned maneuver meant to slow the ship by pointing its left wing downward at a 57-degree angle. But something was causing additional drag on the left side, and some of the ship's thrusters were firing on the right to counteract the drag.

It's not clear what was causing the problem, though officials are considering whether loss of heat-protective tiles or a breach somewhere in the shuttle's aluminum skin was contributing.

As the investigation continues, NASA announced Saturday that a main engine turbopump - burrowed 14 feet below the surface - was located near Fort Polk in Louisiana. Officials also identified one of the shuttle's main computers among the debris already taken to Kennedy Space Center, but the general purpose computer is badly damaged and missing its battery. It is not expected to provide any useful information, Herring said.

Also Saturday, the search for debris intensified in New Mexico, where workers picked through the dense vegetation and steep slopes of the Embudito Canyon.

About 140 volunteers were organized into teams of 10 to look for the source of a "whooshing" noise in the air Feb. 1 as the spaceship headed for Texas. Hikers and residents had reported the sound to officials after the ship broke apart over northcentral Texas, said Peter Olson, a spokesman for the New Mexico Department of Public Safety.

Usually called upon to search for lost hikers or hunters, the volunteers are well-trained to look for small clues - such as candy bar wrappers - in the landscape. NASA told them to watch out for potential debris as big as a clipboard or small as a credit card.

"They're used to looking for physical items," said Olson, who was in the canyon where skies were cloudy and temperatures hovered around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. "They've given us descriptions of things like the (shuttle's heat-protective) tiles."

The teams planned to search a two-square mile area of about 1,100 acres, which is littered with boulders, prickly-pear cacti and sage.

To date, no confirmed pieces of the shuttle have been found west of Fort Worth but NASA officials say they have credible reports of debris coming off the spaceship before it broke up over Texas.

Two possible pieces have been retrieved from the Albuquerque area and sent to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for further review, said NASA spokesman Alan Buis in Houston. But it's not clear yet that they're genuine, and another 10 debris sightings in Albuquerque were investigated and ruled out.

Anything that came off the shuttle early could be crucial in helping investigators determine where the trouble started on Columbia.

The Embudito Canyon is on the outskirts of Albuquerque, nestled against the west side of the Sandia Mountains. Olson said a residential neighborhood borders the canyon, which is home to rabbits, snakes and other wildlife; coyotes and mountain lions can be found further up the mountainside.

Earlier in the week, helicopters from the U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range had canvassed the area from the sky, with no luck. Olson said the teams were working in a grid-like fashion on the ground, walking close together.

"Hopefully, we'll find something," he said.

As debris collection continues, the independent team investigating the accident spent Saturday in Louisiana at the Lockheed Martin plant that manufactures the giant external tanks used on the space shuttle. Tanks are under scrutiny because a 2.67-pound chunk of foam insulation broke free from Columbia's tank during launch and struck the ship's underbelly on the left side.

The team - led by retired Navy Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr. - was due back in Houston on Saturday evening, after a quick road trip to several NASA facilities, including KSC. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board also added a new member Saturday, Sheila Widnall.

Widnall is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former secretary of the Air Force from 1993-97.

NASA unveils revised Columbia accident timeline
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: February 13, 2003

Just one minute and 24 seconds after reaching the region of maximum aerodynamic heating off the coast of California, telemetry from the shuttle Columbia shows the first sign of unusual heating in the ship's left wing main landing gear wheel well, according to a dramatic new accident timeline released today by NASA.

The timeline plots Columbia's course from a point 400,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii to the point over Texas where the last data from the stricken ship was transmitted. Overlayed on the map and the shuttle's ground track are boxes showing all of the unusual telemetry beamed back from the shuttle as it streaked eastward toward destruction.

The new timeline includes the latitude and longitude of the orbiter at each point where telemetry was transmitted, the altitude and velocity of the spacecraft at that time and additional details about what each bit of telemetry actually indicated.

As the chart shows, re-entry began in earnest at 8:44:09 a.m. as the shuttle fell into the discernible atmosphere 395,010 feet above the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii. At 8:50:53 a.m., Columbia began encountering the region of peak heating at an altitude of 243,048 feet and a velocity of 24.1 times the speed of sound.

One minute and 24 seconds later, at 8:52:17 a.m., telemetry indicated the start of an unusual rise in temperature from a sensor on the left main landing gear brake line on the inboard sidewall of the main landing gear wheel well. The shuttle's altitude at that moment was 236,791 feet and its velocity was Mach 23.58. The shuttle was well off the coast of California west of San Francisco at a 38.9 degrees north latitude and 129.2 degrees west longitude.

Twenty-four seconds later, a temperature sensor on a strut in the wheel well that faces the main landing gear door began registering an unusual temperature increase. Starting at 8:52:59 a.m. and continuing for another 12 seconds, four temperature sensors near the back of Columbia's left wing suddenly dropped off line. Wire bundles leading to the sensors were routed along the left, or outboard, side of the main landing gear wheel well before crossing in front of the well and into the shuttle's fuselage.

Moments later, in mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, mechanical systems officer Jeff Kling noticed at least some of the unsettling telemetry.

"FYI, I've just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle, hydraulic return temperatures," he told entry flight director Leroy Cain. "Two of them on system one and one in each of systems two and three."

Cain: "Four hyd return temps?"

Kling: "To the left outboard and left inboard elevon."

Cain: "OK, is there anything common to them? DSC or MDM or anything? I mean, you're telling me you lost them all at exactly the same time?"

Kling: "No, not exactly. They were within probably four or five seconds of each other."

Cain: "OK, where are those, where is that instrumentation located?

Kling: "All four of them are located in the aft part of the left wing, right in front of the elevons, elevon actuators. And there is no commonality."

Cain: "No commonality."

NASA officials said today the most likely explanation for the temperature rise ultimately seen in the wheel well was hot plasma circulating inside the wing from a breach, or penetration, elsewhere. Such a breach could have damaged the hydraulic sensor wiring, explaining the loss of data from systems at the back of the wing, while at the same time explaining the rising temperatures in the wheel well.

That much is informed speculation. That a breach occurred at some point well before breakup now seems all but certain.

"Preliminary analysis by a NASA working group this week indicates that the temperature indications seen in Columbia's left wheel well during entry would require the presence of plasma (super heated gas surrounding the orbiter during re-entry)," NASA said in a statement.

"Heat transfer through the structure as from a missing tile would not be sufficient to cause the temperature indications seen in the last minutes of flight. Additional analysis is underway, looking at various scenarios in which a breach of some type, allowing plasma into the wheel well area or elsewhere in the wing, could occur."

In any case, the next unusual telemetry was transmitted at 8:53:31 a.m. as Columbia was passing 231,304 feet above Sonoma County, Calif., at 23 times the speed of sound. Another rear elevon hydraulic line temperature sensor failed "off-scale low."

More ominously, at 8:53:46 a.m., as the shuttle passed above Interstate 505 west of Sacramento, Calif., a sensor on the left main gear brake line, mounted on a strut facing the landing gear door, began registering an unusual, steady increase, jumping from 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit per minute to 5.5 degrees per minute. The temperature recorded by brake line temperature sensor A continued increasing until loss of signal.

Twenty-four seconds later, at 8:54:10 a.m., brake line temperature sensor B began showing an unusual increase as Columbia passed above the Toiyabe National Forest. Ten seconds after that, telemetry shows the shuttle's wing flaps, or elevons, began moving in response to the ship's flight control system to counteract increasing aerodynamic drag on the left side of the shuttle.

Just two seconds later, at 8:54:22 a.m., as Columbia neared the border of Nevada, two temperature sensors mounted on the left side of the shuttle's fuselage above the left wing began experiencing an unusual temperature rise. One went from the normal 1-degree per minute increase to 7.6 degrees per minute while the other, located slightly aft, showed a rise to 5.5 degrees per minute.

After two more anomalous temperature readings while Columbia was streaking across Nevada, telemetry indicates increasing aerodynamic drag at 8:55:21 a.m. By this point, the shuttle had fallen to an altitude of 224,002 feet but its velocity was still a blistering 21.9 times the speed of sound.

The end was just five minutes away.

Streaking across Arizona, a flurry of readings painted an ever-worsening picture of problems in the shuttle's left wing. Additional landing gear sensors recorded fast jumps in temperature, a sensor on the underside of the left wing dropped off line followed a few seconds later by a sensor on the upper side of the wing, both presumably due to wiring damage elsewhere.

At 8:56:30 a.m., as Columbia descended through 219,820 feet, the flight control system began the first of four planned "roll reversals," or banks, to bleed off energy, routine maneuvers to help a returning shuttle shed velocity. The first roll reversal was completed at 8:56:55 a.m.

Just northwest of Albuquerque, telemetry registered a "bit flip," or an anomalous reading, at 8:57:19 a.m. from a left hand outboard landing gear tire pressure sensor. Five seconds later, a second left outboard tire pressure sensor exhibited unusual readings.

Additional elevon trim motions were recorded at 8:57:35 a.m. as the shuttle crossed 216,062 feet above Interstate 40 at Mach 20.21. After additional telemetry hits, the data shows the start of "sharp" elevon trim motions around 8:58:03 a.m. The timing is approximate, but the flight control system is obviously struggling to maintain the shuttle in the proper orientation.

At 8:58:32 a.m., left main landing gear tire pressures and temperatures began dropping off line followed 14 seconds later by a decrease in the left inboard wheel temperature. At 8:58:39 a.m., Columbia's backup flight system computer issued an alarm calling the crew's attention to the loss of tire pressure telemetry.

"And, uh, Hou..." shuttle commander Rick Husband radioed. His transmission, however, was cutoff, presumably because the shuttle's antennas did not have a clean line of sight to NASA's communications satellite.

After additional readings from other sensors recording anomalous data, the backup flight system issues a final tire pressure alarm at 8:58:56 a.m. Ten seconds later, telemetry from a "downlock" sensor indicates Columbia's left main landing gear had deployed. A nearby "uplock" sensor, however, showed no change and flight controllers believe the gear remain stowed through loss of signal.

"Flight data including gear position indicators and drag information does not support the scenario of an early deployment of the left gear," NASA said in a statement.

By this point in the timeline, the aerodynamic drag was increasing at a rapid rate because of the deterioration of the left wing.

Kling suddenly tells Cain: "We just lost tire pressure on the left outboard and left inboard, both tires."

"And Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your last," astronaut Charles Hobaugh radioes the crew from Houston.

Cain: "Is it instrumentation, MMACS?"

Kling: "Those are also off-scale low."

Husband then makes what turns out to be his final attempt to contact Houston around 8:59:28 a.m.:

"Roger, uh, buh..." Husband began around 8:59:28 a.m. But this last transmission from the shuttle was cut off. Seconds later, at 8:59:30 a.m., two of Columbia's right-firing yaw jets ignite to assist the elevons in keeping the shuttle on course. One second after that, data shows the elevons sweeping through their largest deflections yet. The left elevon moved up 8.11 degrees.

One second after that, all data was lost. At that point, the shuttle was roughly 200,767 feet up and traveling at Mach 18.16 northeast of Abilene, Texas.

Just a minute or so after this loss of signal, time-stamped video shot by the crew of an Apache helicopter showed the tracks of multiple pieces of flaming debris arcing across the Texas sky.

"Columbia out of communications at present with mission control as it continues its course toward Florida," NASA commentator James Hartsfield said at 9:01 a.m. Two minutes later he said, "Fourteen minutes to touchdown for Columbia at the Kennedy Space Center. Flight controllers are continuing to stand by to regain communications with the spacecraft..."

"Columbia, Houston, comm check," Hobaugh radioed at 9:03 a.m. And again seconds later, "Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check."

There was no reply.

Friday, February 7, 2003

Cosmic bolt probed in shuttle disaster
Scientists poring over 'infrasonic' sound waves

Sabin Russell, Chronicle Staff Writer

Federal scientists are looking for evidence that a bolt of electricity in the upper atmosphere might have doomed the space shuttle Columbia as it streaked over California, The Chronicle has learned.

Investigators are combing records from a network of ultra-sensitive instruments that might have detected a faint thunderclap in the upper atmosphere at the same time a photograph taken by a San Francisco astronomer appears to show a purplish bolt of lightning striking the shuttle.

Should the photo turn out to be an authentic image of an electrical event on Columbia, it would not only change the focus of the crash investigation, but it could open a door on a new realm of science.

"We're working hard on the data set. We have an obligation," said Alfred Bedard, a scientist at the federal Environmental Technology Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. He said the lab was providing the data to NASA but that it was too early to draw any conclusions from the sounds of the shuttle re-entry.

The lab has been listening to the sounds of ghostly electromagnetic phenomena in the upper atmosphere, dubbed sprites, blue jets and elves. For some time, scientists have speculated on whether these events could endanger airliners or returning spacecraft.

A study conducted 10 years ago for NASA found that there is a 1-in-100 chance that a space shuttle could fly through a sprite, although it concluded that the consequences of such an event were unclear. And in 1989, an upper- atmospheric electrical strike "shot down" a high-altitude NASA balloon 129,000 feet over Dallas.

NASA officials have said they are looking for a "missing link" to explain the shuttle's breakup that killed seven astronauts Saturday, and they are downplaying the theory that foam insulation falling from the shuttle's extra tank may have contributed to the shuttle's demise.

The little-known infrasound project at the Environmental Technology Laboratory operates a network of sophisticated electronic ears that can pick up subaudible thuds of waves crashing on either coast of the United States and the hiss of meteors and spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere thousands of miles away.

Sound waves of this nature are called "infrasonic" and are below the range of human hearing but travel unimpeded for extraordinary distances. Arrays of infrasonic sensors in the high Colorado plains east of Boulder recently have been looking for the crackle of the ghostly electromagnetic events in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

"We basically detect events at very long ranges," Bedard said. But he stressed that it was too early to draw any conclusions from sounds of the shuttle re-entry. Bedard said the acoustic sensors had previously detected the re-entry of a space shuttle from Northwest Canada to the Kennedy Space Center.

CELESTIAL THUNDERCLAP

Originally, it was thought that the electrical charges in the thin atmosphere 50 miles above Earth were too dispersed to create infrasound. But Los Alamos National Laboratories physicist Mark Stanley said that, on closer inspection, "we've seen very strong ionization in sprites" indicating that there were enough air molecules ionized to cause heating and an accompanying pulse -- a celestial thunderclap, as it were.

NASA administrators confirmed Thursday that the photograph, taken from Bernal Heights in San Francisco by an amateur astronomer, is being evaluated by Columbia crash investigators. However, Shuttle Program Manager Ron Dittemore told reporters at a Houston news briefing that right now NASA is trying only to verify "the validity" of the image.

The astronomer, who has asked that his name not be used, has declined to release the digital image to the media. But earlier in the week, he permitted Chronicle reporters to view the image and invited one to his home Tuesday evening, when the camera, and a disk of the image, were turned over to former shuttle astronaut Tammy Jernigan for transit to Houston.

The image was also e-mailed Tuesday evening to Ralph Roe Jr., chief engineer for the shuttle program at Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston.

Dittemore would not say during the news conference whether NASA has ruled in or ruled out one possible explanation for the photo: that the image could have been caused by jiggling of the camera. It was a Nikon M-880 mounted on a tripod. The automatically timed exposure of four to six seconds was triggered by finger.

"We have to validate whether it is real," Dittemore said. "This particular one is no different from the others. . . . It has yet to be determined whether this is important to us or not."

SEEKING EVIDENCE

NASA officials have stressed the importance of photographic, video or debris evidence from the earliest moments of the shuttle's distress, which sensors indicate began at about 5:53 a.m. above California. That's when sensors in a wheel well blinked out, in the words of NASA investigators, "as if someone cut a wire."

That is also roughly the time during which the amateur photographer snapped his image of Columbia as it streaked across the sky north of San Francisco. A precise time may be mapped by matching the photo and the strange electrical signature to the crisp background field of stars.

Physicists have long jokingly referred to the lower reaches of the ionosphere -- which fluctuates in height around 40 miles -- as the "ignorosphere," due to the lack of understanding of this mysterious realm of rarefied air and charged electric particles.

The family of "transient" electrical effects occupy this part of the sky, including sprites, which leap from the ionosphere to the tops of thunderheads, and blue jets, which leap from thunderhead anvils to the ionosphere.

Streamers of static electricity can travel these realms at speeds 100 times that of ground lightning, or 20 million miles an hour.

Ten years ago, Walter Lyons, a consultant with FMA Research Inc. in Fort Collins, Colo., conducted a study of sprite danger for NASA. "We concluded that there is about 1 chance in 100 that a shuttle could fly through a sprite. What impact, we didn't know for certain. It didn't appear at this time that the energy would be enough to cause problems."

But Lyons conceded that the "ignorosphere" is a mysterious place that has yielded startling surprises. "Since then, with research on electrical streamers, the discovery of blue jets, the doubt has gone up," he said.

"There are other things up there that we probably don't know about," Lyons said. "Every time we look in that part of the atmosphere, we find something totally new."

LACK OF RESEARCH FUNDING

But the field is dominated by a small club of electrophysicists who have seen their money for research dry up. Ironically, an experiment of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, aboard the doomed Columbia, was among the last fully funded work conducted on sprites. Lyons, considered to be one of the leading authorities, said he played a role in the design of the experiment.

To date, sprites have required the presence of a significant electrical storm on the ground. As the shuttle passed over Northern California, there were some heavy rain showers in the far north of the state, but none of the wild weather normally associated with sprites.

Hearing a description of the purplish, luminous corkscrew in the San Francisco photograph, Lyons said, "This was not a sprite event . but maybe it is another electrical phenomenon we don't know about."

Whether or not an electrical discharge might be involved in the demise of Columbia, there is precedent for an event like this.

Scientists have observed interaction between a blue jet and a meteor. And in December 1999, Los Alamos National Laboratories researcher David Suszcynsky and colleagues, including Lyons, published an account of a meteor that apparently triggered a sprite. Their account is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

"It was a singular observation that had us all scratching our heads," said Lyons. In the strange world of sprite and elf research, scientists have documented one event in which some sort of high atmospheric event "shot down" a high-altitude balloon over Dallas.

On June 5, 1989, before the first sprite was ever photographed, a NASA balloon carrying a heavy pack of instruments suffered "an un-commanded payload release" at 129,000 feet, according to Lyons. It landed in an angry Dallas resident's front yard.

Investigators found scorch marks on the debris and considered it one of the first bits of solid evidence that sprites exist. As a result of the accident, NASA no longer flies balloons over thunderstorms.

Ironically, the balloon was launched from a NASA facility in Palestine, Texas, one of the towns where debris from the space shuttle Columbia fell Saturday.

Space Shuttle

Shuttle sensor found in Arkansas

02/06/2003

By CARYN ROUSSEAU / Associated Press Writer

LITTLE ROCK -- A state emergency official says a sensor from the space shuttle Columbia has been found in northwestern Arkansas.

The sensor was the first piece of shuttle debris found in the state since the spacecraft disintegrated Saturday over eastern Texas, killing all seven crewmembers aboard.

"It's a clear ball about the size of a ping pong ball," Jennifer Gordon, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, said Wednesday. "It says 'U.S. Space and Rocket Center' on it. It's got some little tiny batteries inside it and some circuitry."

Gordon said the debris was found just north of Natural Dam, about 130 miles northwest of Little Rock. Most of the debris has been found in Texas and Louisiana, but officials also are searching Arizona and California.

Gordon said the Crawford County emergency management coordinator has the piece and was waiting for directions from NASA officials on what to do with it.

Lt. Mike Swaim of the Crawford County Sheriff's Office said the office received a call Tuesday afternoon from a woman in the Natural Dam area who told them she had found a small plastic ball in her yard bearing the words "U.S. Space and Rocket Center."

Gordon warned that if any other Arkansans find debris they should call local authorities immediately because it may contain hazardous material.

More than 12,000 pieces of debris from the shuttle have been gathered. In Texas alone, officials have identified 38 counties with debris, while pieces have turned up in two dozen Louisiana parishes.

"The scale makes it unprecedented," said Dave Bary, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, which is overseeing the collection of debris. "The debris field is so large covering so many counties I can't think of anything historically that would compare to this."

The shuttle was composed of about 2 million parts, many of which shattered into pieces as small as a nickel.

CATASTROPHE IN THE SKY
NASA probes 'electric zap' mystery photo
Former astronaut wowed by image snapped by California astronomer

Posted: February 5, 2003
5:22 a.m. Eastern

By Joe Kovacs
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

"Wow."

That was astronaut Tammy Jernigan's stunned reaction last night when she viewed a photo of what appears to be space shuttle Columbia getting zapped by a purplish electrical bolt shortly before it disintegrated Saturday morning.

Former astronaut Tammy Jernigan

"It certainly appears very anomalous," Jernigan told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We sure will be very interested in taking a very hard look at this."

The photo was one of five captured by an amateur astronomer in San Francisco who routinely snaps pictures of shuttles when they pass over the Bay area.

The pictures were taken just seven minutes before Columbia's fatal demise.

The Chronicle reports that top investigators of the disaster are now analyzing the startling photograph to try to solve the mystery.

The photographer continues to request his name be withheld, adding he would not release the image publicly until NASA has a chance to study it.

"[The photos] clearly record an electrical discharge like a lightning bolt flashing past, and I was snapping the pictures almost exactly ... when the Columbia may have begun breaking up during re-entry," the photographer originally told the paper Saturday night.

Late yesterday, the space agency sent Jernigan – a former shuttle flyer and now manager at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories – to the astronomer's home to view the image, and have the Nikon camera brought to Houston today.

It was slated to be flown to the Johnson Space Center by a NASA T-38 jet this morning.

Jernigan reportedly asked the astronomer about the f-stop setting on his lens, and how long he kept the shutter open – apparently some four to six seconds. A tripod was used to steady the camera, and the shutter was triggered manually.

"In the critical shot," states the Chronicle, "a glowing purple rope of light corkscrews down toward the plasma trail, appears to pass behind it, then cuts sharply toward it from below. As it merges with the plasma trail, the streak itself brightens for a distance, then fades."

"I couldn't see the discharge with my own eyes, but it showed up clear and bright on the film when I developed it," the photographer previously said. "But I'm not going to speculate about what it might be."

David Perlman, science editor for the Chronicle, called the photos "indeed puzzling."

"They show a bright scraggly flash of orange light, tinged with pale purple, and shaped somewhat like a deformed L," he wrote.

Space shuttle Columbia's rollout to the launchpad (NASA photo)

Jernigan no longer works for NASA, though she's a veteran of five shuttle missions in the 1990s. Ironically, on her final flight, the orbiter's pilot was Rick Husband, who was at the helm at 9 a.m. EST Saturday when Columbia broke apart during re-entry into the atmosphere.

"He was one of the finest people I could ever hope to know," Jernigan said.

According to her NASA biography, Jernigan graduated from Stanford in 1981 with a bachelor's degree in physics. She went on to earn master's degrees in engineering science and astronomy from Stanford and UC-Berkeley respectively. She also holds a doctorate in space physics and astronomy from Rice University.

She's spent over 63 days above the Earth, completing 1,000 orbits, and having walked in space for nearly eight hours during her final mission aboard shuttle Discovery in 1999.

Before flying on shuttles, she was a research scientist in the theoretical studies branch of NASA Ames Research Center, working on the study of bipolar outflows in the region of star formations, gamma ray bursters and shock-wave phenomena in the interstellar medium.

Regarding the Columbia disaster, the space agency is additionally investigating reports of possible remnants found in the West, including California and Arizona.

"Debris early in the flight path would be critical because that material would obviously be near the start of the events," said Michael Kostelnik, a NASA spaceflight office deputy.

Previous story:

Bright flashes photographed near shuttle

Joe Kovacs is executive news editor for WorldNetDaily.com.

Shuttle nose cone found

'In pretty good shape,' searchers say

Tuesday, February 4, 2003 Posted: 1:12 AM EST (0612 GMT)

HEMPHILL, Texas (CNN) -- A large piece of the space shuttle Columbia's nose cone was found Monday in a field in Sabine County, Texas, officials said Monday night.

The nose was found off a main road just outside of Hemphill, Sabine County Sheriff Tom Maddox said.

"They said it was in pretty good shape," one federal official said.

The nose cone's discovery was the latest major piece to come to light as searchers continued probing a sprawling area Monday in an effort to reassemble the events leading up to Columbia's destruction Saturday morning.

In Nacogdoches, Texas, where more than 1,200 pieces had been found by Monday, searchers discovered a 6- to 7-foot-long section of the Columbia's cabin, said Nacogdoches County Thomas Kerrs. Local officers also were looking into the possible discovery of more human remains, Kerrs said.

"We have received approximately six more unconfirmed reports of sites that may contain human remains," Kerrs said. "We are in the process of trying to investigate those sites now. They still remain a top priority."

Human remains had previously been found in other locations, said Bob Cabana, director of flight crew operations at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. A former astronaut, Cabana said the discoveries took an emotional toll.

"Yesterday was probably the hardest day of my life," he said.

FBI evidence response teams from Houston, Dallas, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana, are handling the recovery of the remains.

Israel is sending a military Rabbinate representative to ensure that if remains are found of the country's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, they are treated according to Jewish tradition and returned to Israel for burial, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported.

The Columbia's massive debris field grew even larger Monday as NASA officials confirmed that pieces of the shuttle were being found farther west than expected. (List of debris)

Michael Kostelnik, NASA deputy associate administrator, said a second collection site was being established at Carswell Air Force Base near Fort Worth, Texas, to assist investigators in that area.

The other collection site is at Barksdale AFB in northeast Louisiana near Shreveport, chosen for its proximity to the debris field in east Texas. Human remains are being taken there for identification.

Experts estimated Columbia broke up nearly 40 miles above Earth, meaning the debris might be scattered as far west as Arizona.

"We want to get every last shred of evidence -- whether it be documentation, whether it be witness statements, whether it be physical evidence that may have fallen to the ground -- and put that into the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that we will start to assemble so we can identify the root cause," said Bill Readdy, NASA's associate administrator of space flight.

Hundreds of investigators and volunteers fanned out over Texas and Louisiana searching a debris field of 28,000 square miles. Teams on horseback and in four-wheel drive vehicles searched remote and heavily wooded areas. (Map)

The search region in Texas extends from Graceland County in the north to Jefferson County in the south and from Eastland County in the west to Sabine and Orange counties in the east.

Investigators used global positioning satellites to create maps of the debris field and to mark spots where debris had been located.

At the huge Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Sabine River, which forms part of the Texas-Louisiana border, search teams scoured the water where witnesses reported seeing a piece of debris the size of a compact car go in.

The reservoir is used for drinking water, and after testing the water for contaminants, state officials assured residents it is safe.

Other shuttle parts were reported in western Louisiana near the Texas border.

Several school districts in Texas were closed Monday while investigators searched the campuses for debris.

Investigators are worried some pieces might never be found, a concern because the shuttle fragments might be toxic and because NASA wants as many pieces recovered as possible to help determine what caused the disaster. (Why debris might be toxic)

Despite repeated warnings of the potential toxicity, some townspeople were driving shuttle pieces into town and delivering them to authorities, said Sue Kennedy, Nacogdoches County emergency management chief.

Kerss also repeated warnings that some of the debris may contain explosive materials. Officials have said that areas such as the shuttle's cabin door and parachute deployment areas were rigged to be operated by explosive systems.

Photos: Mystery flashes spotted near shuttle
Astronomer captures 'electrical phenomena' near Columbia's track

Posted: February 2, 2003
8:05 p.m. Eastern
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

An astronomer who regularly photographs space shuttles when they pass over the San Francisco Bay area has captured five "strange and provocative images" of Columbia as it was re-entering the atmosphere.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports the images "appear to be bright electrical phenomena flashing around the track of the shuttle's passage."

"They clearly record an electrical discharge like a lightning bolt flashing past, and I was snapping the pictures almost exactly ... when the Columbia may have begun breaking up during re-entry," the photographer, who asked not to be identified, told the Chronicle.

The photos were snapped with a Nikon camera using a tripod.

Though the space scientist is not making the pictures public immediately, he invited the newspaper to view the images on his home computer this weekend.

David Perlman, science editor for the Chronicle, calls the photos "indeed puzzling."

"They show a bright scraggly flash of orange light, tinged with pale purple, and shaped somewhat like a deformed L," Perlman writes. "The flash appears to cross the Columbia's dim [white trail formed in the wake of the craft], and at that precise point, the [white trail] abruptly brightens and appears thicker and somewhat twisted as if it were wobbling."

"I couldn't see the discharge with my own eyes, but it showed up clear and bright on the film when I developed it," the photographer said. "But I'm not going to speculate about what it might be."

Meanwhile, an Australian astronomer working in California says he saw what could be tiles falling off the orbiter as it flew over the Golden State.

"After the first few flashes I thought to myself that I knew the shuttle lost tiles as it re-entered and quite possibly that was what was going on," Anthony Beasley told ABC News.

Beasley was north of Los Angeles when he made his report, indicating the shuttle possibly began to disintegrate above California.

If Beasley is correct, it indicates the shuttle began to disintegrate on the West Coast above California.

The Australian reported how the astronomer witnessed "a couple of flashes" and "things clearly trailing" Columbia.

"I think that after the particularly bright event I started to wonder whether or not things were happening how they should," Beasley said.

Space experts said tiles falling off the shuttle would be too small to be detected by NASA radar.

"It leads in the direction that tile loss or some type of structural loss like that was likely to be a cause," former shuttle astronaut Norm Thagard told ABC. "But it still doesn't rule out other possibilities."

NBC 4

California Photographer, Astronomer See Shuttle Re-Entry

Astronomer Thought Shuttle Might Be Losing Tiles

UPDATED: 4:02 p.m. PST February 2, 2003

LOS ANGELES -- A Southern California photographer took one of the last photos of the space shuttle Columbia before it broke apart.

Gene Blevins took shots of Columbia crossing California before dawn from a Caltech observatory hundreds of miles north of Los Angeles.

Blevins got up at 4 a.m. Saturday for the shuttle's anticipated flyover at 6 a.m. between the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains. He said it was the first time in eight years that a space shuttle with a Florida landing would pass over California, providing a special opportunity for photographs.

As Columbia came into view some 47 miles above him, Blevins began taking a series of shots and noticed something wrong.

He said he saw little red pieces breaking away, then a big red flare coming underneath.

The picture was sent to the Associated Press and distributed to newspapers around the country.

Those who were among the first to see the space shuttle Columbia appear to be in trouble were watching from Eastern California as it began trailing pieces of fiery debris on its approach to a scheduled landing in Florida.

California Institute of Technology astronomer Anthony Beasley said just before dawn Saturday he was observed the shuttle's re-entry from outside his home in Bishop.

"As it tracked from west to east over the Owens Valley it was leaving a bright trail.  As it actually moved over the valley, there were a couple of flashes. ... Then we could see there were things clearly trailing the orbiter, " Beasley said.

Although Beasley said he had never witnessed a shuttle re-entry previously he immediately thought Columbia might be losing some of some of the heat-resistant tiles that protect it during the fiery re-entry.

He later compared what he saw with two news photographers who had arranged to photograph the re-entry through a Caltech telescope at Bishop. They also had seen what Beasley termed "the bright event" with the shuttle being trailed by flashes of light that quickly disappeared.

Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not
be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Posted on 02/02/2003 3:23:34 AM PST by MeekOneGOP

'It just kept rolling and thundering'

For Texans, hearing was believing that something wasn't quite right

02/02/2003

By MICHAEL GRANBERRY / The Dallas Morning News

Vaudie Dowdy of Tyler gazed out her big picture window, using a quiet Saturday morning to think and pray.

Ken Foster sat at his kitchen table in Rowlett, reading newspaper stories about war and terrorism.

Gary Hunziker and his wife stepped onto their patio in Plano to watch the space shuttle Columbia fly overhead.

Suddenly, an explosion rattled windows and shook rooftops across North Texas and East Texas. To people waking to the new day, it was the sound of the sky falling. To the controller at NASA's mission control, it was a grim "contingency." And for all Americans facing fears of war and terrorism, the instinctive reaction was, "What next?"

"I have not heard a noise like that since the New London school blew up," said Mrs. Dowdy, 82, referring to a natural gas explosion that killed hundreds of students and teachers in East Texas in 1937. "A great tragedy," she knew, had once again struck Texas - and the rest of the nation.

Residents across East and North Texas shared her fear, anxiety and grief as Saturday morning's calm was shattered by the explosion of the shuttle. In an era of terrorism, and with the possibility of war approaching, many are conditioned to expect the worst.

"It was a big shock," said Mr. Foster, 40, a banker. "It sounded like something fell on the house. I said, 'Oh, hell - what is that!' It was a 'BOOM!' - like none I've ever heard before. ... After Sept. 11, with anything unusual like this, I immediately think we're being attacked. And because of the cautious nature I've developed, it's made me somewhat unnerved when anything like this occurs. I feel much more anxiety about things like this, if only because they occur in a post-Sept. 11 context."

'The house shook'

In Carrollton, John Ferolito, 60, prepared for a bike ride with a cycling club. The boom sounded overhead.

"The house shook, and the windows rattled," he said. "I ran outside and looked in the alley and the yard. I thought, 'Maybe the shuttle set off a sonic boom.'... I turned on the news and heard they'd lost contact with the shuttle. I got that the same feeling I did in 1986 [with the Challenger explosion] - that things weren't right."

In Plano, Mr. Hunziker, 49, and his wife went outside to view the shuttle. "At that point, the shuttle was almost due south and had a very substantial vapor trail," he said. "I had some field glasses... The shuttle was flying east. I had a devil of a time finding it in the binoculars. When I did, it was well east of us. I said to my wife, 'Look, chase jets have already intercepted it.' It looked like two bright spots immediately to the side and behind the shuttle. Twenty minutes later, I turned on the TV and realized that what I saw wasn't chase jets at all - but debris from an explosion."

In East Plano, a fire of unknown origin started on the roof of a condominium at Park Boulevard and Ridgewood Drive. It drew spasms of panicked speculation. Frantic residents blamed the fire on debris raining down from the shuttle, saying no other cause was possible. Officials were still investigating the fire Saturday night and would not confirm the cause.

In Garland, Marcella Seeley, 47, a print production manager, said the blast shook her from a sound sleep.

"It sounded like something had crashed into the window or the roof," she said. "So I went outside, thinking some kids were playing football and had hit my house with it. It was that loud. A few minutes later, I turned on the TV and said, 'Oh, my God!' "

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison was walking in her North Dallas neighborhood.

"And I heard this boom," she said. "I thought it was a sonic boom, which I mentioned to my friend, with whom I was walking. It was so pronounced, I thought it must be an F-16 training overhead. But then I came home and turned on the television and found out quickly what it really was."

Within minutes, the senator telephoned NASA officials and offered them the use of her Dallas office as an emergency command post.

At White Rock Lake, Murray Forsvall, a former journalist, said he and about 150 runners looked up from their morning jog to see "a wide vapor trail. It was like a 50-yard line seat. We thought it was an airplane. But someone said, 'It has a tail.' We continued to watch, and just seconds later it all broke up into smaller pieces."

In East Texas, Larry Weisinger, 52, a Chandler pipe welder, was fishing on Lake Palestine. He and his brother were lazily adrift on the calm waters, hoping to hook a striped bass. "We were just sittin' there in our boat," he said, "when all of a sudden, I said, 'What was that sound?' It just kept rolling and thundering. I said, 'It sounds like Texas Eastman just blew up," referring to the Eastman Kodak chemical plant in Longview.

Near Red Springs, Danny McDaniel, 54, an ex-Marine and barbecue cook, said "a big boom" sent his dog scrambling for cover. "We didn't know what was going on. The whole house shook. A friend of mine said it sounded just like an earthquake." His neighbors said their dogs and livestock behaved strangely even before the blast occurred.

Sound and debris

In Canton, Kelli Clower, 25, a reimbursement manager at Terrell State Hospital, was changing her 2-year-old son's diaper when her home shook violently. "I thought a tree had hit the house," she said. "We have big pine trees, and I thought a limb from one of the pine trees had fallen and hit the house. And then my grandmother from Arkansas called, telling me about the space shuttle."

In Rockett, near Waxahachie, Mary Sinyard lay on the couch of her mobile home, chatting on the phone with her daughter. She looked out the window. She saw fiery debris streak across the sky, then appear to stop in mid-air and fall, until it disappeared from sight.

For a minute or so, the boom shook the mobile home and rattled its windows.

In Center, about 20 miles northeast of Nacogdoches, environmental consultant Trey Rushing, 51, of Austin had just bought some work gloves at a discount store to fend off the chill as he headed toward a demolition job.

"I just happened to come out of the Wal-Mart and look up in the sky, and there was this bright object going from the north to the south. It was weird," he said. The object looked "like a brilliant, blue-white flare," he said.

He said he thought he was witnessing an F-16 fighter pilot in the midst of war-training exercises, dropping "chaff" to evade being hit by enemy rockets.

But the trail from the shuttle was too low, and the falling objects were burning too brightly for it to be a jet, he said.

Reports of falling debris reached a crescendo in Nacogdoches, where Eirial Stansell was working at his hair salon.

"We were in the office doing payroll for the day," he said, "and all of a sudden this rumbling started. It was like an earthquake. I looked up at the clock, and the building shook for 45 seconds."

Now there's a 4- to 5-foot piece of debris in the parking lot behind the salon.

Being awakened

Kim Hedtke, a student at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, said the explosion woke her up.

"It sounded like thunder at first, but then it just kept getting louder and then the walls started shaking," she said. "And I really didn't know what was going on. My first thought was, this was an earthquake, but, you know, this is Texas."

Nacogdoches resident Jim Garrett said he felt a prolonged tremor shortly after 8 a.m. while reading the newspaper.

"This old, two-story farmhouse, it rattled and rolled," said Mr. Garrett, 50, a lawyer. "My first response was, 'Dang, that jet is flying low.' And then the intensity slackened, but it continued for what seemed like a long time - a lot longer than you'd feel a jet passing over."

For Susan Rushing, who lives in a one-story frame house north of Nacogdoches, the explosion "felt like the washing machine was on spin, and off-balance, for a long time - but a lot louder."

Her daughter Katie, 11, and six other girls were sleeping over for a slumber party. They were jolted from bed. "The house started shaking, and there was this loud rumble," said Ms. Rushing, 50.

"The windows rattled, the glassware clinked, the cabinets slammed and the lamps swayed," she said.

"It lasted for about a minute and a half. One of the girls and I ran out and tried to see what was happening. It was like the longest sonic boom I've heard. But you just didn't know what.

"And then when you later found out, it was just so sad."

Staff writers Teresa Gubbins, Linda Stewart Ball, Jennifer Emily and Robert Garrett contributed to this report.

STS-107 Columbia landing journal

4:00 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore, in an emotional briefing with his top technical deputies, says point blank that NASA does not know what happened yet.

He says the agency needs to reconstruct as much of the vehicle as possible. He thanks the public for its aid in finding debris, which is spread over a large area.

The shuttle managers are saying they did not believe at the time that the damaged wing tile was a serious enough issue to pose a threat during re-entry. He says, "We don't believe at this point that the impact of that debris on our tile was our problem. Now we have the events of this morning, and we are going to go back and see if there is a connection. Is that the smoking gun?"

He says, "That's just something we need to go look at."

But he has pointed out repeatedly that is just one of many things that need to be looked at.

2:05 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

"The Columbia is lost," President Bush is telling the nation.

1:32 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

NASA says it's clear there are no survivors. Associate Administrator Bill Readdy, a former astronaut himself: "Sadly, I think from the video that is available, it does not appear there were any survivors."

1:28 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Administrator O'Keefe is honoring the crew now.

"They dedicated their lives to pushing the scientific challenges for all of us here on Earth. They dedicated themselves to that objective and did it with a happy heart and great enthusiasm. The loss of this valiant crew is something we will never get over."

1:26 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Administrator O'Keefe says a full technical briefing will come at 3 p.m. EST at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. He is advising people in Texas and Louisiana who believe they have spotted debris to stay away from it but report it to authorities.

1:23 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe says this is a tragic day for NASA. President Bush has talked with the astronauts' family members. He and O'Keefe have promised them an immediate and complete investigation of what happened and the quickest possible recovery of their loved ones' remains.

He downplayed any speculation of terrorism.

"We have no indication that the mishap was caused by anyone or anything on the ground."

An independent team is being assembled immediately to investigate.

1:19 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Still no administrator, but it is being said here that he might still be with family members of the crew.

12:59 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Howard McCurdy, professor of public affairs at American University in Washington, who has written several books about NASA management, history and space policy, says any speculation about terrorism is far-fetched.

"It's certainly something you think of, but it would be highly unlikely to occur."

Something mechanical with the vehicle, or the general risks of spaceflight and re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, are much more likely, he said.

However, he was most focused on the immediate shock to America's space program - and most importantly the family members of the seven crew members aboard the ship.

"It's just tragic. The most immediate concern is the astronauts and their families."

12:52 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe is only going to issue a statement at his 1 p.m. EST news conference here at Kennedy Space Center, where he had come to watch the landing. He will not take questions at this time.

12:26 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Dr. David Wormflash, who works with the National Astrobiology Institute, worked with student researchers from Israel and Palestine on a bacteria experiment aboard shuttle Columbia. He had not called the Israeli student, Yuval Landau, who is back home, because today is the Sabbath.

“I didn’t want to ruin his Sabbath, especially with bad news.”

The experiment required post-flight analysis, but Wormflash was not interested in that in light of today's events. He says he'd met astronaut Ilan Ramon's wife the night before launch at a Cocoa Beach restaurant.

"She gave us little pins of the mission. She was so happy that night."

12:26 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

This was what entry flight director Leroy Cain had to say yesterday about the wing tile damage.

"The engineers and analysts took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever, and therefore we haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. And there's nothing that we need to do in that regard. So, nothing different. It will be nominal, standard trajectory."

"I believe that at this time, we can't say with great detail the degree of the damage, other than all the analyis suggests it would be very minor, in terms of the amount of tile that might actually be missing or had been removed, would be very minor. All of the analysis says that we have plenty of margin in those areas in that regard and that the impact could not have been from this particular material significant enough to take out any significant amount of tile. So I can't tell you inches by inches or depth, but I can tell you we think it's going to be very small."

Cain is talking about a tile damaged, perhaps by a piece of falling debris from the shuttle external tank. The tiles on the left wing are there to help protect the orbiter structure from the extreme heat when it goes through the hottest portions of the atmosphere. That is where the orbiter was located in the sky when it lost contact with NASA ground controllers.

Cain went on to assess the damage, in comments Friday, downplaying its potential impact on the orbiter’s re-entry. It’s important to note that he is talking about something that he nor anyone else on the ground could visually inspect to any detailed degree. It’s also important to note that NASA still has not given any indication that the wing tile damage has anything to do with what happened today.

12:18 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

There is a black scar in the ground being shown now on television that appears to be the smoking remnants of the shuttle Columbia from Anderson County, Texas.

Radar images show a path of extremely fast-moving particles over Dallas-Ft. Worth and moving, over time, into Louisiana. The radar images indicate a debris field that stretches across the two states and perhaps into the Gulf of Mexico. The radar shows debris streaks all the way to the region near Shreveport.

12:12 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Brevard County has activated a 211 help line for those who feel they need crisis counselors. Dial 2-1-1 here locally if you need to find help for any reason at all related to today's events.

12:09 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

NASA has issued the following statement:

"A Space Shuttle contingency has been declared in Mission Control, Houston, as a result of the loss of communication with the Space Shuttle Columbia at approximately 9 a.m. EST Saturday as it descended toward a landing at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla. It was scheduled to touchdown at 9:16 a.m. EST.

Communication and tracking of the shuttle was lost at 9 a.m. EST at an altitude of about 203,000 feet in the area above north central Texas. At the time communications were lost. The shuttle was traveling approximately 12,500 miles per hour (Mach 18). No communication and tracking information were received in Mission Control after that time.

Search and rescue teams in the Dallas-Fort Worth and in portions of East Texas have been alerted. Any debris that is located in the area that may be related to the Space Shuttle contingency should be avoided and may be hazardous as a result of toxic propellants used aboard the shuttle. The location of any possible debris should immediately be reported to local authorities.

Flight controllers in Mission Control have secured all information, notes and data pertinent to today's entry and landing by Space Shuttle Columbia and continue to methodically proceed through contingency plans.

More information will be released as it becomes available."

That was the end of the statement.

12:06 p.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Twenty five Kennedy Space Center staff are on their way to Texas to assist with the search and rescue. Also, the Defense Department has dispatched a team of people who specialize in space shuttle support.

11:52 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Senator Bill Nelson of Florida is on his way to the space center and expected to be here between 1:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe is now planning to make a statement here at KSC at 1 p.m. EST. NASA continues saying nothing from mission control except that a "contingency" has been called. The agency has said it lost contact with Columbia and search and rescue teams are dispatched along the shuttle's expected route over Texas. They are "actively working" to locate the debris from the accident.

11:35 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

NASA has delayed its planned news conference. We're hearing that President Bush will speak first and NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe will defer to him first, but it's unclear whether that's the reason for the delay. We're also unclear on whether - even though a news conference is scheduled - if we are going to get any information beyond what we've been able to witness with our own eyes and report from the mission control communications with the orbiter earlier today.

11:20 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

An eye witness at an Air Force base near Fort Worth says he saw five pieces of debris flying parallel to Columbia over the far west side of Fort Worth. He says, from his vantage point, the size of the debris field indicates that the shuttle had broken up long before it reached that point.

11:13 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Boeing spokesman Brian Nelson says that the accident is now being investigated by NASA. Boeing is providing assistance in securing and protecting all of the data from the re-entry, but "NASA is the lead on this."

11:10 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

This accident is going to be harder to investigate because all of the evidence is going to have burned up in the atmosphere. NASA lost telemetry data and voice communication, limiting the kind of information that might be available about what was going on in the shuttle systems during the moments before the ship's transmissions disappeared.

11:01 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

NASA has just lowered the flag in front of the turn basin to half staff.

10:55 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

NASA has just ordered its contractor to close the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex.

10:49 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Weather officer John Madura says that at 200,000 feet, where the orbiter was believed to be when it was destroyed, the shuttle was in the mesosphere. That's a very predictable portion of the atmosphere, at least in terms of weather. There was nothing there to interfere with an orbiter's normal flight pattern except for one thing - it's very hot there. At the height the shuttle was at that time, it was just leaving the plasmosphere, which is the hottest portion of the atmosphere.

10:38 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The destruction of Columbia raises a slew of practical issues as well. The current station crew was scheduled to return to Earth via a space shuttle orbiter, but it's unlikely that an orbiter will be flying any time for the remainder of this year if the post-Challenger practices are any indication. That crew's options include return via an emergency pod built by the Russians. That Soyuz spacecraft is docked at the station at all times for emergency escape. The question is whether they would use that escape pod now and come home in the very near future.

As things stand now, with the United States' remaining three orbiters certainly grounded for the forseeable future, Soyuz is the only craft available to ferry astronauts back and forth to station.

10:32 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

NASA's contingency board is meeting at this moment to discuss what happened. Johnson Space Center will release a statement shortly, we are being told. And a press conference should follow. Administrator Sean O'Keefe was on site today for the landing but is not clear yet whether the press will get access to him to discuss the incident.

10:28 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The wires are reporting that President Bush is being briefed and that top Pentagon and Homeland Security officials are talking about possible terrorist attacks and other issues - although it is absolutely critical to note there is no indication that is what happened today despite the presence on board of Israel's first astronaut.

10:20 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The protective tiles used to shield the orbiter from the heat of re-entry were new to the space shuttle vehicle (of which Columbia was the first to fly). Thousands of the pieces are used to protect the outside of the orbiter, made from a variety of high-tech materials. Some look and feel like little ceramic blocks. Other protective tiles are more of a fabric material.

NASA says there are approximately 24,300 tiles and 2,300 flexible insulation blankets on the outside of each orbiter.

NASA says the orbiter's nose cone, including the chin panel, and the leading edge of its wings are the hottest areas during re-entry. When maximum heating occurs about 20 minutes before touchdown, temperatures on these surfaces reach as high as 3,000 degrees F.

10:00 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

It's now been 1 hour since NASA last received data or voice communications from the shuttle.

9:59 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Witnesses in Texas are saying they heard an incredible roar and saw the white trail of Columbia as it was lost.

9:58 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

This new crisis comes just as Administrator Sean O'Keefe was getting kudos for apparently getting the agency's financial troubles back in order.

9:56 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The officials said yesterday that damage to the protective tiles on Columbia's left wing shouldn't affect the procedure for landing, Entry flight director Leroy Cain said yesterday when asked about the situation. "All of the analysis says we have plenty of margin in that regard," he said Friday. No information coming now about whether that's the issue here.

The damage was likely caused by foam that came off the shuttle's external tank during ascent, a Johnson Space Center spokesman said.

9:49 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

There was a minor problem when a piece of insulating foam from the external fuel tank fell from the shuttle during launch on January 16th, but NASA officials said at that time that they thought there was only minor damage to left wing tiles - the covering that protects the orbiter from extreme heat during the descent through the atmosphere at incredible speeds.

9:45 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

That is NASA's official confirmation that the shuttle and its crew are lost.

9:43 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

TV stations are reporting Columbia exploded over Texas with debris falling over Texas. Spokespeople here are not reporting any information. Video on television shows pieces of the orbiter are falling from the sky. There is no indication of casualties. NASA is now saying that debris is the shuttle.

9:41 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Communications were lost at 8 a.m. central time this morning on the way to a landing here at Kennedy Space Center. Apparently contrails were seen somewhere near Dallas. Any debris located near Dallas-Fort Worth area is potentially toxic or dangerous and people are being warned to stay away from anything they find in that area. Details are very sketchy here.

9:39 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

They've locked down Kennedy Space Center with security. No one is getting in or out of the base for the time being. NASA is going to issue a statement briefly but it's destined to be brief and without much detail because it is clear the mission controllers do not know precisely what happened. The descent into the atmosphere was going fine from all indications and then the normal running commentary from mission control in Houston became quiet as they had no information transmitted down from the orbiter. There was no body language or other indication from controllers that something was amiss. There still is not as they professionally continue efforts to gather every bit of data they can. The tone out here at KSC is absolute devastation as crews radio messages to one another about security, astronaut family support and other contingency plans.

9:34 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

There are long periods of silence between the updates from NASA. We're getting no information. Reporters are being hauled away from the landing facility. Assistance has been dispatched to the VIP area at the landing site to help with astronauts families. Controllers are being told to secure all information and data from the orbiter for the pending investigation of what went wrong today at about 200,000 feet above north central Texas.

9:32 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

A search and rescue team is being dispatched to Texas, where it is believed the orbiter broke up during descent. Very, very little is being said here about what has happened in part because officials appear not to know yet.

9:28 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Mission control is silent. There was never a sign of the orbiter here. There was brief discussion of an instrumentation problem aboard the orbiter just before communications was lost but no explanation. Then, Merritt Island tracking station did not pick up the orbiter's signal. It was believed last contacted over Texas.

9:20 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

NASA has lost communication with the orbiter and has no tracking data.

9:06 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Ten minutes from wheels down.

8:57 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Columbia is near the Arizona-New Mexico border moving at just over 14,000 miles per hour. Husband has taken the orbiter into the second of four banks, slowing the orbiter down.

8:56 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Twenty minutes to touchdown and no announcement yet of a runway change. The orbiter is flying over Nevada near Las Vegas.

8:55 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

VIP guests, including crew members' loved ones, have arrived at the Shuttle Landing Facility. Several members of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon's family are among them. The Israeli delegation, here for the mission of that country's first spacefarer, has been well guarded in all of their travels here on the Space Coast, both for launch and today's landing.

8:52 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Columbia's altitude is about 47 miles, moving at 16,400 miles per hour. Commander Husband has the shuttle in the first of a series of hard banks, which help to slow the orbiter for landing. Columbia is approaching the coast of California right now.

8:51 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

A decision to switch to Runway 15 is being discussed now. The shuttle is 3,450 miles from touchdown here at KSC.

8:46 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Exactly 30 minutes from landing and still no decision on which runway the shuttle will use. Discussions are ongoing. The orbiter is dropping into the atmosphere, moving at 17,000 miles per hour and 68 miles above Earth.

8:42 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The convoy has arrived at the landing facility to support the landing of Columbia. The orbiter will remain on the runway longer than normal today as crews unload the many science experiments on board.

The astronauts also are in for longer-than-normal physicals because they too were test subjects for many experiments on this flight. They will see family members who are in town for the landing, but the astronauts themselves will not be able to fly home to Houston until Sunday.

8:39 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Astronaut Kent Rominger and Educator-Astronaut Barbara Morgan are doing the weather reconnaissance here at Kennedy Space Center this morning. They are flying in the shuttle training aircraft, making approaches to the runways to test the landing conditions and reporting back to Houston controllers. Morgan, by the way, is slated to fly on a shuttle mission scheduled to launch later this year.

8:36 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Columbia will cross the Florida panhandle, fly briefly over the Gulf of Mexico on a path that will take it over Orlando heading eastward toward the landing facility. This will be the 62nd landing of a shuttle at Kennedy. Winds are coming from the west at 5 knots, well within limits for a nominal landing.

8:34 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

It's breezy with a few clouds at the Shuttle Landing Facility. The convoy of landing support vehicles is on its way but yet to arrive. Security helicopters are now making passes over the runways and the roads near the SLF.

8:29 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Discussions are ongoing in Houston and here in Florida about which runway the shuttle will land on. Columbia is targeted for Runway 33 now, but there is discussion about a possible switch. Crews on the ground here on making preparations just in case that change is made. They'll be prepared for whatever decision is made by controllers in Houston and shuttle Commander Rick Husband.

8:24 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Columbia will cross the west coast above San Francisco Bay area in less than a half an hour, providing what NASA predicts will be a great view for people there this morning. It will remain visible to people in Las Vegas just before 9 a.m. EST as it continues crossing the southwestern United States, heading toward Florida.

8:22 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Columbia is beginning to move itself into the proper position for its first encounter with the atmosphere. The crew aboard is dumping the remaining fuel from its maneuvering system before it enters the atmosphere.

8:19 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The burn is complete and Columbia is beginning its descent to Earth. The orbiter is on course for a touchdown at Kennedy Space Center at 9:16 a.m. EST. Mission control in Houston has deemed the burn was perfectly executed. The shuttle's initial encounter with the atmosphere will occur in about 25 minutes above the Pacific Ocean, north of Hawaii.

8:16 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Commander Rick Husband has begun the two and a half minute burn of the shuttle's orbiter maneuvering systems to drop Columbia out of orbit. The shuttle was about 175 miles above Earth, over the Indian Ocean, when the burn began.

8:09 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

"Right now we are happy with the weather at KSC, and you are go for the burn," astronaut and ground communicator Charlie Hobaugh just told shuttle Commander Rick Husband. A decision as to which runway will be used is still pending.

8:05 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Chief astronaut Kent Rominger has been reporting mixed results from his flights in the shuttle training aircraft at both runways. Visibility is apparently better at runway 33. A final decision is pending on the deorbit burn, which would take place 10 minutes from now for the shuttle's first landing opportunity at Kennedy Space Center this morning.

7:50 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Forecasters are still keeping an eye on the fog at Kennedy Space Center, but the Columbia crew has been given a go-ahead for all deorbit burn preparations except the burn itself.

7:27 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The astronauts are taking their seats, preparing for a deorbit burn about 45 minutes from now. Weather is still under consideration. Upper-level winds could determine how the shuttle approaches Kennedy Space Center and whether it will land at runway 15 or 33. Fog is also a concern, but it is beginning to burn off.

7:12 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Mission controllers have told the crew to prepare for the first deorbit burn, although there are a couple of weather issues: visibility - though the rising sun may help burn off the fog - and strong and shifting upper-level winds. There's also a discussion of which runway to use.

6:58 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The shuttle is now a little more than an hour away from the planned deorbit burn for its first landing opportunity. Forecasters will evaluate whether fog, clouds and upper-level winds are a concern before giving the go-ahead.

6:08 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The orbiter's computers are configured with the "ops 3" software package for landing.

5:50 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

The payload bay doors are now closed and latched. The next step for Columbia is switching to the software package that will enable it to land.

5:38 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Columbia's astronauts have reconfigured the shuttle's cooling system and are closing the orbiter's payload bay doors. They shut the hatch to the Spacehab double research module in the payload bay around 2 a.m. EST, officially ending their scientific activities.

They have just received a weather briefing summarizing the prospects for landing. The second opportunity looks better because of lingering fog and clouds.

5:32 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

Mission controllers in Houston have given the astronauts aboard Columbia the go-ahead to close the payload bay doors in preparation for landing. The doors are kept open in orbit to assist in regulating the orbiter's temperature.

5:22 a.m. EST, Feb. 1, 2003

It's landing day! After a marathon 16-day mission, the astronauts aboard Columbia are making preparations for a scheduled 9:15 a.m. landing.

Fog is creeping through Kennedy Space Center this morning, and some of it has lifted into low clouds. John Madura, manager of KSC's weather office, said though there are patches of fog and stratus lingering, "we're confident it's going to burn off."

The question is, will enough of it have burned off by the time the deorbit burn decision must be made? The burn is scheduled to take place at 8:15 a.m. EST.

If the fog and clouds at that time make the forecasters at Houston's Spaceflight Meteorology Group uncomfortable, they may decide to wave off the first attempt. There's another opportunity for landing at 10:50 a.m.

"The weather will cooperate on the second opportunity," Madura said. Winds are not a concern and may, in fact, help blow off some of the fog. "The winds that we have will be primarily down the runway."

12:47 p.m. EST, Jan. 31, 2003

Apparent minor tile damage on Columbia's left wing shouldn't affect the procedure for landing, entry flight director Leroy Cain said at a midday briefing. "All of the analysis says we have plenty of margin in that regard," he said.

The damage was likely caused by foam that came off the shuttle's external tank during ascent, a Johnson Space Center spokesman said.

Cain echoed Spaceflight Meteorology Group's favorable forecast, saying winds would be blowing right down the runway.

The crew is wrapping up scientific activities and focusing on packing for the trip home. "It's far exceeded folks' expectations from a science standpoint," Cain said.

There will be a weather briefing around 4 a.m. EST Saturday. The payload bay doors will then be closed in preparation for the shuttle's deorbit burn, scheduled for 8:15 a.m. EST.

People in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the Gulf Coast can get a view of the orbiter as it swoops over the southern United States on the way to a 9:15 a.m. landing at Kennedy Space Center.

10:28 a.m. EST, Jan. 31, 2003

Dry air over Florida and winds coming from the right direction will combine to make good conditions for Columbia's landing Saturday morning.

The northerly breezes pose no threat of crosswinds, Kennedy Space Center spokesman George Diller said.

Forecasters no longer expect fog, and scattered clouds are in the forecast. Visibility should be 7 miles.

Runway 33 is planned for both of the KSC landing opportunities Saturday, now expected at 9:15.50 a.m. and 10:50.29 a.m.

Sunday and Monday also look good at KSC and at alternate landing site Edwards Air Force Base in California. Edwards will not be used on Saturday.

The shuttle crew has been doing communications checks with tracking stations this morning, including the one on Merritt Island, in preparation for landing. The astronauts test-fired steering jets and checked other systems as well.

They are wrapping up their scientific activities and packing up as they get ready to close out their 16-day mission.

3:52 p.m. EST, Jan. 29, 2003

The Spaceflight Meteorology Group in Houston says the weather for landing at Kennedy Space Center on Saturday morning looks promising. Edwards Air Force Base in California will not be used as an alternative landing site Saturday, a KSC spokesman said.

Broken clouds are expected at 25,000 feet, with scattered clouds at 3,500 feet. There will be light west-northwest winds, with 7-mile visibility - and a chance of 5-mile visibility in ground fog.

The shuttle can land in fog and has before, affording photographers unique photo opportunities as the orbiter's wings form patterns as they cut through the fog.

Some scientists are eagerly awaiting the return of their experiments and are traveling to Kennedy Space Center from around the country to pick them up when Columbia returns.

3:20 p.m. EST, Jan. 28, 2003

Space shuttle Columbia's first landing attempt is scheduled for Saturday morning, Feb. 1, at 9:15 a.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center. If the orbiter is waved off, its second try will be at 10:49 a.m. EST.

The National Weather Service office in Melbourne, Fla., is calling for partly cloudy skies on Saturday. Enough clouds, and the shuttle will not land.

If weather proves bad for Saturday, the shuttle can try again at 7:38 a.m. or 9:12 a.m. Sunday at Kennedy Space Center. It also has two landing opportunities at Edwards Air Force Base in California after the Florida attempts.

It can try again Monday at KSC at 7:34 a.m. or 9:09 a.m., or it could go for a landing at Edwards at 10:35 a.m. EST. Mission managers said Monday that the orbiter has enough resources to extend the mission by four days.

The shuttle has been involved in scientific research during a 16-day mission. It orbited the Earth during that time but did not visit the International Space Station. See more coverage on our mission page.

Feb 1, 2:17 PM
Texas hears loud noises
Associated Press

DALLAS -- Residents of north Texas heard "a big bang" Saturday about the time the space shuttle Columbia disappeared on its way to a landing at Cape Canaveral.

"It was like a car hitting the house or an explosion. It shook that much," said John Ferolito, 60, of Carrolton, north of Dallas.

NASA declared an emergency after losing communication with Columbia as the ship soared across Texas at an altitude of about 200,000 feet, while traveling at six times the speed of sound. The space agency said search and rescue teams in the Dallas-Fort Worth area were alerted.

Gary Hunziker in Plano said he saw the shuttle flying overhead. "I could see two bright objects flying off each side of it," he told The Associated Press. "I just assumed they were chase jets."

"I was getting read to go out and I heard a big bang and the windows shook in the house," Ferolito told The AP. "I was getting ready to go out and I heard a big bang and the windows shook in the house. I thought it was a sonic boom."

Louisiana State Police in Bossier City, 182 miles east of Dallas, got so many calls that one trooper had to be assigned just to answer the phone.

"One said he saw a plane breaking up over Shreveport. One said he saw a big ball of fire. One guy said his house had a blast that shook his house," state police Sgt. Steve Robinson said. That call was from DeSoto Parish, south of the parish where Bossier City is located.

"Back in the 1980s, a Russian satellite re-entered the atmosphere," Robinson said. "We got lots of calls about that. Turned out it went down a thousand miles from here."

NASA: Shuttle Lost Over Texas

All Seven Astronauts Believed to Be Dead

Combined Wire Reports

Saturday, February 1, 2003; 11:22 AM

 

Space shuttle Columbia apparently broke apart in flames as it streaked over Texas toward its scheduled landing Saturday morning. All seven astronauts, six Americans and an Israeli are believed to be dead.

NASA didn't immediately declare the crew dead; however, the U.S. flag next to its countdown clock was lowered to half-staff.

Officials in Washington said that there was no immediate indication of terrorism, and that President Bush was informed and awaiting more information from NASA.

NASA announced that search and rescue teams were being mobilized in Dallas and Fort Worth areas.

Columbia was at an altitude of 200,700 feet over north-central Texas at a 9 a.m., traveling at 12,500 mph when mission control lost contact and tracking data.

NASA warned that any debris found in the area should be avoided and could be hazardous. There were reports of debris seen falling.

Residents of north Texas heard "a big bang" Saturday about the time the space shuttle Columbia disappeared on its way to a landing at Cape Canaveral.

"It was like a car hitting the house or an explosion. It shook that much," said John Ferolito, 60, of Carrolton, north of Dallas.

Gary Hunziker in Plano said he saw the shuttle flying overhead. "I could see two bright objects flying off each side of it," he told The Associated Press. "I just assumed they were chase jets."

"I was getting read to go out and I heard a big bang and the windows shook in the house," Ferolito told The Associated Press. "I was getting ready to go out and I heard a big bang and the windows shook in the house. I thought it was a sonic boom."

Bob Multer of Palestine, Texas, told CNN he saw what looked like a high-flying jet and heard a noise.

"It would be very similar to a tornado, it was very loud and intense," Multer said. "It was loud enough and it was low enough that it shook the building."

In 42 years of human space flight, NASA has never lost a space crew during landing or the ride back to orbit. In 1986, space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff.

Security had been tight for the 16-day scientific research mission that included the first Israeli astronaut.

The astronauts had conducted more than 80 experiments on behalf of NASA and the European, Japanese, German and Canadian space agencies, as well as numerous student and commercial investigations. The shuttle did not visit the International Space Station on this trip.

Ilan Ramon, a colonel in Israel's air force and former fighter pilot, became the first man from his country to fly in space, and his presence resulted in an increase in security, not only for Columbia's Jan. 16 launch, but also for its landing.

On launch day, a piece of insulating foam on the external fuel tank came off during liftoff and was believed to have struck the left wing of the shuttle.

Leroy Cain, the lead flight director in Mission Control, had assured reporters Friday that engineers had concluded that any damage to the wing was considered minor and posed no safety hazard.

Columbia is NASA's oldest shuttle and first flew in 1981.

© 2003 The Associated Press

Feb 1, 11:16 PM


Contrails from what appears to be shuttle Columbia streak across the sky Saturday over Texas in this image from television. Columbia apparently disintegrated in flames minutes before it was to land at Cape Canaveral. The video showed what appeared to be falling debris, as NASA declared an emergency and warned residents to beware of falling objects. Image copyright © 2003, AP

Probe targets wing
By John Kelly, Chris Kridler and Kelly Young
FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL -- NASA will center its investigation on the left wing of the ill-fated shuttle Columbia, officials said Saturday.

A NASA video obtained by Florida Today revealed debris striking the left wing of Columbia during its ascent to space. Failures were recorded just prior to the last contact with the crew Saturday along the same left wing. Ron Dittemore, shuttle program manager, said in hindsight the incident will require close study.

Shuttle Columbia exploded and broke apart over central Texas on Saturday morning on its way to Kennedy Space Center, killing all seven astronauts.

The orbiter's ride home from a 16-day science mission was going perfectly until 8:53 a.m., when sensor readings began to indicate a series of unusual failures, all associated with the left wing and left tires.

Mission controllers lost contact with the shuttle about 9 a.m., 16 minutes before the planned landing. About the same time, witnesses saw trails of debris flying through the skies high above Dallas-Fort Worth in a path parallel to the orbiter.

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Lost in the pursuit of science were commander Rick Husband, 45; pilot William McCool, 41; Michael Anderson, 43; David Brown, 46; Kalpana Chawla, 41; Laurel Clark, 41; and the first Israeli astronaut, former fighter pilot Ilan Ramon, 48. All except Brown were married, and among those married, all but Chawla had children.

"We are bound together by the risk of disaster all the time," shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said, citing the passion of those working in the space program. "There is an emotional attachment to human spaceflight. It piques our interest, captures our imagination."

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe promised the astronauts' families the quick recovery of their loved ones and a thorough, independent investigation of what went wrong. U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Tallahassee, vowed a separate Congressional probe. President Bush pledged whatever federal resources were needed for the search and recovery and the investigation.

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The cause of the accident was not immediately known, but speculation at NASA focused immediately on launch-day damage to insulating tiles on Columbia's left wing. Thousands of the tiles keep the shuttle from burning up as the ship drops from space, shedding extreme heat as it hurtles through Earth's atmosphere on its way to landing.

A videotaped recording of the launch, obtained by Florida Today, shows a white piece of debris falling during launch and striking the underside of the shuttle's wing. On Friday, NASA officials said debris from the shuttle's external tank had fallen during launch and hit the wing, damaging the tiles that protect it from the heat of re-entry.

Shuttle program directors said they weren't convinced the wing damage caused the disaster. But Dittemore said "We can't discount there might be a connection."

As the strange sensor readings poured in during reentry, "we knew that something was not quite right," he said.'We did not copy'At 8:59 a.m., the crew was having a routine exchange with mission controllers in Houston when communications were lost.

"We did not copy your last," the ground controller said.

"Roger," Commander Rick Husband said from Columbia. He never completed his sentence.

A few seconds of silence followed before a NASA commentator noted without explanation, "Columbia is out of communication with mission control."

A few moments later at Kennedy Space Center, astronauts' families and dignitaries began to wonder why they were not seeing the glint of the shuttle on the horizon or hearing the trademark sonic booms. NASA controllers said they were not picking up voice or telemetry data from the shuttle at a tracking station on Merritt Island.

Eyewitnesses in Texas reported seeing the shuttle break apart as it streaked across the sky.

Astronaut Mark kelly cariies a piece of debris from shuttle Columbia as he works to recover pieces of the fallen sapce shuttle Saturday in Nacogdoches, Texas. Image copyright © 2003, AP

Debris that government officials later confirmed to be parts of the shuttle was found across Texas and Louisiana, and radar imagery indicated that pieces of the orbiter could have been strewn as far as the Gulf of Mexico. Also there were remains that a hospital employee identified as a charred torso, thighbone and skull on a rural road near other unspecified debris in Hemphill, east of Nacogdoches, Texas.

O'Keefe said President Bush spoke to the families of the astronauts, as did he.

"We trust the prayers of the nation will be with them and with their families. A more courageous group of people you could not have hoped to know," O'Keefe said.

The shuttle, at the time it was lost, was traveling at 207,135 feet above Earth.

That altitude roughly matches that of the mesosphere, where NASA weather officer John Madura said there should have been no weather or other unpredictable factors affecting the orbiter's flight path. But at the moment of failure, the shuttle was passing through the hottest portions of its flight through the atmosphere.

"We cannot yet say what caused the loss of Columbia," Dittemore said, nearly breaking down as he read off the names of the lost crew members.

Columbia's science mission had been delayed several times because of technical and other concerns. Like the other shuttles, it had welding repairs on its fuel-pipe liners last summer. The oldest of the shuttles, and the first to fly to space, it completed a $145 million overhaul in 2001.

In Brevard, a crowd of VIPs, including astronauts, officials, Israeli dignitaries and NASA brass, were gathered to watch the landing. People were watching the sky, looking for the usual glint of light that is the first sign of the orbiter nearing the Florida air strip and listening for its trademark sonic booms.

When that did not happen before the landing countdown clock hit zero, people became confused. People rushed to dial cell phones and, within a few minutes, VIPs and journalists were loaded onto buses and removed from the landing strip.

Mission controllers by that time were declaring a "shuttle contingency" and working to make sure they could preserve whatever information and data they had from the moments leading up to the loss of communication. The shuttle's signals should have been picked up by a tracking station on Merritt Island just before arriving at KSC. That signal never came.

Once it was clear Columbia was lost, workers with the support convoy at the shuttle landing strip gathered in a building for a moment and said a prayer.

The families of the astronauts were immediately dispatched to the astronaut crew quarters, as were a contingent of support staff -- dozens of which are on hand for launches and landings to run errands for and otherwise take care of the visitors.

"It's terrible," said one NASA employee, who asked not to be identified because the agency ordered its workers not to talk to the press. "It's something no one expected. . . . There's just nothing to say."

In the weeks leading up to the launch, more people were concerned about security for this shuttle, in part because of Ramon's presence. The security surrounding the launch was an escalation of intense measures put in place since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Crew knew risksRamon reassured his family that flying on the shuttle was safe.

"I tell them maybe now, more than ever, after the last delay, that NASA is taking care, very, very seriously, of all the safety issues," Ramon said. "And I feel like I'm going to fly as safely as I could ever be in the shuttle."

Husband was on his second flight.

"Certainly my wife is more aware of the risks than my kids are, so we try not to play up those kinds of things more than necessary," the father of two said. "And the main thing we try to emphasize is the confidence that I have in all of the people who work so hard to make sure that we fly our missions safely."

Many of the crew said the importance of spaceflight outweighed the risks.

The disaster brings to 17 the number of people NASA has lost in launch accidents or mission training, but Ramon became the first foreign national killed aboard a U.S. shuttle. The Challenger disaster claimed seven astronauts on Jan. 28, 1986, and the launch pad fire of Apollo 1 killed three Americans on Jan. 27, 1967. Their names will go on a memorial wall at Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex.

Most astronauts talk with their families and deal with the potential for danger when they become astronauts, and sometimes before.

"Being a military pilot, they're sort of used to me being gone and used to me having a job that has a fair amount of risk associated with it," Anderson said before the launch. ". . .When it comes to space flight, I really don't tell them anything. I think they know I'm doing something I love to do. They understand there's risk involved."

Yet there is no denying that risk is a worry for the aging space shuttle fleet, which first launched with Columbia in 1981 and which NASA has been preparing to fly through 2020. The cause of the accident must be determined, and the costs and risks must be weighed again. The three remaining shuttles will be grounded until the cause of the accident can be determined, NASA officials said.

There is no escape system on the space shuttles, other than the parachutes astronauts wear in case the orbiter can't reach a landing strip. That's not relevant when the orbiter is at the altitude it was when it broke up over Texas.

The shuttle fleet was built for 100 flights each. The remaining orbiters, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, have flown about a quarter of their designed life. NASA could not immediately say what its intentions were for the fleet, but all of its officials vowed repeatedly to "fix" whatever happened.

Still, the human dimensions of tragedy that gripped Kennedy Space Center, Brevard County and the world Saturday morning were huge. There was a sense of disbelief and horror, colored by the confusion prompted by an orbiter that simply did not appear over the horizon as it had so many times before as a matter of routine.

Shuttle crew takes break for CNN interview

Monday, January 20, 2003 Posted: 1:25 PM EST (1825 GMT)

(CNN) -- While working around-the-clock on a 16-day science mission in orbit, members of the space shuttle Columbia crew took a break this weekend to talk to CNN Space Correspondent Miles O'Brien in Atlanta. Following are highlights from the long-distance chat.

O'BRIEN: We're going to take just a few moments to say hello to the crew of the space shuttle Columbia, now traveling above the Pacific at 17,300 miles per hour, 150 miles above us. Let's give you an idea of who's who. This is Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli ever to fly in space. Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist, on her second mission. Rick Husband, the commander, second mission. Laurel Clark, another space rookie.

Commander Husband, let's talk first of all about how everything's going. You've got a menagerie of animals up there. Too many scientific experiments to enumerate here, but generally speaking, how's it going?

HUSBAND: Things are going really great, Miles. We're having a great time up here. We had a great ride to orbit, and all the activation of the experiments went extremely well. And we've really got our space legs up and up running.

O'BRIEN: Send it over to Colonel Ramon, please. Colonel Ramon, I'm curious what it was like when you had that opportunity on one of those early passes to look down at your home country in the Middle East. What were your thoughts at that time?

RAMON: To tell you the truth, it was pretty fast. It was actually today [Saturday] and it went too fast. It was partly or mostly cloudy. So I couldn't see much of Israel, just the north of Israel, and, of course, I was excited.

O'BRIEN: What are your thoughts now that you're in space about what it represents to your nation?

RAMON: It's an opening for great science from our nation, and hopefully for our neighbors in the Middle East.

O'BRIEN: Was the launch what you expected?

RAMON: The launch was really exciting, yes. A lot of noise, shaking, but after about a minute or so, and it went really smoothly.

O'BRIEN: Security was very tight. A lot of concern before you ever fired off those solid rocket boosters. Did you ever -- how aware of that were you, how much of an added concern was that for you?

RAMON: Well, since NASA security [was] unbelievable and helpful, I didn't have any doubt that everything would go really good, and so it did. And I was aware of it. I got there with my family, and I knew exactly what was going on there.

O'BRIEN: It's interesting, when you consider the risks astronauts take, to be concerned about that on top of everything else.

Send it over to mission specialist Chawla. I'm just curious if you could share for us a moment of what it's like being in that space hub? It's a scientific juggling act, isn't it?

CHAWLA: It really is. [I'm working on] four experiments simultaneously. But it's a lot of fun and we are enjoying it. The module is quite big, roomy, and we were able to put it in very good configuration for our work on the very first day, so it's been working out really well.

O'BRIEN: And let's send it over to Laurel Clark. Laurel, are these experiments working? You have 80 some experiments. They couldn't all be working as planned.

CLARK: Things are going very smoothly. As expected, there are some minor glitches, and the eight minutes that it took us to get to orbit, we trained months and months for, and didn't have to use any of that preparation, other than being aware and ready.

As for our science experiments, on the other hand, it's very fortunate that we've had such thorough training, we've had an excellent team on the ground. With the minor glitches that have occurred, we've been able to take care of them. And the teams on the ground are getting tons of incredible data.

O'BRIEN: Let's close with Colonel Ramon. I have an e-mail question for you, colonel. This comes from Great Britain. "Don't you think it would have been a powerful evocation and image of humanity if you had flown with a Palestinian or an Arab crew member?" And he wishes good fortune to you. Have you thought much about that?

RAMON: Well, as you probably know, an Arab man already flew in the '80s. So I am not the first one from there. And I feel like I represent, first of all, of course, the state of Israel and the Jews, but I represent also all our neighbors, and I hope it will contribute to the whole world, and especially to our Middle East neighbors.

O'BRIEN: All right. We're going to have to leave it at that. The crew, or at least a portion, the awakened crew of the Columbia. There are some of them asleep right now. Three of them in bunks in the mid-deck. Thanks very much for taking a little bit of time while you are in orbit to visit us from the flight deck of the space shuttle Columbia. We wish you well on this space marathon.

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