COLUMBIA LOST
Shuttle in peril from launch, NASA says
By Marcia Dunn
Associated Press Aerospace Writer
SPACE CENTER, Houston — NASA engineers are taking a second, harder look at video, computer data and everything else that led them to conclude — perhaps wrongly — that a flyaway chunk of insulation did not harm space shuttle Columbia during liftoff.
Associated Press
"We are completely redoing the analysis from scratch," shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said yesterday, exactly one week after engineers assured him that any damage to the shuttle's thermal tiles was minimal. "We want to know if we made any erroneous assumptions. We want to know if we weren't conservative enough. We want to know if we made any mistakes."
A representative from the Environmental Protection Agency gathered evidence from the site where the nose cone of the space-shuttle Columbia was discovered yesterday in Hemphill, Texas. The shuttle disintegrated over Texas on Saturday.
The wrenching duplication of work to determine what doomed the shuttle Saturday morning, killing its seven crewmembers, was to be temporarily halted today so employees could take part in a memorial service at Johnson Space Center with President Bush.
Practically from the start, investigators have zeroed in on a piece of foam insulation that fell off the shuttle's big external fuel tank during liftoff Jan. 16. The impact by the 2 1/2-pound, 20-inch fragment may have damaged the heat tiles that keep the ship from burning up during re-entry into the atmosphere.
"We're making the assumption from the start that the external tank was the root cause of the problem that lost Columbia," Dittemore said. "That's a fairly drastic assumption and it's sobering."
While Columbia was still in orbit, NASA engineers analyzed launch footage frame-by-frame and were unable to determine for certain whether the shuttle was damaged by the insulation. But they ran computer analyses for different scenarios and different assumptions about the weight of the foam, its speed, and where under the left wing it might have hit, even looking at the possibility of tiles missing over an area of about 7 inches by 30 inches, NASA said.
The half-page engineering report — issued on Day 12 of the 16-day flight — indicated "the potential for a large damage area to the tile." But the analyses showed "no burn-through and no safety-of-flight issue," the report concluded.
High-level officials at NASA said they agreed at the time with the engineers' assessment.
"We were in complete concurrence," Michael Kostelnik, a NASA spaceflight office deputy, said at a news conference yesterday with NASA's top spaceflight official, William Readdy.
"The best and brightest engineers we have who helped design and build this system looked carefully at all the analysis and the information we had at this time, and made a determination this was not a safety-of-flight issue."
No one on the team, to Dittemore's knowledge, had any reservations about the conclusions and no one reported any concerns to a NASA hot line set up for just such occasions.
"Now I am aware, here two days later, that there have been some reservations expressed by certain individuals and it goes back in time," Dittemore said. "So we're reviewing those reservations again as part of our data base. They weren't part of our playbook at the time because they didn't surface. They didn't come forward."
Yesterday, Readdy said the damage done by the broken-off piece of insulation is now being looked at very carefully as a possible cause of the tragedy.
"It may certainly be the leading candidate right now — we have to go through all the evidence and then rule things out very methodically in order to arrive at the cause," he said.
Associated Press
Last night, searchers found the front of the shuttle's nose cone buried deep in the ground near the Louisiana border. But even more valuable in trying to piece together what happened would be to locate any tiles from Columbia's left wing.
A broken ceramic tile is imbedded in an oak tree near Hemphill, several hundred yards from a major highway. Human remains were also found at the site.
"That's the missing link that we're trying to find," Dittemore said.
The shuttle, covered with more than 20,000 thermal tiles, broke up 39 miles over Texas and fell to Earth just as it was experiencing maximum re-entry heat of 3,000 degrees.
NASA said temperature data showed that the shuttle's left side — the same side hit by the debris — heated up sharply just before Columbia disintegrated.
The foam that covers the shuttle's 154-foot external fuel tank is hard enough to damage the shuttle when the spaceship is hurtling into space at high speed.
Dittemore said he knows of at least two other shuttle launches in which foam came off and damaged the shuttle, though nowhere near to the extent suspected in the case of Columbia. One of the shuttles — Columbia, in 1992 — had tile damage on the wing.
Engineers relied heavily on the fact that the previous damage was so minor.
Officials have acknowledged that even if they knew the damage from the foam insulation had the potential for disaster, there was little they or the astronauts could do once the shuttle lifted off. The craft was not equipped with a robotic arm that could investigate or fix broken tiles, for example, and the astronauts could not reach the shuttle's underbelly to fix any damage manually, officials say.
At Barksdale Air Force Base, officials said honor guards have begun escorting in the astronauts' remains, discovered scattered in east Texas prairies and thickets. Underscoring the difficult task of identifying the bodies and the body parts, officials declined to drape the caskets with American flags in case they contained remains of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut on board Columbia when it tore apart Saturday morning.
The families of the seven dead astronauts, meanwhile, steeled themselves for a private memorial service scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at Johnson Space Center, the NASA complex on the southern tip of Houston where the Columbia crew trained for several years before their ill-fated mission. President Bush and first lady Laura Bush are expected to arrive in Houston tomorrow to take part in the ceremony.
Acknowledging calls to revamp NASA's mission, possibly by curbing the use of manned spacecraft, the families released a joint statement Monday calling instead for renewed vigor in the "bold exploration of space."
"Once the root cause of this tragedy is found and corrected, the legacy of Columbia must carry on — for the benefit of our children and yours," the families said.
Underscoring that sentiment, President Bush said in a speech at the National Institutes Health in Bethesda, Md., that "while we grieve the loss of these astronauts, the cause in which they died will continue.
"American's journey into space will go on," he said.
Congressional hearings on the Columbia disaster are expected to begin next week in the House and Senate, and will focus on "the immediate cause, and the remedies that can be made as soon as possible, so that the program can continue," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
By coincidence, federal officials released NASA's proposed budget for the next fiscal year yesterday, amid questions of whether budget restraints had any role in compromising safety. Under the proposal, NASA would receive $15.5 billion in 2004, a slight increase that includes nearly $4 billion for the space shuttle program.
Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.
