Unfortunately, most people have never seen a space shuttle in life, so the debris-recovery effort turned up a considerable quantity of Earthbound junk, including a truck mudflap, a Chevy alternator and a burnt piece of toast. But searchers in Texas and Louisiana had recovered more than 1,000 genuine items, ranging from scraps of fabric to a 500-pound section of the nose cone–and, of perhaps greatest interest, a 26-inch-long section of wing that was found near Fort Worth, at the western edge of the debris track. Since the first signs of trouble aboard Columbia appeared in the left wing, that piece could be a vital clue, depending on which wing it had come from. Parts of all seven crew members had also been recovered; the unidentified remains were sent to military pathologists, who will decide which families would get to bury them.
The human lessons were easier to draw than the technological ones–in part, of course, because they’re more predictable. President George W. Bush spoke comfortingly to the families of the astronauts at the memorial service, humbly sharing his handkerchief with commander Rick Husband’s young son. Afterward, he mingled quietly with the 40 or so survivors. “We’re so proud of you as a father,” he told one man, and to a woman: “You’re a strong soul.” And he bravely decreed that “America’s space program will go on,” although he could hardly have said otherwise in front of 10,000 NASA workers. This was not the time or place to give voice to the growing belief in Washington that manned spaceflight may not have much of a future beyond the shuttle.
And, in case anyone needed reminders, Columbia demonstrated again that there is no tragedy so deep that someone won’t try to exploit it. At least two people were arrested last week on suspicion of hoarding pieces of the shuttle, either as souvenirs or to sell. Others sought a place in history by submitting to NASA faked photographs of Columbia coming apart in the sky. For pundits it was a field day; the columns denouncing the administration for wasting money on showy but scientifically trivial manned spaceflights were roughly balanced by those condemning it for not spending enough to ensure the astronauts’ safety.
But the certainties of the op-ed page were not vouchsafed to the NASA engineers who began trying to understand the disaster literally as it was taking place. As soon as temperature anomalies showed up in mission control, flight director LeRoy Cain told NEWSWEEK, he thought back to the launch, when a chunk of foam insulation shook loose from the external fuel tank and struck the left wing. But “I didn’t take very much time reflecting on that,” he said, calmly discussing with his controllers the mounting cascade of indicators, which in minutes escalated to loss of data and voice contact. A moment later, someone inside the control room quietly told Cain that an outsider had just reported seeing the shuttle in four pieces in the Houston sky. At that moment, they might have been the only ones in the control room who understood what was happening, but Cain could barely assimilate it, much less bring himself to say anything to his colleagues around him. It was only after the time of Columbia’s planned touchdown came and went that Cain acknowledged it to himself, and ordered “contingency” procedures–NASA’s term for a disaster.
But Cain’s first hunch set the tone for what an exhausted and frustrated shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore called “a tremendously long week for all of us.” In detailed and candid daily briefings, Dittemore led the public through the investigation as it circled through the various hypotheses: from the early suspicions about the insulation strike, which NASA engineers had thoroughly (if privately) discussed all through the 16-day mission, to an assertion on Wednesday that the lightweight foam had been all but ruled out as a cause, to the eventual acknowledgment that it was still being seriously examined as one of a number of possible causes, including a collision with a meteorite or a piece of orbital junk, a failure of the shuttle’s computerized control systems or mechanical failure of the shuttle’s airframe.
One additional piece of information came to light during the week, although Dittemore said he wasn’t sure how helpful it was–a photo by a high-resolution Air Force telescope on Earth, appearing to show a chunk missing from the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing and an anomalous plume trailing behind it. Any significant damage to the insulation on Columbia’s wings–either the two-inch-thick ceramic tiles on the underside or the reinforced carbon-carbon panels on the leading edges–could have resulted in a catastrophic failure, or “burn-through,” from the 3,000-degree heat of re-entry.
Regrettably, NASA had insufficient information on the tank incident, since the closest camera had been inexplicably out of focus during the launch. But Elizabeth Pate-Cornell, an engineering professor who studied the tile problem for NASA a decade ago, told NEWSWEEK that it was “not very clever” of NASA to start its analysis by trying to rule out a debris hit as the trigger for the disaster. She and her colleague Paul Fishbeck found that loose tiles, although very rare, were not unknown. (In one notorious case, the glue failed after a worker installing the tiles spit into the compound to make it harden faster.) The only way to detect these is by hand, using a procedure known as the wiggle test. But, the professors say, the technicians who know how to do this are nearing retirement, and replacements are not being adequately trained. A debris strike that might not ordinarily cause a failure could knock loose a tile that was already weakened, leading to disaster.
The answer, perhaps, is in one of the pieces now being inventoried at Barksdale Air Force Base, or perhaps caught in a tree in a backyard outside Dallas. If the task sounds impossible, it’s worth noting that the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that scattered debris over 840 square miles, was solved when a searcher turned up a fingernail-size piece of circuit board. But you can work your way only so far up the chain of causality before you reach the point that Cain himself has come to, after a sleepless week of work and worry. “I know we did everything we could,” he says. “This was not a day that the ground was going to be able to help the crew. This day was in God’s hands.”
THE LAUNCH ·Insulation: NASA is still investigating the effects of foam that broke loose from Columbia and struck its left wing during launch, possibly knocking off heat-resistant tiles.
THE DESCENT · Space junk: Orbiting debris or a meteorite may have breached Columbia’s protective shell. ·Sensors: Temperatures rose near the left wing and wheel well prior to breakup. ·Turbulence: Columbia was lurching left during re-entry, suggesting drag on the left wing that may have been caused by broken tiles. ·Wing: Images captured shortly before the shuttle exploded apparently show damage to the left wing near where foam hit during launch.
