Shuttle wing in spotlight after horror crash

Yesterday’s catastrophe occurred 39 miles above the Earth, in the last 16 minutes of the 16-day mission as the spaceship re-entered the atmosphere and glided in for a landing in Florida.

The day echoed one almost exactly 17 years before, when the Challenger space shuttle exploded.

“The Columbia is lost,” said President George Bush, after telephoning the families of the astronauts, who had watched in horror as the crash was screened live on TV.

The loss of seven astronauts – shuttle commander Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and William McCool, all Americans and Israeli Ilan Ramon – brought grief to the US and the world. Six of the seven astronauts were married and five had children.

Nasa appointed an independent commission to investigate. The agency said the first indication of trouble had been the loss of temperature sensors in the left wing’s hydraulic system.

The spacecraft had just re-entered the atmosphere and had reached the point at which it was subjected to the highest temperatures.

Nasa officials said they suspected the wing was damaged on lift-off, but felt there was no reason for concern.

A piece of insulating foam on its external fuel tank came off shortly after lift-off and was believed to have hit the left wing of the shuttle. Leroy Cain, flight director in Mission Control, assured reporters ON Friday that engineers had concluded any damage was considered minor and posed no safety hazard.

“As we look at that now in hindsight ... we can’t discount that there might be a connection,” shuttle programme manager Ron Dittemore said last night. “But we have to caution you and ourselves that we can’t rush to judgment on it because there are a lot of things in this business that look like the smoking gun but turn out not even to be close.”

Authorities said there was no indication of terrorism. At 207,135ft and travelling at 12,500mph, 18 times the speed of sound, the shuttle was out of range of any surface-to-air missile. Security was extraordinarily tight on this mission because Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut, was among the crew members.

It was a relatively inexperienced crew. Only three – Husband, Anderson and Indian-born Chawla – had flown before.

The others were rookies, including Ramon, the 48-year-old Israeli Air Force colonel and son of a Holocaust survivor. A former fighter pilot who himself survived two wars, he carried into space a small pencil drawing titled Moon Landscape by Peter Ginz, a 14-year-old Jewish boy killed at Auschwitz.

“The state of Israel and its citizens are as one at this difficult time,” Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office said in a statement.

Television footage showed a bright light followed by white smoke plumes streaking diagonally across the sky. Debris appeared to break off into separate balls of light as it continued downward.

Pieces of the spacecraft were found in several Texas counties and in Louisiana. Among the items found were an astronaut’s charred patch, and a flight helmet.

There was at least one report of human remains recovered – in Hemphill, Texas, a hospital employee reported finding what appeared to be a charred torso, thigh bone and skull on a rural road near what was believed to be other debris.

In Nacogdoches, 135 miles north-east of Houston, a National Guardsman stood watch over a steel rod with silver bolts. People streamed up to take photos of the debris.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a notice to airmen because the National Weather Service radar picked up a debris cloud about 95 miles long and 13 to 22 miles wide over Lake Charles, Louisiana.

The Army’s 1st Cavalry Division sent a helicopter search-and-rescue task force from Fort Hood, Texas.

Nasa also asked members of the public to help in its search for debris, but warned people not to touch the pieces because they might be contaminated with toxic propellants.

The flight was the 113th in the shuttle programme’s 22 years and the 28th flight for Columbia, Nasa’s oldest shuttle which was built in 1981 at a cost of about $1bn (€929m).

The horrific end of shuttle mission STS-107 was a devastating blow to the US space programme.

The Challenger explosion led to a 2 -year moratorium on launches, and yesterday’s accident could bring construction of the international space station to a standstill.

The shuttle delivers components of the space station to be installed and also carries crews to and from the station. The three astronauts now on board the station could return to Earth at a moment’s notice via a Russian vehicle attached to the space station.

Six shuttle flights had been planned for 2003 – five of them to the space station. The next was scheduled for March 1.

Columbia had been scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Centre at 9.16am. (2.16pm Irish time).

The final radio transmission between Mission Control and the shuttle, at 9am, gave little indication of any trouble.

Mission Control radios: “Columbia, Houston, we see your tyre pressure messages and we did not copy your last.”

Columbia’s commander, Rick Husband, calmly responds: ”Roger, uh, buh ...”

For several seconds, the transmission goes silent.

Then, there is static.

In 42 years of U.S. human spaceflight, there had never been an accident during the descent to Earth or landing.

The American flag next to Mission Control’s countdown clock was lowered to half-staff.

The shuttle is essentially a glider during the hour-long descent from orbit toward the landing strip. It is covered by about 20,000 thermal tiles to protect against temperatures as high as 3,000F (1,648C).

Columbia’s crew had completed 80-plus scientific research experiments during their time in orbit.

Just in the past week, Nasa had observed the anniversary of its only two other space tragedies, the Challenger explosion on January 28, 1986 and the Apollo spacecraft fire that killed three on January 27, 1967.