Minutes before the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas, monitors showed an “abnormal” rise in temperatures along the craft’s left wing and wheel well, NASA officials said Sunday.
The rise in temperatures was followed by increased drag on the spacecraft, forcing Columbia’s automated flight system to adjust its path. That could suggest that vital thermal tiles intended to protect the shuttle from the extreme heat of re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere were damaged or missing, the officials said.
But as shock gave way to pointed questions about whether the deaths of seven astronauts on Saturday could have been avoided, mission manager Ron Dittemore said he could not conclude whether damaged tiles were the cause.
“I don’t have any smoking gun,” Dittemore said at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We haven’t ruled out anything at this point.”
Even if the tiles were missing or damaged, Dittemore said, NASA was “helpless” to do anything about it.
Dittemore said NASA is “very early in our analysis” and warned that interpretations of data could change from day to day.
As searchers persisted in the sorrowful task of finding debris scattered over east Texas and Louisiana, the space agency named a former Navy admiral to lead an independent investigation into the tragedy.
On the ground, hundreds of investigators on foot, in four-wheel-drive vehicles and on horseback searched across a 500-square-mile expanse of Texas and Louisiana.
NASA officials said the remains of several of the seven astronauts had been recovered in rural east Texas. The remains are expected to be analyzed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the remains of the seven Challenger astronauts were sent after that shuttle exploded 17 years ago.
Officials used global positioning system devices to plot where each piece of debris landed. They hope to use that information to track how the shuttle came apart.
Divers were called in to search the floor of the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas-Louisiana border for a car-sized fragment believed to be in the water.
Hundreds of other evidence sites were located over hundreds of square miles. The search is concentrated in the Piney Woods of east Texas, home to four national forests covering almost 700,000 acres.
“There is no way to describe how many pieces there are and how spread over the landscape they are,” said James Kroll, director of the Emergency Geospacial Mapping Center at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches.
“Ten years from now, folks are going to be walking around the woods and finding stuff.”
The shuttle scraps will eventually go to Barksdale Air Force Base, near Shreveport, La. An investigating panel led by retired Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr. will begin its examination Monday of events that led to the Columbia disaster.
In Washington, the White House said President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush would travel to Texas on Tuesday to mourn with family members of astronauts during a memorial service at Johnson Space Center.
The president prayed for victims’ families Sunday during a church service in Washington. He is scheduled to be briefed on Monday in the Oval Office by NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe.
Later in the day, O’Keefe is to meet with members of Congress, which also will investigate the accident.
There will be no shortage of investigations. On Sunday the Federal Emergency Management Agency was the lead agency in directing all federal efforts in response to the disaster. The FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA also are participating in the investigation.
The Columbia disaster comes as Bush prepares for one of the most difficult weeks of his two-year-old presidency. He will submit his budget to Congress on Monday. In light of Columbia, NASA’s budget is expected to undergo great scrutiny from lawmakers, some of whom have questioned the government’s commitment to the space agency.
Small budget increase
A senior Bush administration official said Sunday night that the president’s plan would increase NASA’s spending from $15 billion this year to nearly $15.5 billion. It was unclear how much of the increase was targeted for the shuttle program.
Adding to this week’s drama is Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation Wednesday to the United Nations Security Council. Powell is expected to provide evidence purporting to show that Iraq is in violation of a UN mandate to dispose of weapons of mass destruction.
NASA was already under attack before the Columbia catastrophe. In 2001, the investigative arm of Congress questioned whether there was enough manpower at the agency to safely support the shuttle program.
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“Every possible safety of operations issue was considered before flight. It was pored over before everybody decided to launch,” O’Keefe said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“There was positively nothing that anybody felt that could possibly have been examined that would have contributed to this horrific accident,” he said.
While NASA officials appeared to be much more open about discussing possible causes of the accident in comparison to the aftermath of the space shuttle Challenger disaster 17 years ago, they still faced questions about their response to damage that Columbia suffered during liftoff.
Columbia had more than 25,000 protective tiles. The removal or even minor damage to any of them could expose the craft’s aluminum shell to extreme temperatures during re-entry, experts said.
Two days after Columbia took off on its 16-day scientific research mission, analysts knew a piece of insulating foam had peeled off the external fuel tank about 80 seconds after launch. The foam struck the left wing, possibly damaging the tiles.
But after studying video frames of the launch, engineers concluded there was no reason for concern about the craft’s safety as it plummeted through the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, generating up to 3,000 degrees of heat.
Even if tiles were missing or damaged, officials said, they had no backup plan to replace them while in orbit.
Tiles have fallen off the shuttle before, experts said. Where the tiles fall off is much more critical.
Comment on losing tiles
“The loss of any one single tile, we believe, would not be the cause for loss of a vehicle,” Dittemore said. ” In fact, we believe we can lose a tile in different locations, and all by themselves, we don’t believe that would represent loss of vehicle. It may represent some structural damage, but not loss of a vehicle.”
Dittemore said investigators would take a close look at the wheel well to see if the problem originated there. There were indications this was “a thermal problem rather than a structural problem, but it’s too early for me to speculate on what all that means,” he said.
Dittemore said NASA considered training the astronauts to make space walks to repair damage to the shuttle but the risks outweighed any potential benefits.
“We just didn’t believe it was feasible at the time,” he said Sunday.
“Early in the [shuttle] program we realized if we lost a tile or multiple tiles, we didn’t have any repair technique,” he said. “We have no capability to inspect and repair tile damage on the bottom of the vehicle.”
Dittemore said he detected no sense of alarm from the astronauts in the moments before Mission Control lost contact with Columbia.
Other questions arose Sunday about Columbia’s structural integrity. The fuel tank’s manufacturer disclosed that NASA had used an older version of the tank, which the space agency began phasing out in 2000. NASA’s preflight press information stated the shuttle was using one of the newer super-lightweight fuel tanks.
Harry Wadsworth, a spokesman for tankmaker Lockheed Martin, said most shuttle launches now use the super-lightweight tank and the older version is no longer made. Wadsworth said he did not know if there was a difference in how insulation was installed on the two types of tanks. Columbia’s external fuel tank was covered by about an inch of insulation.
Dittemore said that while the tank is no longer manufactured and weighs three tons more than the newer version, “We had no reason to doubt its capability.”
Probe to be unrelenting
The space agency has promised a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week investigation that will include studying everything from photos taken by spy satellites to examining every bit of debris recovered.
Before the shuttle went up, every piece was numbered and carefully catalogued, which could help in reassembling the craft and determining where certain parts of the shuttle landed.
The investigation is expected to take months.
NASA officials said the three remaining shuttles would be grounded until the cause of the disaster is found and corrected.