NASA Opens Hunt for Clues to Space Disaster : Expert Teams Compile Data on Challenger

As vessels and aircraft scavenged the Florida coast for remnants of the space shuttle Challenger, NASA began its effort Wednesday to resolve the tragic riddle of what went wrong in the final seconds of the fateful flight.

More than 10 teams of space agency experts were being formed for an immediate investigation of the mission, which abruptly ended 73 seconds into launch Tuesday morning when a mysterious fireball consumed the spacecraft and its seven-member crew.

Efforts were under way to compile and impound at various NASA sites all potential scraps of evidence, including sophisticated computer data, wreckage flotsam and detailed histories of all engines and other hardware employed in the mission. Even film from remote-control press cameras mounted near the launch pad was being held.

Team ‘Dedicated’

“While we grieve for our lost colleagues, and for the families they left behind,” said William R. Graham, acting administrator of the space agency, “the NASA team is dedicated to understanding very thoroughly what occurred yesterday, and what is needed to give all of us the best possible assurance that it will never happen again.

“And we are dedicated to pressing on.”

Throughout the day, eight military vessels, nine aircraft and hundreds of volunteer beachcombers gathered debris from the fallen spacecraft. Ships equipped with sonar scanned the sea floor at the point where shuttle tracking signals vanished in 30-foot water.

Search officials held out scant hope of finding any remains of the crew. Among the dead was Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the 37-year-old history teacher who had volunteered to become the first private American citizen in space.

Vigils for the lost voyagers were conducted throughout the nation in the aftermath of the worst accident in the history of the American space program. NASA announced that President Reagan will travel to the Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday to participate in a memorial service.

NASA officials also disclosed Wednesday that two potentially crucial pieces of evidence were destroyed as a safety precaution about 20 seconds after the Tuesday explosion. Two solid rocket boosters that helped propel the shuttle off launch pad 39b were detonated by remote control when it appeared one was bearing down on populated land.

One line of speculation by outside space experts has been that a malfunction of one of the two boosters, which fanned away from the point of explosion seemingly intact, might have ignited a fire that caused the shuttle’s enormous fuel tank to blow up.

Emotional Effects

Top-level NASA administrators, some still showing the emotional effects of the shattering event, meanwhile took pains to defend the shuttle program and its track record, and to rally support for an eventual resumption of what had been a busy agenda of 14 more missions this year.

Graham said the nation’s sense of loss “is perhaps made all the more dramatic because of the long record of outstanding successes in the U.S. space program.

“We’ve come to expect complete total performance on every mission,” he told a news conference here, “and that is, in some ways, an extremely difficult thing to achieve.

“Nevertheless, I want to assure you . . . that this loss will not stop us, as Americans, from exploring the frontiers of science and the frontiers of space.”

Called Important Step

Graham, like President Reagan, also defended the move to incorporate so-called ordinary citizens like McAuliffe into shuttle crews, calling that an important step in an effort to tame the space frontier.

While Graham and other key NASA officials held press conferences both here and in Houston, they uniformly declined to discuss what might have caused the explosion, or even to share their interpretations of slow-motion television replays witnessed by most Americans.

Several non-NASA space experts have said that it appears the trouble began with a fire toward the bottom of the fuel tank to which the shuttle was attached for launch.

“We are not discounting any possibility at this point in time,” said Jesse W. Moore, NASA associate administrator and the man who gave approval to proceed with liftoff Tuesday.

Seek ‘Prime Cause’

Moore said he was forming investigative teams to pinpoint the “prime cause” of the disaster. Each team, he said, will gather data and explore a specific aspect of the launch. For example, he said, one team will concentrate on studying all photographs of the incident, while another will concentrate on the shuttle’s propulsion system.

Moore did not give a complete list of the number of investigative teams, saying only that it would be more than 10, nor did he indicate how many investigators would be involved.

Among teams he mentioned, however, were ones to concentrate investigations on the launch pad, debris analysis, flight telemetry, the shuttle propulsion system, the technical and performance histories of all engines and other hardware used in the mission, and the flight crew.

These teams will report to an interim review board that Moore has established to oversee the in-house investigation until Graham appoints a full review board, as required by law.

Outside Talent

Graham said it would take time to put together a review body. He would not say how many members it will include, but said he will draw on talent outside NASA.

“It is the intention of NASA,” he said, “ . . . to draw on the best, the most qualified experts that we have in America.

“We will bring them together in a variety of ways which will provide their expertise to this issue, to the analysis of this issue and to its final resolution and correction.”

The focus at NASA in the immediate aftermath of the disaster has been to gather any evidence that might assist an investigation. Written statements, for example, were taken from key launch personnel immediately after the explosion.

Space agency officials seem almost baffled by the paucity of preliminary information offered by the sophisticated computer link-up between Challenger and Mission Control.

The system sends millions of bits of information about spacecraft condition during every minute of flight. Most of it is stored automatically in computers, but indicators of a dangerous condition anywhere on the craft are supposed to flash on screens in the control room.

No Alert Issued

Control room officials, however, said the system issued no alert indicating anything was amiss. It is hoped, but by no means a certainty, that indications of what went wrong might be harvested after more thorough analyses of all the computer data.

NASA officials said that it was unlikely the crew members received any warning of disaster in the few seconds before the deadly explosion. And even had they seen a flash from the initial fire, it might not have registered for what it was.

“This shuttle,” Graham said, “was traveling on the order of 1,800 feet per second, something over Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. It was at 47,000 feet; it was at the boundary of the stratosphere.

“A great number of phenomena occur there, which involve physical effects that we don’t see in everyday life. They include things--optical phenomena, visible phenomena on the shuttle, shock waves, various other patterns. And it’s natural to expect some of those.”

Exhaustive Rehearsals

In a Houston press conference, launch director Jay Greene was asked if there was anything in the exhaustive preflight rehearsals that could have helped anticipate and react to the blast.

“We train awfully hard for these flights,” he said, “and we train under every scenario that can possibly happen. There was nothing anyone could have done for this flight.

“It just stopped.”

The costly and sometimes controversial shuttle program has been brought to a standstill while efforts to decipher the disaster proceed.

“All orbiters have been powered down,” Richard G. Smith, Kennedy Space Center director, announced, “and no work on the ships Discovery, Atlantis and Columbia is planned in the immediate future pending priority attention being placed on the accident. . . . “

The halt is certain to have a serious impact on the space agency’s ambitious schedule of 14 more flights this year, although they refused Wednesday to announce cancellation of any specific mission. At greatest risk was a delicately timed launch of the Columbia, scheduled for March 6, that was to have involved close-up studies of Halley’s comet.

Will ‘Stand Down’

Smith told private contractors on the site that shuttle operations would “stand down” at least for the next few days and perhaps for weeks.

“I’m confident,” he said, according to a copy of remarks distributed to reporters, “we’ll again have the pressure of schedule and launch rate on our back, because the space program requirements are not going to go away, and we’ll be in a position to be up and running better and more effectively than we did in the past.”

Wednesday found the mood at this space center, an intimate partner in much of the achievements of space exploration in the past quarter-century, gloomy but persevering.

“Everybody who works in the Vehicle Assembly Building has a heavy heart today,” said Pat Strait, an office worker. “We’re all walking with our heads down.”

Times Staff Writers Barry Bearak and David Treadwell also contributed to this report.