Shuttle Burns Up Over Texas, Killing All 7 Crew Members

The space shuttle Columbia, flying at 18 times the speed of sound, disintegrated in a rumbling roar and incandescent flashes of light Saturday over East Texas, killing all seven of its astronauts and scattering chunks of metal and machinery across two states, only 16 minutes before its scheduled landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

It sounded like “rolling thunder,” one witness said. Shock waves rattled homes and barns 39 miles below. Bright objects hurtled off the spacecraft, and the debris plummeted to Earth. Pieces were soaked with toxic fuel. Some were in flames and started several brush fires. Plumes of chalk-white smoke streaked across the blue sky, visible from Texas to Mississippi.

Officials warned people in East Texas and northwestern Louisiana not to touch the toxic debris. No injuries were reported on the ground. There was at least one report of human remains from the shuttle, recovered in Hemphill, Texas, near the Louisiana line. A hospital employee on his way to work told authorities he found body parts near some debris.

Aboard the shuttle were six Americans and an Israeli astronaut, causing security to be tighter than usual. “There is no information at this time that this was a terrorist incident,” said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the Homeland Security Department. FBI spokeswoman Angela Bell said her agency would have only a tangential role in investigating the tragedy -- assisting in the recovery of evidence.

NASA said it did not yet know what destroyed Columbia. Ron Dittemore, shuttle program manager, said a piece of insulation from a fuel tank had struck the left wing seconds after takeoff Jan. 16 -- and that this wing was where problems seemed to start during its descent over Texas. The agency halted all shuttle flights until an independent investigation could pinpoint the cause of those problems.

“The Columbia is lost,” President Bush told the world on television. “There are no survivors.” His eyes glistened as he spoke softly from the Cabinet Room at the White House. “The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth, but we can pray they are safely home.”

The loss of Columbia is the third major tragedy to strike the U.S. space program. The shuttle Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, 1986, after takeoff from Cape Canaveral. All seven of its astronauts, including one civilian, schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, were killed. A fire aboard an Apollo spacecraft on Jan. 27, 1967, killed three astronauts.

Despite these losses, Bush said, the United States will persist in its exploration of space. “The cause in which [the Columbia astronauts] died will continue,” he said. “Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.”

Columbia, named after the sloop that made the first American navigation of the globe in 1792, was the oldest shuttle in NASA’s fleet and in 1981 flew the first shuttle mission.

After scores of modifications over the years, including a new lightweight cockpit and enhancements to its braking, steering and thermal protection systems, the shuttle took off last month on a scientific mission.

It was its 28th trip into orbit.

The crew members were:

* Cmdr. Rick D. Husband, 45, of Amarillo, Texas, a colonel in the Air Force who flew a 4-million-mile shuttle mission in 1999.

* Pilot William C. McCool, 41, of San Diego, a commander in the Navy who was taking his first spaceflight.

* Michael P. Anderson, 43, of Plattsburgh, N.Y., a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who flew to space station Mir in 1998.

* Kalpana Chawla, 41, born in Karnal, India, an aerospace engineer and a naturalized American who had flown in space in 1997 to experiment with weightlessness.

* Ilan Ramon, 48, of a Tel Aviv suburb, an Israeli air force colonel and son of a Holocaust survivor who was on his initial space trip.

* David M. Brown, 46, of Arlington, Va., a captain in the Navy and a flight surgeon who was on his first shuttle mission.

* Laurel Clark, 41, of Ames, Iowa, a flight surgeon and Navy commander who was going into space for the first time.

Dittemore, in discussing a large piece of foam used as insulation on a fuel tank that appeared to break off and strike Columbia’s left wing on takeoff, said the incident caused no problems during the liftoff.

While the shuttle flew its 16-day mission in orbit, NASA investigated the matter. It conducted an extensive engineering analysis that included a frame-by-frame video. “It was judged,” Dittemore said, “that the event did not represent a safety concern.

“As we look at that now in hindsight, that impact was on the left wing,” where the problems appeared to originate. “We can’t discount that there might be a connection.”

It also might be coincidence, Dittemore said. “There are a lot of things in this business that look like the smoking gun and turn out not to be even close. We have to piece together the events.... We will try to fill in the blanks in the coming days and weeks....

“We will not fly again until we have this understood,” Dittemore said. “There is a hold on future flights until we ... understand the root cause.”

After Columbia completed its scheduled 80 experiments in space and began to descend early Saturday from west to east across the United States, Anthony Beasily, an astronomer for Caltech who lives in Bishop, Calif., awoke early and walked out onto his driveway to watch it fly overhead.

In the darkness, Beasily said, he could clearly see the bright light it normally radiates -- but then he noticed smaller lights detaching from the main body of the spacecraft and falling away.

“This really looked like things that came off and fell down,” he said.

NASA officials suggested that all Beasily had seen was hot plasma that forms around the shuttle from extraordinary heat that normally builds up during reentry.

But Beasily was not convinced.

“That’s not my understanding of what plasma would do,” he said.

As the shuttle crossed the Southwest and flew over Texas, it became more clear that something was wrong. At 7:53 a.m. CST, said Milt Heflin, the chief flight director, engineers at Mission Control in Houston learned through their computers that a temperature gauge on the trailing ledge of the left wing had been lost.

Then sensors began failing repeatedly along the left side of the spacecraft, Heflin said: in the left wheel well at 7:56 a.m., along the left side near the wing at 7:58 a.m. and near the landing wheels again at 7:59.

“It was as if someone had just cut the wires,” Dittemore said.

In addition, engineers on the ground noticed a loss of tire pressure and an indication that Columbia’s outer armor was growing too hot.

The astronauts on board were not aware of most of these problems, officials said, because Mission Control monitors most technical issues to give the astronauts less to deal with.

At some point, however, onboard computers told the astronauts that Columbia’s temperature sensors were failing.

It prompted their last radio message to Mission Control. Heflin said he thought a crew member said: “We see that.”

Dittemore gave this account of the transmission:

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

Cmdr. Husband, calmly: “Roger, uh ... “

Then the radio fell silent.

After several seconds, the silence dissolved into static.

Columbia was traveling at Mach 18, or 12,500 mph. The temperature last recorded at the front of the spacecraft was about 3,000 degrees.

NASA lost all communication with the shuttle at 8 a.m., only 16 minutes before it was to touch down at Cape Canaveral. Even with the sensor problems and the loss of communication, engineers assumed that Columbia would make it to Florida.

Mission Control routinely loses communication with astronauts, sometimes during “dark” portions of orbits, sometimes because of minor technical problems.

Computers on the ground indicated that Husband and pilot McCool were still conducting “roll reversals” -- intentionally banking to the left, then to the right, to use friction from the atmosphere to control their speed.

During these maneuvers, Mission Control conducted an analysis of the sensor failings. They discovered that the sensors had no common link, that the failings appeared to show a series of individual problems aboard the spacecraft.

“They were all independent,” Dittemore said. “That made it more significant. We knew that something was not right.”

At the very moment that engineers arrived at this conclusion, the first reports of falling debris reached Houston and Cape Canaveral.

Harvey J. Hanson, 54, a retired police officer in Dialville, Texas, a rural outpost halfway between the larger towns of Jacksonville and Rusk, said he had seen the bright white streak of a space shuttle crossing Texas on at least one earlier occasion.

Now he was watching for Columbia outside his motor home, 137 miles southeast of Dallas, where the northwestern sky was bright and blue. “I grabbed my binoculars.

“Soon as I got out the door of the motor home, I saw this ball of fire coming at me, through my binoculars.... It was so bright, it was kind of like looking at a welding torch.”

Hanson put down the binoculars, but he kept looking.

“This ball of fire was coming right at me,” he said. “Four or five little balls of fire were dropping off it.... It was straight as an arrow, coming right at me. I guess I watched it for a good 45 seconds. It sounded like bacon frying in a skillet.

“It was coming at me. That puppy was sizzling across the sky, I tell you....I knew something was wrong because parts were falling off it. Looked like a mass of meteors coming in. That just didn’t add up.

“Sonic booms started to rattle the windows,” Hanson said. He estimated that the concussions lasted about 30 seconds.

Then, he said, he began smelling a “pungent” odor.

He could not compare it to anything he knew. But he was sure of this: “I have never witnessed anything like this in my life.”

At Tyler, Texas, about 100 miles southeast of Dallas, Ben Lester, 63, a retired commercial pilot, was just waking up.

“That’s when I heard it,” he said. “Long, rolling thunder that you could feel in your chest. I jumped up and looked out the window, thinking that there must be a huge storm.

“But the sun was out.

“I asked my wife, ‘Did you move something across the floor?’

“She said she didn’t.

“We learned what happened a few minutes later. It is very disheartening. It’s a terrible tragedy.”

To the southeast in Lufkin, Sabria Holland, 41, said: “I heard several thunder booms. It reminded me of thunder, but so much louder. The dogs were unreal. Our bloodhounds didn’t know what to do.”

Holland said the sound lasted two minutes.

“I’ve never heard nothing like that in my life,” said her mother, Alma Havard. “It’s so sad to think what happened to those people.”

Much of the debris remained in the air. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a notice to fliers after National Weather Service radar picked up a cloud of metal particles about 95 miles long and 13 to 22 miles wide over Lake Charles, La.

At Cape Canaveral and in Israel, as officials and members of the astronauts’ families waited for their return, NASA tried to contact Columbia, but to no avail. “That’s when we knew,” said Heflin, that “we had a bad day.”

Space shuttles come back to Earth as powerless gliders, without any fly-around capability. Officials knew that Columbia had to reach its intended runway at Cape Canaveral or it was doomed. Powerful C-band radars scanned the sky -- in vain.

Dr. Yael Barr of the Israeli Aerospace Medicine Institute in Tel Aviv cried. “The countdown clock, when it got to zero and then started going, instead of counting down, counting up, and they were still not there, I told my friend: ‘I have a bad feeling. I think they are gone.’

“And I was in tears.”

Israeli astronaut Ramon’s wife, Rona, and their four children were at Cape Canaveral for the landing, along with families of the other astronauts. Security before, during and after the flight was extraordinarily tight because officials feared that Ramon’s presence might make the space shuttle a terrorist target.

But when it became clear that the astronauts would not return, NASA officials ushered the families to a secluded place.

Bush spoke to them by telephone. “We assured them,” said Bill Readdy, NASA’s associate administrator for spaceflight and a former shuttle commander, “[that] we will begin the process immediately to recover their loved ones and understand the cause of this tragedy.”

Six of the seven astronauts were married. Five had children -- 12 in all. “We trust the prayers of the nation will be with them,” Readdy said. “A more courageous group of people you could not have hoped to know than the families of these crew members, an extraordinary, extraordinary group of astronauts who gave their lives.”

Meanwhile, NASA declared a “contingency” -- or emergency -- and urged search and rescue teams to disperse in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and in portions of East Texas.

But the Columbia crew was already dead.

*

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers David Willman in Washington and Rosie Mestel, Ralph Vartabedian and Usha McFarling in Los Angeles, and Times researcher Lianne Hart in Nacogdoches.