Orbiting Crew Says Grief, Not the Waiting, Is Hardest

The three astronauts aboard the international space station, in their first public comments since the breakup of the shuttle Columbia, said Tuesday that the isolation of space is making it difficult to weather the loss of their seven comrades killed in the accident.

Compounding that grief, however, is a very real difficulty: They just lost their ride home, and what was supposed to be a four-month tour of space could be extended by a year or longer.

The three astronauts, who have lived at the space station since November, said in a teleconference that they began that fateful Saturday the same way everyone back at mission control had: with the hope that there would be survivors. When there were none, the morning ended in lonely silence, in guilt, in fear and in irrational anger.

They considered the crew of Columbia their colleagues and their friends. Space station astronaut Donald Pettit was in the midst of a very long-distance computer chess match with Columbia’s pilot when the shuttle disintegrated while reentering Earth’s lower atmosphere on Feb. 1.

Worse yet, being in space seemed only to compound their grief. Mission control officers in Houston have worked to give the crew time alone to grieve, more time to exercise to help keep the astronauts grounded, even time to listen on the radio to last week’s memorial service in Houston. When the service ended, the space station astronauts rang a bell seven times, once for each of the Columbia astronauts killed.

Then they just stared off into space.

“When you’re up here this long, you can’t just bottle up your emotions and cope with it all the time,” Kenneth Bowersox, NASA astronaut and commander of the space station crew, said Tuesday.

“It’s important for us to acknowledge that the people on [Columbia] were our friends ....We feel their loss.”

The astronauts’ remarks came hours before the board charged with determining what brought down Columbia introduced itself to the nation at a news conference.

Retired Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, said his panel is already struggling with competing “imperatives.”

The first, he said, is to arrive at cautious and accurate conclusions, a process that will involve poring over tens of thousands of pieces of evidence and data pools. Ensuring that conclusions are based on “good, solid, analytical work” could take months, Gehman said.

The second, he said, is to complete that investigation as quickly as possible so that NASA can resurrect its space shuttle program and try to resume its cooperation with the space station.

The space shuttle is the primary provider of personnel and supplies to the station, the semi-permanent spacecraft and laboratory that the United States is building along with 15 other nations.

The space shuttle fleet has been grounded while officials try to determine the cause of the Columbia accident.

In effect, the space station crew is temporarily stranded because the shuttle Atlantis, which was supposed to pick them up on March 1, is not going to lift off anytime soon.

Bowersox and the other two crewmen addressed the world in a remarkable teleconference Tuesday. Shoulder-to-shoulder in matching blue uniforms, the astronauts were tethered to the wall to hold them steady in microgravity as they soared 245 miles above Australia while orbiting in a half-built, $100-billion craft seen as the future of manned space exploration.

Behind them, a sign read: “Exit.”

When they will open that door again remains to be seen.

Across the world, space administrators are scrambling to address the issue and are considering these possibilities, officials said Tuesday:

* Russian space officials could hurry along their schedule for launching a Soyuz craft that could bring in the crew’s replacement, possibly substituting its three-man crew with just two astronauts to lighten the demand on supplies.

* NASA could complete its investigation and quickly fix the flaws that doomed Columbia, enabling the agency to get a shuttle back on the launch pad to retrieve the space station crew as planned. That is unlikely, officials conceded.

* The crew could abandon the space station, using a Soyuz craft that is docked there as an escape pod. This is considered a desperate measure at NASA, where officials still hope the coming year -- the third year of occupation on the space station -- will be the busiest and the most complex to date. Space officials want to deliver three research facilities to the station, as well as equipment that would triple the craft’s ability to generate electricity.

Bowersox and the other two crew members, Pettit and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin, said Tuesday that they have offered to stay in space for another year if that’s what it takes. They have already spoken with their wives and relatives about that possibility.

“My sense of time has changed,” Bowersox said. “I don’t so much worry about weeks and months. I like life here on the station.... We feel comfortable that we have a way home.”

The most pressing concern on board the station is water, officials said.

Pettit said the shuttle typically generates water through its energy production system. Other craft have to dump that water into space, but the shuttle is able to transfer it to the space station when it docks there, increasing the supplies aboard the station.

That exchange won’t happen again anytime soon, and it is very difficult to conserve water aboard the space station.

For example, people on the ground use an average of five gallons of water per minute while showering, and some analysts have suggested eliminating bathing on the space station to conserve water.

Taking a standard shower is impossible in space, so astronauts aboard the space station take periodic sponge baths. Eliminating those baths would save only three or four ounces of water at a time, Pettit said. The primary use of water is for cooking, and astronauts are wary of the mental and physical effects of reducing their consumption of food and water.

Pettit said Tuesday that he has launched a survey of potential conservation programs while the world sorts out the space station’s fate. For instance, the astronauts had removed batteries from some tools and devices before the Columbia accident, although the batteries had some “juice” left in them, Pettit said. Those batteries will be retrieved and used until they are completely spent.

“I wouldn’t be so presumptuous to say that everything is fine,” Bowersox said. “We need to look at the cause of the last accident. We need to understand it ....What in the system failed? Did we miss something? Did we just not know something?”

The investigative panel charged by NASA with answering those questions is simultaneously grappling with the effect of the Columbia tragedy on the space station.

An unmanned Russian Progress craft docked last week and delivered enough supplies to last the crew until June. The Progress also fired its thrusters Tuesday to lift the space station into its proper orbit. The station falls more than 600 feet each day because of gravity, and it often relies on the shuttle to push it back up.

Gehman reiterated that while NASA itself will continue an investigation -- congressional investigators have also launched an inquiry -- his panel will remain independent.

He noted that, while most members of the board have military backgrounds and ties to the aerospace community, just one member is employed by NASA: Scott Hubbard, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

Gehman said investigators have not found any pieces of the shuttle west of Fort Worth, although NASA has received 179 solid reports of wreckage found as far west as California.

“We have reason to believe -- we don’t have proof -- that we should keep looking west of Fort Worth,” he said. “It’s possible there is something out there.”

Board members declined to address any theories engineers have offered to explain the Columbia accident -- a piece of foam insulation that struck the shuttle when it lifted off Jan. 16, for example, or new radar data showing a piece of space debris leaving the vicinity of the shuttle on the mission’s second day.

“You make no judgments. You suspect everything,” said a board member, Rear Adm. Stephen A. Turcotte, commander of the Naval Safety Center in Norfolk, Va.

Board members said it’s possible that they might never be able to fully explain the Columbia accident. Instead, they said, they may offer the public a “probable cause.”

The members of the board spent Tuesday morning taking turns sitting in the cockpit of a shuttle flight simulator at Johnson Space Center.

NASA engineers fed the simulator a program that enabled the board members to experience a problem-free reentry.

“This board is trying to personalize this accident,” Gehman said. “We wanted to [experience] the violence that’s involved in flight at Mach 20.”

On Tuesday, NASA also released tapes of the communications recorded between mission control officials during Columbia’s final minutes.

The tapes reveal no sense of panic in Houston, but an increasing urgency, first as the shuttle’s sensors recorded minor glitches, then when communication was lost.

“FYI, I’ve just lost four separate temperatures on the left side of the vehicle, the hydraulic return temperatures,” one official said to open the tape.

“Is there anything common to them?” Flight Director Leroy Cain asked.

“No,” the official replied. “Not exactly. They were all within four or five seconds.”

Minutes pass with few updates, and Cain can be heard asking: “Everything look good to you?”

“I don’t see anything out of the ordinary,” an official replied.

Minutes later, Cain launched NASA’s standard plan for addressing an accident. Officials can be heard referring to paragraphs and pages of that plan.

Finally, as the moment that the space shuttle was supposed to land in Florida came and went with no further communication, Cain asked: “Have we got any tracking data?”

“We got a blip ....But it was bad data,” another official answered. “We do not have any valid data at this time.”

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Times staff writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.