Most of Columbia Will Never Be Found, Officials Concede

NASA investigators acknowledged Tuesday that many pieces of the space shuttle Columbia vaporized in the atmosphere as reentry began on Feb. 1 and will never be discovered.

Despite an exhaustive effort by more than 4,000 searchers in East Texas, little more than 10% of the space shuttle -- about 8,100 pieces -- has been recovered.

Investigators might retrieve less than 20% of the 179,000-pound orbiter, members of an independent panel appointed by NASA to investigate the loss of the Columbia said in interviews Tuesday.

Asked whether much of the debris, particularly the lighter pieces, might have burned up altogether in the Earth’s atmosphere, retired Navy Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., the panel’s chairman, said: “Absolutely.”

NASA has recovered only a few large pieces, including one of the shuttle’s three main engines, which plowed 15 feet into the ground in Texas.

G. Scott Hubbard, a member of the Columbia investigative board and director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., said the 20% estimate is “very preliminary.”

The most massive and heavy pieces of the shuttle were more likely to survive the scorching heat of reentry, which can produce temperatures greater than 3,000 degrees.

Some of the pieces recovered, however, are “beginning to talk to us,” Gehman said.

At a news conference Tuesday, he displayed a photograph of one of the Columbia’s heat-resistant tiles, discovered in Powell, Texas, 30 miles west of Fort Worth.

The tile, once smooth and white, was severely damaged from heat that appeared to melt away its top layer and by forces that left a giant scoop mark on its bottom.

But it isn’t clear whether the damage was caused before the breakup or when the tile flew by itself through the atmosphere after the breakup.

Gehman also disclosed that investigators located another tile in Littlefield, Texas, west of Lubbock. Though analysis of that fragment has just begun, investigators say the tile was once attached to a portion of the shuttle known as its “glove,” where the top of the wing attaches to the fuselage.

“This is very unusual,” Gehman said. “We are beginning to see some interesting trends and evidence. We will learn something from this tile.”

Gehman said the board will look closely look at the adequacy of Boeing Co.’s analysis of potential damage to the shuttle’s heat-resistant tiles when pieces of material believed to be foam insulation fell from an external fuel tank and struck the left side of the shuttle after Columbia’s Jan. 16 liftoff.

Among other things, the board will look at Boeing’s decision to transfer more than 1,000 jobs from Southern California, where the orbiter was designed and built, to its Houston office.

There are concerns that the company’s engineers in Houston were not as well prepared for safety-related assignments as the more experienced staff at its plant in Huntington Beach, which had been doing tile damage analyses.

Boeing has said repeatedly that it stands by its assessment of the liftoff incident, in which its engineers predicted a “safe return” for the Columbia and its seven-member crew.

Also Tuesday, two members of the investigative board said in interviews that the panel will investigate whether NASA retains a culture of stubbornness and recalcitrance when it comes to sharing information -- particularly the safety concerns of low- and mid-level engineers.

Concerns Expressed

In a series of internal e-mails released late last week, engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., suggested they were concerned during Columbia’s mission that the launch incident had left the shuttle badly damaged.

But their e-mails indicated that they had been unable to persuade top NASA administrators to take their theories seriously.

One engineer said NASA treated requests for additional information like “the plague.”

Another suggested NASA was being secretive in its treatment of the liftoff incident.

Similar concerns about a culture of secrecy and poor communication were raised after the space shuttle program’s other disaster, the Challenger explosion in 1986.

The presidential commission that investigated Challenger concluded that NASA suffered then from a failure to discuss potential engineering and safety issues.

The commission wrote that managers at one NASA facility had a “propensity ... to contain potentially serious problems.”

Ten years later, those investigating the loss of a Mars spacecraft learned that top space agency officials had never been informed of a young engineer’s concerns about possible flaws. It turned out the engineer was correct and the mission failed, Hubbard said.

“This engineer raised his hand, but he wasn’t confident enough to raise” the issue with top administrators, Hubbard said. “And he did not have a graybeard looking over his shoulder, saying, ‘This is not right.’ ”

Hubbard and Maj. Gen. Kenneth W. Hess, the Air Force chief of safety and another member of the Columbia panel, said the board will investigate whether NASA still suffers from that sort of culture.

Both said the board is just beginning that process and has not drawn any conclusions.

“NASA is full of brilliant engineers,” Hess said. “They spend a lot of their time going over the information they have.”

Final Seconds

Also Tuesday, the board said it has unraveled more data from the final seconds of Columbia’s flight, learning that hydraulic lines that operate the flight controls, landing gear and brakes all lost pressure and hydraulic fluid reservoirs were empty.

That could explain how Columbia went out of control at the end and began to break up.

Some astronauts contend that a two-year refurbishment of the Columbia, completed in 2001, gave its left side more aerodynamic “drag” than its right side.

The left side of the shuttle is where a series of sensors detected temperature spikes and other problems in the shuttle’s final minutes.

Investigators have learned that four radar installations in different parts of the country each tracked a piece of debris that flew in the vicinity of the space shuttle on the second day of its mission.

Investigators have determined that the debris was about the size of a basketball and was made of lightweight material, but they have not determined what it was, or whether it may have damaged the shuttle’s protective tiles.

The object broke apart over the South Pacific three days later.