Piecing Together Clues to Space Puzzle

The fragments of Columbia come in by the truckload in cardboard boxes or strapped to pallets -- charred and jagged clues to a space puzzle whose vast majority of pieces are still missing and may never be found.

Sixteen hours a day, gloved and white-suited technicians log in the remnants of the orbiter lost during reentry on Feb. 1, and lay them out in a vast Quonset hut-like building less than a quarter mile from the site where the shuttle and its crew of seven should have landed safely.

The work, carried out by 300 people, resembles the effort undertaken after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986, which also killed seven people on board.

“So far, the pieces I’ve seen are much smaller than those recovered from Challenger,” NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham said Wednesday as he escorted a group of reporters to the hangar. “There, some pieces had to be hoisted by crane, and we had external fuel tank and booster pieces to worry about as well.”

Once a potentially significant piece from Columbia has been identified and its information entered into computers, it is tagged with a bar code and positioned on the floor of the Reusable Launch Vehicle Hangar. Blue tape has been laid down to sort the wreckage by origin, such as fuselage, right vertical stabilizer or thermal tiles from the left wing. Yellow tape forms a grid to make it easier to locate individual components scattered over the 50,000-square-foot space.

It is a jarring sight: Lying on the concrete floor is weathered, dirty and aged junk that may be all that is left of one of the proudest members of the U.S. space fleet. There are only a few large pieces -- a ragged-edged, boomerang-shaped chunk of the tail, a plastic-wrapped section of Columbia’s nose on a pallet.

Material too mangled to identify is classified by the scientists as an “unknown soldier” and put into a separate box.

The 70-foot-high hangar was completed nearly three years ago to handle a new type of reusable manned launch vehicle, the X-33, that was subsequently canceled. One wall is decorated with cards of sympathy and support for NASA, including a poster from second-graders at Holy Family Educational Center in San Jose. “Feel better,” urges one message.

Not counting the two truckloads of wreckage that arrived Tuesday, 24,700 pounds of what once was Columbia have been received since work began in the hangar on Feb. 11, Buckingham said. That is only about 10% of the orbiter’s weight -- less than a quarter of what was recovered from Challenger.

NASA investigators acknowledged Tuesday that many components of Columbia had been vaporized during the searing heat of reentry and will never be recovered.

But one official indicated that the answer to the mystery of the shuttle’s destruction could lie somewhere in the shards now accumulating here.

“The data and the twisted metal is speaking to us, [but] we’re just developing the ears to hear it,” said G. Scott Hubbard, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center at Mountain View, Calif., and a member of the accident investigation board.

On Wednesday morning, members of the investigation board visited the Reusable Launch Vehicle Hangar, but they did not meet with reporters.

After the Challenger accident, seven months of search and recovery efforts off Florida brought to shore 45% of the orbiter and its attached components. Among the items found was the burned-out booster rocket joint that leaked hot gases, helping scientists pinpoint what went wrong.

In a similar operation, more than 1 million pieces, or 96% of the wreckage, of TWA Flight 800 were found in the ocean after the jumbo jet blew up after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1996, killing all 230 people aboard. The material was reassembled in a Long Island hangar as part of a nearly $50-million investigation that failed to find the exact origin of the spark that officials believe touched off vapors in one nearly empty fuel tank.

Unlike the debris of Challenger, which was reassembled on a chicken-wire frame, Columbia’s pieces will not be put back together, NASA officials said. Instead, using technology not available 17 years ago, computer modeling that is still under development is supposed to permit a virtual reconstruction.

Investigators have speculated that a breach in the orbiter’s thermal tiles, perhaps caused by a falling piece of insulation during liftoff on Jan. 16, may have allowed superheated gases to penetrate Columbia on reentry. But officials said they are refraining from judgment until they get as many of the pieces under one roof as they can.

“We don’t have a particular piece or pieces that are more important to us,” Buckingham said. “Right now, all we are doing here is putting pieces together. We’re not making any judgment as to their importance.”

For now, recovered thermal tiles sit in gray plastic trays on the hangar floor. Components that specialists say could not have played a role in Columbia’s doom, including the payload bay doors, are stored elsewhere.

As of Wednesday, 11,952 pieces of Columbia, some no bigger than a dime, had been shipped here from Texas and Louisiana. Of those, 6,418 had been identified, and 619 had been arranged on the floor of the hangar, which is just off the wide tow path where shuttles are pulled after landing to the orbiter-processing facility to be readied for their next flight.

Once the Challenger investigation was over, the remnants of that spacecraft -- 215,000 pounds of material -- were lowered into two abandoned Minuteman missile silos at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, adjacent to Kennedy Space Center. The 90-foot-deep silos were then sealed to preserve the evidence in case it is ever needed again.

NASA said no decision has been made about what to do with the shuttle remnants.