Shuttle Disintegrates in Flames Over Texas

By: D'Vera Cohn and William Harwood

The space shuttle Columbia, speeding back to the Earth's atmosphere at 12,500 miles per hour, disintegrated in flames 200,000 feet above north central Texas today, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

"The Columbia is lost", President Bush said in a live address to the nation from the White House. "There are no survivors."

The crew of seven, led by mission chief Rick Husband, an Air Force colonel, included five other Americans and the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, an Israeli Air Force colonel. Two were on their first space missions. Six of the seven astronauts were married, and five of them had children.

Bush, who returned to Washington from the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, told the families of the astronauts: "The entire nation grieves with you." And he promised the nation: "The cause in which they died will continue."

Officials said it was premature to speculate about the cause, but NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe told an early afternoon news conference: "At this time we have no indication that the mishap was caused by anything or anyone on the ground."

O'Keefe promised that a commission of experts from outside NASA - including federal transportation and military officials, and chaired by someone outside the federal government - would investigate the cause of the accident. President Bush, he said, offered "full and immediate support" for getting to the bottom of the tragedy.

O'Keefe, wearing a red sports shirt as he hunched over a microphone, praised the astronauts, who were returning from a 16-day mission. "They dedicated their lives to pushing the scientific challenges for all of us here on Earth... A more courageous group of people you could not have hoped to know."

The President, he said, spoke with the astronauts' families "to express our deepest national regrets. He assured them we would begin the process immediately to recover their loved ones and determine the cause of this tragedy."

O'Keefe said Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge was coordinating with local officials in Texas and nearby states to secure and collect any debris from the disintegrating spacecraft.

People in Nacogdoches, TX, a city in the eastern part of the state, reporting finding metal debris falling throughout the area about the time that the shuttle problems were being reported. They had not been officially linked to the shuttle, however.

"There is no reason to believe there are any links to terroism at this point, but we are fully investigating the situation", a White House official said. A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press there was no threat made against the flight. The shuttle, flying at an altitude of 207,000 feet over north-central Texas when it lost contact, was out of range of a surface-to-air missile, the official said.

Residents of north Texas said they heard a loud explosion about 9 am. Video cameras recorded multiple contrails spraying outward from the spacecraft, minutes away from landing on a brilliant, sunny winter's morning.

NASA immediately declared an emergency and warned area residents to watch out for falling debris and to avoid touching remnants of the spacecraft which they said could be impregnated with toxic chemicals.

Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston lost contact with Columbia around 9 am. Prior to that moment, nothing appeared unusual with the shuttle's fiery descent to Earth, and controllers expected an on-time landing at the Kennedy Space Center at 9:16 am. But efforts to recontact the shuttle were unsuccessful and as the minutes dragged by, flight controllers grew increasingly concerned.

The shuttle returns to Earth as an unpowered glider, using small maneuvering jets to change its orientation until it gets deep enough in the atmosphere for its aerosurfaces to take effect. Because it flies as a glider, along a very specific trajectory, the shuttle has no fly-around capability and must reach the intended runway.

During the launch day on Jan. 16, a piece of orange insulating foam on the Columbia's external fuel tank came off during liftoff and was believed to have struck the leading edge of the shuttle's left wing. The shuttle did not have a robot arm on this mission, so the crew was never able to actually look at the area where the foam hit.

The leading edge - the very front of the wing - experiences extreme heating during re-entry, as does the nose of the orbiter. But Leroy Cain, the lead flight director in Mission Control, said yesterday that engineers had concluded that any damage to the wing was considered minor and posed no safety hazard. "[We] took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever", he said. "We haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. It will be a nominal, standard trajectory."

There is no indication yet that the analysis was wrong. But there were no other technical problems of any significance with Columbia's mission. As the landing time approached, powerful C-Band radars at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Patrick Air Force Base scanned the skies in vain for signs of the shuttle.

Mission control commentator James Hartsfield said Cain had declared a "contingency", telling controllers to protect any and all data beamed down from the shuttle prior to the loss of contact.

NASA released the transcript of a final partial communication between Mission Control and the shuttle, in which Mission Control radioed: "Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your last."

Columbia's responds: "Roger, uh..." Then the transmission breaks off.

It was unclear today if the tire pressure message had anything to do with the loss. It may have simply been an instrumentation alert. On the other hand, it could also indicate that temperatures were rising very rapidly in the belly of the orbiter, which takes the brunt of the heat on re-entry.

Besides Husband and Ramon, the shuttle crew included pilot William "Willie" McCool, flight engineer Kalpana Chawla, physicians Laurel Clark and David Brown, and payload commander Michael Anderson.

In 42 years of U.S. human space flight, there had never been an accident during the descent to Earth or landing.

On Jan. 28, 1986, space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff. Columbia was NASA's original space shuttle, blasting off for the first time on April 12, 1981. Since then, Columbia completed 27 successful missions, logging 284 days, 19 hours, 19 minutes in space before the current mission got underway. The other shuttle's in NASA's fleet - Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour - remain operational, but obviously grounded until the cause of today's disaster are determined. All told, the shuttle fleet logged 1,015 days, 14 hours, and 15 minutes of flight time in the 112 flights going into Columbia's mission.

The next planned flight by shuttle Atlantis will not fly until engineers determine what went wrong today. Beyond that, it's not yet clear what effect the loss of one of NASA's four space shuttles will have on the launch schedule.

Columbia, NASA's oldest, heaviest space shuttle, does not make routine flights to the space station because it is unable to carry heavy payloads to the station's orbit. But NASA had planned to launch Columbia to the station on its next flight in November, a mission featuring the agency's first educator astronaut, Barbara Morgan. Morgan was the backup to the first "teacher in space", Christa McAuliffe, who died in the Challenger disaster.

Morgan was at the Kenedy Space Center today, flying approaches in a shuttle training craft with chief astronaut Kent Rominger, awaiting Columbia's return.