Columbia Space Shuttle

Israelis witnessed the second act of a riveting tragedy Sunday when the crash of an F-16 fighter-bomber killed the pilot son of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died in the Columbia space shuttle disaster of 2003. Radio and television stations interrupted their programming to report the death of air force Lt. Assaf Ramon, 21, and convey emotional responses by the nation's leaders. Some newscasters wore black. "The Sky Has Fallen Twice," read the headline on Ynet, an online news site.

Poor design of their pressure suits led the seven astronauts aboard the Columbia space shuttle to black out almost immediately as the craft started breaking apart during reentry in 2003, and they were probably killed by the violent contortions, a NASA panel said Tuesday. Other design flaws with seat belts, helmets and parachutes also could have caused their deaths if they had survived the depressurization and intense buffeting, the panel said in its final report on the incident.

Poor design of their pressure suits led the seven astronauts aboard the Columbia space shuttle to black out almost immediately as the craft started breaking apart during reentry in 2003, and they were probably killed by the violent contortions, a NASA panel said Tuesday. Other design flaws with seat belts, helmets and parachutes also could have caused their deaths if they had survived the depressurization and intense buffeting, the panel said in its final report on the incident.

NASA allowed reporters to see debris from the space shuttle Columbia in its final resting place Friday, a space that is part shrine and part laboratory. The viewing of the depository here at Cape Canaveral, where the space agency launches its shuttles, took place ahead of the first anniversary of the tragedy on Sunday.

President Bush on Friday announced his choice of Johns Hopkins University physicist Michael D. Griffin, a strong advocate of robotic and manned space exploration, to become the new head of NASA. If confirmed by the Senate, Griffin -- head of the space department at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory -- would replace Sean O'Keefe, who led the space agency through three tumultuous years that included the triumphant Mars rover missions as well as the Columbia space shuttle disaster.

The Americans who died aboard the space shuttle Columbia were eligible for the standard life insurance offered to military personnel and federal employees, but NASA carried no special coverage specifically for astronauts, officials say. "There is a limit on what type of benefits the federal government provides," said NASA spokeswoman Eileen Hawley. "We look at this as larger than a monetary issue," she said. "We are committed to helping these families and we have a support network. They are ...

NASA's top managers for the doomed Columbia space shuttle mission publicly defended their actions for the first time Tuesday, saying that no individual should be blamed personally for the accident because safety was always their top priority. "It goes without saying that we were all trying to do the right thing," Linda Ham, the chairwoman of the team that ran the mission, said in her first public comments on the disaster. "Nobody wanted to do harm to anyone.

President Bush will unveil a new American space initiative next week that is expected to include building a permanent base on the moon and later sending astronauts to Mars, White House officials said Thursday night. The program, if it gains the political support to move forward, will represent the most ambitious and monumental space initiative since the Apollo program that landed Americans on the moon in 1969.

Ever since the shuttle accident, rocket engineer Jud Lovingood has spent difficult days wondering whether he could have prevented the tragic deaths of seven astronauts. "When something bad happens, like killing a bunch of people, you just think: 'What could we have done that we didn't do?' " Lovingood said in a recent interview. "I was shocked. I was sick. I could never make an engineering decision that put a life at risk again."

NASA has decided to delay the launch of the first shuttle flight after the Columbia disaster by two months, citing continuing concerns about the buildup of ice on the external fuel tanks and other problems observed during a recent fueling test. The earliest the Discovery launch could now occur would be the afternoon of July 13, NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin said Friday. The launch from Kennedy Space Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., had been scheduled for May 22.

President Bush on Friday announced his choice of Johns Hopkins University physicist Michael D. Griffin, a strong advocate of robotic and manned space exploration, to become the new head of NASA. If confirmed by the Senate, Griffin -- head of the space department at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory -- would replace Sean O'Keefe, who led the space agency through three tumultuous years that included the triumphant Mars rover missions as well as the Columbia space shuttle disaster.

Family members of the astronauts who died aboard the space shuttle Columbia watched as officials dedicated a granite memorial in Houston on the second anniversary of the accident that killed the seven-member crew. The monument consists of a concrete pedestal topped with a granite slab and a black plaque honoring the men and women "who made the supreme sacrifice to advance humankind."

The foam that struck the space shuttle Columbia soon after liftoff was improperly applied to the shuttle's external fuel tank, NASA said Friday. The official investigation into the accident, conducted by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, left the matter open, since none of the foam or the fuel tank could be recovered for study.

The first pieces of debris from the space shuttle Columbia have been loaned to private-sector researchers under a plan to make the orbiter available for study, NASA said. Unlike the remains of its sister shuttle Challenger, which was destroyed in a launch accident in 1986 and later buried in an abandoned missile silo, NASA decided to catalog each of the thousands of pieces of Columbia recovered from Texas and Louisiana and make them available for researchers who applied for access.

A full year after the Columbia tragedy, NASA has finally determined how and why the large piece of foam insulation that doomed the space shuttle broke off from the fuel tank at liftoff. NASA's top spaceflight official, Bill Readdy, said that through extensive testing, the agency has learned that air liquefied by the super-cold fuel in the tank almost certainly seeped into a crack or void in the foam, or collected around bolts and nuts beneath the foam.

Getting a student-designed science experiment into space is almost as difficult as making a perfect metal sphere. But later this month, four former Cal State Northridge students hope to accomplish both. After almost seven years of false starts and bureaucratic delays, their experimental device for making a flawless ball bearing in space has been loaded aboard the space shuttle Columbia, which is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Wednesday morning.

By the Milk River on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana, Chauncy Birdtail woke up the day Columbia crashed the way he did most mornings -- worried. As a part-time firefighter, Birdtail, 26, spent too many weeks in smoldering mountain wastes far from his wife and three children. Like many members of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes, he struggled for steady work. To make ends meet, he had a part-time job filling in for an elementary school janitor.

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe dedicated a memorial to the space shuttle Columbia's astronauts at Arlington National Cemetery, eulogizing them as "pilots, engineers and scientists all motivated by a fire within." The dedication took place a year and a day after the craft disintegrated on its return to Earth, claiming the lives of the crew -- Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon.

Jon Clark, an Army brat as a boy, an ambitious flight surgeon as a man, has long preferred the cold facts -- "the stats," as he calls them -- to messy emotions. But at home, he realizes now, he was mired in an unspoken competition for his son's love. And, like many fathers, he was losing. "We were buddies and everything," he said. "But I was on the sidelines. He just worshipped his mom." Then, just like that, she was gone.