Space Shuttle Accidents

Whether scrutinizing a fellow admiral charged with sexual misconduct or probing weaknesses in Navy operations that made a destroyer vulnerable to terrorists, retired four-star Adm. Harold Gehman has gained a reputation for unflinching independence. That quality is likely to be put to the test when Gehman, 60, takes the helm of a NASA- appointed commission charged with investigating what went wrong with the space shuttle Columbia, said some of Gehman's former bosses and colleagues.

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.

NASA has failed to fulfill the three most critical criteria for improving shuttle safety recommended by the board that investigated the Columbia shuttle accident, an independent advisory group said Monday. But the agency has made good progress, the panel said, so there is no reason to delay the scheduled July 13 launch of Discovery.

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.

The crew of the Columbia lived for at least one minute after their last communication with NASA ground controllers in Houston, a potentially important finding that could affect future efforts to improve the survivability of space shuttle accidents, investigators said Tuesday.

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 ...

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."

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.

The Bush administration said Monday that it had agreed to seek a significant increase in the budget for NASA's space shuttle program even before Saturday's disintegration of Columbia, but the space agency's own figures cast doubt on the size of the hike. Budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. said in unveiling the administration's $2.

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.

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.

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.

They were cruising along at 25 times the speed of sound, more than 500,000 feet above the South Pacific. By then, there was little to do but enjoy the ride and rediscover the simple pleasures of life on Earth -- like gravity. At 7:45 a.m. CST on Feb. 1, astronaut William C. McCool, the pilot of the space shuttle Columbia, picked up a cardboard page of his flight manual and then let go. During the previous 16 days, the page would have hovered in front of him, suspended in a zero-gravity state.

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.

It was at best a make-work mission. The 80 experiments on the agenda for Columbia's 28th flight had no urgency. Many were high school student projects. In truth, it was a mission meant to maintain momentum. After 13 delays in two years, shuttle planners were impatient to clear the mission from the agency's manifest on Jan. 16. Like a sideshow performer juggling chain saws, NASA could not afford to break its rhythm of launch and recovery. In the third-floor crew quarters several miles from Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, seven men and women sat in chairs while technicians helped them don orange pressure suits.