Space Shuttle Accidents

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 children of the seven astronauts who died three years ago aboard the space shuttle Columbia received an avalanche of condolences from around the world, including one read Saturday on the anniversary of an earlier shuttle tragedy. The letter, written by Challenger Cmdr. Dick Scobee's daughter Kathie, spoke of the difficulty of dealing personally with a tragedy so public. "Everyone in the country felt like it happened to them too," she wrote. "And it did.

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."

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.