By Paul A. Anthony, Editor in Chief
Saturday morning dawned bright and blue in Abilene, Texas. Several miles above the earth, space shuttle Columbia streaked through the air at 7:59 a.m., less than 20 minutes away from its landing point in Florida.
Then-just seconds later-came the bang, the contrails, the debris.
Four days removed from its second space shuttle disaster, NASA’s officials are still investigating what could have caused Columbia’s fiery death in the skies over the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
“I don’t have a smoking gun,” Ron Dittemore, Columbia’s flight control director, told reporters Sunday. “I don’t have anything that shows a root cause.”
Officials almost immediately ruled out terrorism as a cause of the explosion, but further answers were slow in coming as debris from the Columbia was found and collected for study.
Early speculation has focused on the shuttle’s left wing, where heat sensors reported a rise in temperature just before all communication was lost. Data also indicated the shuttle was tending to roll to the left when it broke apart.
Many have pointed to video footage of the shuttle’s takeoff that shows a piece of insulation falling off and striking the left wing, possibly causing damage to the insulation tiles along that side.
NASA officials have said the incident wasn’t considered a threat to the shuttle’s safety. Several launch-abort procedures are in place in case something does go wrong, one former NASA official told the Optimist, but the risks of aborting likely outweighed those of continuing with the mission.
“If they had seen it, they could have made one of those calls,” said Kyle McAlister, class of 1989 and former public affairs official for the agency. “But who wants to make that call?”
The process of aborting a launch would require blowing up the rockets and in some cases the shuttle itself to avoid crash-landing in a populated area, McAlister said.
The disaster sparked widespread comparisons to the liftoff explosion of the Challenger in 1986-the only other in-flight space shuttle accident.
“When you talked about the shuttle, everything was pre-Challenger and post-Challenger,” said McAlister, who worked for NASA’s public affairs office in 1990-1991. “Everything had changed. I guess now it’ll be pre-Columbia and post-Columbia.”
McAlister said the Columbia disaster presents a host of different problems, chief of which are the two American astronauts still orbiting in the International Space Station.
“When the Challenger blew up, NASA could come to a halt,” McAlister said. But now, “NASA can’t stop. They can’t.”
But NASA will slow down in the near future, said Dr. Donald Robbins, adjunct professor of physics and deputy director of space and life sciences for NASA from 1986-1994.
“Pilots have been killed in fires and crashes and all sorts of things,” said Robbins, who worked for NASA for 33 years, the last 10 of which were spent managing health services, research and experiments for the shuttle program. “It took a long time for NASA to get over the Challenger. It’s a disrupting thing when this happens.”
The space program-long a symbol of American might, especially during the Cold War race with the Soviet Union-is on hold until investigators find and fix the problems that doomed Columbia.
“We never dreamed we’d have to do this again,” a worker in NASA’s public affairs office told McAlister. “We never dreamed we’d have to dust off the contingency plan.”
