Investigators focusing on tiles hit during liftoff

Mission may have been doomed from start

Cape Canaveral, Fla. ? Investigators trying to figure out what destroyed space shuttle Columbia focused immediately on the possibility that its thermal tiles were damaged far more seriously than NASA realized by a piece of debris during liftoff.

Just a little over a minute into Columbia’s launch on Jan. 16, a chunk of insulating foam peeled away from the external fuel tank and smacked into the left wing, which like the rest of the shuttle is covered with tiles to protect the ship from the extreme heat of re-entry into the atmosphere.

On Saturday, that same wing started exhibiting sensor failures and other problems 23 minutes before Columbia was scheduled to touch down. With just 16 minutes to go before landing, the shuttle disintegrated over Texas.

“As we look at that now in hindsight … we can’t discount that there might be a connection,” shuttle manager Ron Dittemore said on Saturday, hours after the tragedy. “But we have to caution you and ourselves that we can’t rush to judgment on it because there are a lot of things in this business that look like the smoking gun but turn out not even to be close.”

Just a day earlier, NASA had given assurances that the launch-day incident was absolutely no reason for concern. The space agency did an extensive engineering analysis that included a frame-by-frame examination of the launch video, and concluded that any damage to Columbia’s thermal tiles would be minor.

If the liftoff damage was to blame, the shuttle and its crew of seven may well have been doomed from the very start of the mission.

Dittemore said there was nothing that the astronauts could have done in orbit to fix damaged thermal tiles and nothing that flight controllers could have done to safely bring home a severely scarred shuttle.

“My thoughts are on seven families, children, spouses, extended family. My thoughts are on their grief,” Dittemore said. And he added: “My thoughts are on what we missed, what I missed, to allow this to happen. It’s going to be a difficult day. For all of us.”

The shuttle has more than 20,000 black, white or gray thermal tiles that are made of a carbon composite or silica-glass fibers and are attached to the shuttle with silicone adhesive.

Loose, damaged or missing tiles can change the aerodynamics of the ship and allow heat to warp or melt the underlying aluminum airframe, causing nearby tiles to peel off in a chain reaction. If the tiles strip off in large numbers or in crucial spots, a spacecraft can overheat, break up and plunge to Earth in a shower of hot metal, much like Russia’s Mir space station did in 2001.

In Columbia’s case, the shuttle broke apart while being exposed to the maximum re-entry heat of 3,000 degrees on the leading edge of the wings, while traveling at 12,500 mph, or 18 times the speed of sound.

“I would say that the tiles are the No. 1 candidate” for causing the disaster, said Norm Carlson, a retired NASA test chief and former launch controller.

Dittemore said that the disaster could have been caused instead by a structural failure of some sort. He did not elaborate.

As for other possibilities, however, NASA said that until the problems with the wing were noticed, everything else appeared to be performing fine. NASA officials said, for example, that the shuttle was in the proper position when it re-entered the atmosphere on autopilot. Re-entry at too steep an angle can cause a spaceship to burn up.

Law enforcement authorities said there was no indication of terrorism; at an altitude of 39 miles, the shuttle was out of range of any surface-to-air missile, one senior government official said.