someone knew the shuttle was unstable

[pudgy]

TweetThe Associated Press

Related:
• Engineer warned of possible shuttle breach
• Wing breach still chief theory
• Breach likely doomed shuttle




WASHINGTON -- One day before the Columbia disaster, senior NASA engineers worried the space shuttle's left wing might burn off and cause the deaths of the crew, describing a scenario remarkably like the one investigators believe ultimately happened. They never sent their warnings to NASA's brass.

The space agency released e-mails Wednesday also showing it was sufficiently concerned about possible damage to Columbia's insulating tiles that it asked the Defense Department -- then abruptly changed its mind -- to take pictures of the shuttle in orbit more than one week before its breakup.

The dozens of pages of e-mails described a far broader, internal debate about the seriousness of potential damage to Columbia from a liftoff collision with foam debris than previously acknowledged. They even considered instructing the crew to bail out.

Engineers in Texas and Virginia fretted about the shuttle's safety during its final three days in orbit, with one wondering whether officials were "just relegated to crossing their fingers" and another questioning why such dire issues had been raised so late.

"Why are we talking about this on the day before landing and not the day after launch?" wrote William C. Anderson, an employee for the United Space Alliance LLC, a NASA contractor, less than 24 hours before the shuttle broke apart.

Concerns about Columbia prompted a request six days into the mission, on Jan. 22, for the U.S. Strategic Command to take satellite images of suspected damage to the shuttle's left wing. For weeks until Wednesday, NASA has denied it ever made such a request.

The space agency withdrew its informal request one day later amid fears it might have "cried wolf" and endangered future such requests, according to one e-mail.

Deciding against the satellite request, a NASA official wrote reassuringly to the Defense Department that Columbia was "in excellent shape" and that insulating foam that struck the shuttle on its mid-January liftoff was "not considered to be a major problem."

Not everyone agreed.

Three days before the end of the doomed mission, one frustrated engineer, Robert Daugherty, asked, "Any more activity today on the tile damage or are people just relegated to crossing their fingers and hoping for the best?" The response: "I have not heard anything new."

After intense debate -- occurring by phone and e-mails -- the engineers, some supervisors and the head of the space agency's Langley research facility in Hampton, Va., decided against taking the matter to top NASA managers, including William F. Readdy, NASA's associate administrator for space flight.

"It was a surprise to us when the 'what-if' scenario played out," said Robert Doremus, head of the mechanical systems group in Mission Control, who met with reporters in Houston on Wednesday. "We were not expecting that."

The space agency has previously said mission controllers were unaware of these midlevel talks, but it was unclear how high these concerns were expressed. NASA has maintained that senior officials had confidence in an analysis by the Boeing Co., a contractor, that the shuttle would return safely.

Yet Jeffrey V. Kling, a flight controller at Johnson Space Center's mission control, foresaw with haunting accuracy what might happen to Columbia during its fiery descent if superheated air penetrated the wheel compartment.

Kling wrote just 23 hours before the disaster that his engineering team's recommendation in such an event "is going to be to set up for a bailout (assuming the wing doesn't burn off before we can get the crew out)." The following day, Kling was among the first in mission control to report a sudden, unexplained loss of data from the shuttle's sensors in the left wing.

Kling said Wednesday the debate about risks to the shuttle among engineers was never passed to Columbia's crew.

"This was just a mental exercise that we went through to 'what-if' the whole thing," Kling said. "But there was no concern for the crew, and there was not any reason to ever tell him to look for gear tires going out."

The e-mails showed the debate was triggered by a telephone call Jan. 27 to Daugherty from Carlisle Campbell, a NASA engineer at Johnson Space Center, about how re-entry heat could damage the shuttle's tires.

Another e-mail, from R.K. "Kevin" McCluney, a shuttle mechanical engineer at the Johnson center, described the risks that could lead to "LOCV" -- NASA shorthand for the loss of the crew and vehicle.

But McCluney ultimately recommended to do nothing unless there was a "wholesale loss of data" from sensors in the left wing, in which case controllers would need to decide between a risky landing and bailout attempt.

"Beats me what the breakpoint would be between the two decisions," McCluney wrote.

Investigators reported such a wholesale loss of sensor readings in Columbia's left wing, but it occurred too late to do anything -- after the shuttle was already racing through Earth's upper atmosphere moments before its breakup.

NASA has considered a bailout by a shuttle crew feasible only during level, slow flight at about 20,000 feet or lower. Columbia broke up at 207,000 feet while flying roughly 12,500 miles per hour.

Many of the e-mails NASA released were gathered at the direction of Ronald Dittemore, the shuttle's program manager. With news media inquiring, Dittemore asked for copies of the e-mails "so that I can see the traffic and get a feel for the conversations."

Doremus on Feb. 11 summarized the exchanges and told Dittemore that Daugherty and other engineers, on the afternoon before the breakup, agreed that "we were doing a 'what-if' discussion and that we all expected a safe entry."

The e-mails disclose that Doug Dwoyer, a middle manager at Langley, brought his concerns as high as the director of the research center, Del Freeman, and questioned whether they should go up to NASA's associate administrator for space flight.

NASA officials in Washington said Wednesday that Freeman never raised the concerns up the chain. Langley spokesman Keith Henry said that Freeman directed a senior staffer during a meeting Jan. 31 to contact controllers at Johnson Space Center to ensure concerns by Langley engineers were resolved and that Freeman was assured they were.

Earlier, NASA said a videotape salvaged from the wreckage of space shuttle Columbia provides what is likely the final glimpse of the astronauts before the shuttle broke apart. They are seen putting on their gloves and can be heard casually chatting, unaware of the impending destruction.

NASA said the video holds nothing of investigative value, but it will allow the public to see the astronauts and the inside of the shuttle minutes before the first sign of trouble. NASA plans to release copies to the media sometime this week.

Thirteen minutes of tape were preserved, despite burning that destroyed the rest of it, an official close to the accident investigation said Tuesday night. The tape shows four of the seven crew members doing routine tasks in the cockpit as the shuttle zoomed over the Pacific Ocean on Feb. 1.

The tape ends four minutes after the start of Columbia's atmospheric entry while the spaceship is still above the Pacific and flying normally. The first indication of trouble shows up in temperature monitors in the left landing gear compartment another four minutes after the end of the tape, the official said.

Commander Rick Husband, co-pilot William McCool, flight engineer Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark were on the flight deck and reportedly caught on camera. The three other astronauts were on the lower deck. The camera was mounted on the wall and moved by one of the crew; their voices can be heard clearly, the official said.

Neither the official nor a NASA spokeswoman knew where, when or how the tape was found, but it was thought to have been recovered in Texas sometime during the past week.

Members of the board investigating the disaster knew about the videotape for the past several days but did not discuss it at a news conference Tuesday afternoon, the official said, because they wanted to give NASA time to show it to the astronauts' families.

On Wednesday, board spokeswoman Laura Brown said no one on the panel ever had a copy of the videotape -- and still does not. But the chairman, retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., almost certainly is discussing the contents of the tape with members of Congress during his daylong visit to Washington, she said.

In an interview broadcast by CNN late Tuesday, Husband's widow, Evelyn, who is deeply religious, said her strength has failed her at times. "But, I mean, the thing that has not failed," she said, "I have not felt hopelessness and I haven't felt that once and I'm being very honest about that and I'm very thankful for that. There have been times through this that I don't think I can take it anymore. The pain is horrible."

All seven astronauts died as the shuttle broke apart during re-entry on Feb. 1. The investigative board suspects a breach in the left wing allowed superheated gases to penetrate Columbia.

Earlier Tuesday, the accident investigators said they want to know more about a mysterious object that almost certainly fell off the shuttle and was flying alongside the spacecraft during its second day in orbit.

The object orbiting near Columbia was never noticed during the flight. After the shuttle's destruction over Texas, just 16 minutes short of its planned Florida landing, the Air Force Space Command began analyzing radar data and noticed the object.

Initially, NASA said it suspected the object might be frozen waste water dumped overboard or an orbiting piece of space junk that the shuttle happened to encounter.

But Air Force Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, a board member, discounted both possibilities Tuesday and said the object almost had to have come from the shuttle itself.

"You or I could invent a dozen scenarios," Deal said. "It could have been something loose that separated, it could have been something inside the payload bay." It also could have been part of the left wing, where all the overheating and other troubles developed during re-entry.

He described the object as about 1 foot by 1.3 feet in size and said it was flying in tandem with Columbia one day into the mission. It was within 50 feet of the shuttle and, within that first day, started separating farther and farther away until it burned up on re-entry three days later, he said.

"It was something that more than likely came loose," Deal said.

The composition of the object is unknown, but it was lightweight and not dense, Deal said. Lab testing is planned by the Air Force and NASA to determine the material, based on its reflectivity.

Columbia had just gone through a major maneuver in orbit Jan. 17, about 24 hours into its flight, when the object popped out of nowhere, Deal said. That suggests it could have broken loose from the shuttle during the maneuver.

Following the accident, Space Command staff went through reams of data to track the object until its atmospheric re-entry Jan. 20. Nearly 3,200 radar observations were made of Columbia during its 16 days in orbit.

"It's been the most laborious examination that's ever taken place in the history of Space Command, looking at every single one of those observations," Deal said.

Because the astronauts did not do a spacewalk and did not have many windows, they would not have noticed the unidentified object, Deal said.

Meanwhile, a piece of a thermal tile, believed to be from the top of the left wing near the fuselage, remains the westernmost piece of debris found yet -- and probably the earliest known fragment from its breakup. The fragment was found in West Texas, about 300 miles west of Fort Worth.

The board's chairman, Gehman, said he does not know how badly damaged the fragment is and stressed that it is too early to draw any conclusions from it. But he held up pictures of another tile fragment found about 30 miles west of Fort Worth. It was dark gray or almost black with orange specks and extremely rough surfaces -- heat damage that is much more severe than what is normally seen from shuttle tiles.

[jack hust]

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