JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Texas, 3 February 2003 — NASA vowed yesterday to “leave no stone unturned” in an exhaustive investigation into why the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board in a fiery explosion.
As Americans mourned the deaths of seven of the “best and brightest” astronauts, police and soldiers fanned out across Texas in a grim and sometimes gory search for clues as to what caused the shuttle to break apart on Saturday, just 16 minutes from landing at its home base.
“We’re leaving nothing to chance. We’re looking at every piece of evidence, we’re securing all the debris and assuring we look at every possible angle of what could have caused this horrible accident,” NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe told CBS’ “Face the Nation” program. “It’s been an accident of epic proportion.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said while investigators would “leave no stone unturned” in the probe, it was too early to speculate that insulation foam that came off during the launch and nicked a wing was behind the accident but that would be one of the early focuses.
Columbia disintegrated high above the Texas plains almost 17 years to the day of the explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986, also killing the six astronauts and one American school teacher on board.
Body parts, fragments and pieces of the shuttle Columbia were strewn across a vast area.
With the United States jumpy about a countdown to possible war with Iraq and with an Israeli astronaut as part of the crew, US government officials were quick to rule out terrorism in the disaster.
World leaders sent their condolences to the United States.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Ambassador Mohammed Aldouri, Iraq’s representative to the United Nations, said, “This is an unfortunate accident...In Iraq they view this accident from that point of view. Certainly this is unfortunate for the families...and for all people here in the United States.” A grim-faced President George W. Bush, who led the nation in its grief and vowed the space shuttle program would continue, attended a church across from the White House where the congregation prayed for the astronauts.
Debris from Columbia rained down on fields, highways and a cemetery in northeast Texas, sending dozens of residents to hospitals for minor treatment after they were exposed to the smoldering metal wreckage. No was directly injured by the catastrophic break-up on the ground.
Police and national guardsmen fanned out to guard pieces of wreckage ranging in size from a postage stamp to the trunk of a car, marking them with a traffic cone or yellow tape, until NASA officials could collect them. Police outside Lufkin, Texas, were reported to have found human remains and in Nacogdoches a resident, William Pinkston, told Reuters he found human hair among debris in his yard.
The space agency has promised a seven-day-a-week, 24-hours-a-day probe. It will include studying everything from photos taken by spy satellites to examining every bit of debris recovered from the end of the 16-day scientific mission.
“If there is any piece that may be part of the control section of the shuttle, they (NASA) want to be notified immediately,” said Sue Kennedy, a county judge in Nacogdoches, Texas. Other government agencies, including the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, joined the investigation and the military was called in to help the search-and-recovery effort. (R)
