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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - If liftoff damage to Columbia's thermal tiles caused the disaster, was the crew doomed from the very start?
Or could NASA have saved all or some of the seven astronauts by trying some Hollywood-style heroics - a potentially suicidal spacewalk, perhaps, or a rescue mission by another shuttle?
Some Americans are wondering.
Some of the ideas would have been highly impractical, dangerous and perhaps futile.
The shuttle does not carry spare tiles, and NASA insists there was nothing on board that the crew could have used to repair or replace missing or broken ones. In any case, the space agency believed at the time that the tile damage was nothing to worry about and thus nothing worth risking a life over.
Still, as James Oberg, a former shuttle flight controller and author who has been bombarded by Armageddon-type rescue ideas via e-mail, said yesterday: "They may be implausible, but not by much." He added: "There's always the question of miracles."
NASA knew from Day Two of Columbia's 16-day research mission that a piece of the insulating foam on the external fuel tank peeled off just after liftoff and struck the left wing, possibly ripping off some of the tiles that keep the ship from burning up when it re-enters Earth's atmosphere.
A frame-by-frame analysis of launch video and film clearly showed a clump of something streaking away from Columbia 80 seconds into the flight.
However, the potential problem was not identified until a review conducted a day after the launch, according to Ron Dittemore, the shuttle program manager at NASA.
Engineers spent days analyzing the situation and concluded that there was no reason for concern. The flight director in charge of Columbia's Jan. 16 launch and Saturday's descent from orbit, Leroy Cain, assured reporters as much on Friday.
Possible cause
But hours after the disaster, Dittemore acknowledged that NASA might have been wrong and that wing damage on launch day might have contributed to or even caused Columbia to disintegrate on re-entry.
"It's one of the areas we're looking at first, early, to make sure that the investigative team is concentrating on that theory or that set of facts as we are starting to unfold," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said yesterday.
Dittemore said: "My thoughts are on what we missed, what I missed, to allow this to happen."
Some facts remain:
NASA did not attempt to examine Columbia's left wing with high-powered telescopes on the ground, 180 miles below, or with spy satellites. The last time NASA tried that, to check Discovery's drag-chute compartment during John Glenn's shuttle flight in 1998, the pictures were of little use, Dittemore said. Besides, he said, "there was zero we could have done about it."
Similarly, NASA did not ask the crew of the International Space Station to use its cameras to examine the wing when the two ships passed within a few hundred miles of each other several times over the past two weeks.
NASA did not consider a spacewalk by the crew to inspect the left wing. The astronauts are not trained or equipped to repair tile damage anywhere on the shuttle, least of all on a relatively inaccessible area like the underside of a wing, Dittemore said.
Rescue possibilities
Or could NASA have saved all or some of the seven astronauts by trying some Hollywood-style heroics - a potentially suicidal spacewalk, perhaps, or a rescue mission by another shuttle?
Some Americans are wondering.
Some of the ideas would have been highly impractical, dangerous and perhaps futile.
The shuttle does not carry spare tiles, and NASA insists there was nothing on board that the crew could have used to repair or replace missing or broken ones. In any case, the space agency believed at the time that the tile damage was nothing to worry about and thus nothing worth risking a life over.
Still, as James Oberg, a former shuttle flight controller and author who has been bombarded by Armageddon-type rescue ideas via e-mail, said yesterday: "They may be implausible, but not by much." He added: "There's always the question of miracles."
NASA knew from Day Two of Columbia's 16-day research mission that a piece of the insulating foam on the external fuel tank peeled off just after liftoff and struck the left wing, possibly ripping off some of the tiles that keep the ship from burning up when it re-enters Earth's atmosphere.
A frame-by-frame analysis of launch video and film clearly showed a clump of something streaking away from Columbia 80 seconds into the flight.
However, the potential problem was not identified until a review conducted a day after the launch, according to Ron Dittemore, the shuttle program manager at NASA.
Engineers spent days analyzing the situation and concluded that there was no reason for concern. The flight director in charge of Columbia's Jan. 16 launch and Saturday's descent from orbit, Leroy Cain, assured reporters as much on Friday.
"It's one of the areas we're looking at first, early, to make sure that the investigative team is concentrating on that theory or that set of facts as we are starting to unfold," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said yesterday.
Dittemore said: "My thoughts are on what we missed, what I missed, to allow this to happen."
Some facts remain:
Rescue possibilities
