The American space agency (NASA) published yesterday the transcripts of e-mail messages sent by safety engineers, who specifically warned the day before landing about the crash of the shuttle "Columbia" during landing, due to damage to the left wing. The external investigation committee into the circumstances of the crash is investigating why the warnings were not heeded
The remains of "Columbia" at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, yesterday. Among the fragments was found a video tape containing the minutes before the shuttle entered the atmosphere
One day before the Columbia disaster, senior engineers at NASA were concerned that the left wing might catch fire and kill the crew. The engineers described a scenario like the one that researchers believe actually happened. However, they did not broadcast their fear through the usual NASA channels. This is according to a document of dozens of e-mail pages published on Wednesday.
"Why are we talking about this the day before landing and not the day after launch?" William Anderson writes, working for United Space Alliance - a NASA subcontractor, less than 24 hours before the shuttle disintegrated.
A few days earlier a frustrated engineer asked "Are we going to do anything to solve the tile damage problem or will all the people involved just cross their fingers and hope for the best?
After an intense debate - mainly by phone and e-mail - the engineers, supervisors and heads of NASA's Langley facility in Ampon, Virginia, decided not to transfer the treatment to the heads of NASA.
Jeffrey Klingeg, a flight controller at the control center in Houston, predicted with great accuracy what could happen to Columbia during reentry, if extremely hot air penetrated the wheel system.
Kling wrote only 23 hours before the disaster that the engineering team was filling in such a case to prepare for escape (in case the wing does not burn, allowing the crew members to get out). Kling was among the first in the control room to report the sudden loss of data from the left wing sensors.
The e-mails describe a broader debate about the risk to Columbia than the concerns expressed three days earlier by Robert Doherty, another senior engineer at Langley. He was mostly concerned about the shuttle landing with flat wheels or otherwise damaged from the extreme heat.
Doherty was responding to a question Jan. 27 from Carlyle Campbell, a NASA engineer at the Johnson Space Center, about how heat intrusion during reentry into the atmosphere might affect the shuttle's wheels. One day into the debate, Doherty expressed frustration to Campbell that his comments about Fingers crossed and hope for the best.
Among the messages was one from Doherty's boss at Langley, Mark Schwart, to another Langley executive, Doug Dwyer, who described Doherty as the kind of conservative and thorough engineer NASA needs.
Another mail McCoin McCluney, a mechanical engineer for the shuttle at the Johnson Space Center, described the risk that could lead to LOCV - NASA's abbreviation for "Loss of Crew and Shuttle," but McCluney recommended doing nothing unless there was a general loss of sensor data on the left wing, then the control personnel will be required to decide between a risky landing or an rescue attempt. McLoney wrote.
The researchers reported such a loss of sensors on the left wing, but it happened too late to do anything - after the shuttle had already begun to enter the Earth's upper atmosphere, and several minutes before it disintegrated. NASA decided that abandoning the shuttle is possible only when it stabilizes in the atmosphere at a relatively low speed and at an altitude of 20 thousand feet (about 6 kilometers) or lower. 65 thousand km/h.
Many of the emails released Wednesday were collected at the prompting of Robert Ditmore, the shuttle program manager at the Johnson Space Center, in a message he wrote the day news agencies reported Doherty's concerns. Ditmore asked for copies of the e-mail messages "so that I can see the traffic and get a sense of the discussions that took place."
Doherty's concerns and continued arguments with other engineers came days after an engineer at Boeing, another NASA subcontractor, assured that Columbia was safe despite damage to the left wing when pieces of the insulation foam from the external fuel tank were launched.
In response to Dittmore's request for the emails, Robert Dormus, a NASA employee at the Johnson Center, described it: "We had a discussion of what if but we all expected a safe return."
The emails themselves revealed that Dwyer, an interim administrator at Langley, had written to the research center's director, Dale Freeman, asking if he could contact William Reddy, NASA's joint administrator for manned spaceflight. NASA officials said yesterday that Freeman had never Talked to Reddy, and Freeman decided he assumed the problem was solved after he discussed the issue with Langley engineers.
In the meantime, NASA researchers discovered among the debris of the shuttle "Columbia" a video tape recording the last minutes of the flight, before entering the atmosphere. In the recording, several members of the crew are seen as they engaged in routine operations before landing.
It does not teach anything new about the circumstances of the crash. NASA decided to allow the astronauts' families to watch the tape before releasing it to the public.
John Ira Petty, a NASA spokesman, said that the film did not reveal any new clues about the causes of the shuttle crash. The film was shown to the astronauts' families and will be shown to Congress, before being broadcast to the general public.
And in the meantime, NASA is examining the possibility that in the future the astronauts will be able to repair malfunctions in space, such as gluing porcelain tiles to the shield layer, instead of tiles that will break or detach from the shuttle body. This requires special training of the crew members during their training.
The Los Angeles Times writes that the possibility of using a robotic arm on the International Space Station, which costs a billion dollars, is also being considered to check the shuttles' stomachs. The arm, which is about 17 meters long, may be used as a platform on which the astronauts will stand outside the shuttle and perform repairs on its lower part. Columbia did not have enough fuel to reach the space station, but on future flights access to the space station will be part of the journey routine.
