- HOUSTON (Reuters) - A NASA
engineer warned of the possibility of grave damage to the shuttle Columbia
days before the spacecraft broke up on Feb. 1 and complained that it was
hard to get relevant information, according to e-mails released by the
U.S. space agency on Friday.
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- The e-mails by safety engineer Robert Daugherty expressed
concern that a debris impact on Columbia's left wing shortly after launch
on Jan. 16 may have gouged a hole big enough to cause excessive heat in
the shuttle landing gear.
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- "Apparently the current official estimate of damage
is 7 inches by 30 inches," Daugherty wrote in a Jan. 29 e-mail that
went to colleagues in NASA's middle ranks. "One of the bigger concerns
is the gouge may cross the main (landing) gear door thermal barrier and
permit a breach there. No way to know of course."
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- NASA has said that higher-ups in the agency did not see
the messages.
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- Last week, an investigating board said it appeared a
breach in Columbia's heatshielding tiles had permitted superheated plasma
into the wheel well area, leading to the spacecraft's spectacular demise
over Texas. The seven astronauts on board died.
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- The board gave no definitive cause for the breach, but
NASA has been looking at a piece of what it believes was fuel tank insulation
that flew off and struck the left wing about 80 seconds after takeoff.
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- The debris hit was studied for several days while Columbia
circled the earth before shuttle flight directors decided it could not
have seriously damaged the nation's oldest shuttle and told the astronauts
it was safe to come home.
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- They were 16 minutes from landing at Kennedy Space Center
in Florida when NASA lost contact with the shuttle.
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- Columbia fell to earth in thousands of pieces in a catastrophe
much worse than Daugherty imagined. He worried mainly about tire failures
that could make landing impossible.
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- "It seems that if Mission Operations were to see
both tire pressure indicators go to zero during entry, they would sure
as hell want to know whether they should land gear up, try to deploy the
gear or go bailout," he wrote.
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- "We can't imagine why getting information is being
treated like the plague. Apparently the thermal folks have used words like
they think things are survivable, but marginal," Daugherty said.
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- NASA earlier released a Jan. 30 e-mail by Daugherty in
which he warned of several possible scenarios caused by heat in the wheel
well, all of them with dire consequences.
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- "Something could get screwed up enough to prevent
(landing gear) deployment and then you are in a world of hurt," he
wrote.
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- Two other e-mails released by NASA on Friday showed that
some NASA engineers think ice, not insulation may have struck Columbia.
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- In a Feb. 5 e-mail, NASA engineer Dennis Bushnell said
ice damage from the 150-foot-tall external fuel tanks has long afflicted
the left side of space-bound shuttles, but nothing was done about it.
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- "We (the agency) should have done more analysis
of this whole situation/taken it more seriously as well as repositioned
that tank dump line to minimize ice impingement," he wrote.
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- Another NASA engineer, Daniel Mazanek, wrote that a study
of video taken during launch indicated that Columbia was struck three times
by debris that was most likely ice.
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- The impact, he said, "would be the equivalent of
a 500 pound safe hitting the wing at 365 miles per hour."
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