90-second nightmare of shuttle crew

Nasa was warned in 1990 of ice build-up that could damage tiles

The seven astronauts aboard the doomed space shuttle Columbia are likely to have known they were going to die for between 60 and 90 seconds before the craft broke apart, Nasa officials said yesterday.

This painful detail was reported to families of the astronauts as further evidence emerged that the space agency had been warned more than a decade ago of potential problems with the tiles designed to protect the hull from the intense heat of re-entry.

Eliezer Wolferman, the father of Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli in space, said in a radio interview that he was haunted by thoughts of his son's last few moments.

"These seconds are always spinning around in my head," he said. "It's very difficult, as if I'm with them and I try to imagine what they went through. One second is like 20 years. I can't explain it, it's hell, hell in the sky."

Body parts have been recovered including remains of Ramon and a piece of fabric carrying a Star of David that will be sent to Israel for burial.

Further allegations that Nasa might have been able to prevent Saturday's accident came from a 1990 study, which warned that protective tiles around the shuttle's wheel wells were particularly vulnerable to damage. It was the left wheel well where the first increases in heat were detected during Columbia's descent.

The study, conducted by experts at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University, and financed by Nasa, also identified ice that builds up on the external fuel tank as potential debris that could strike the tiles and cause serious damage.

Footage of Columbia's takeoff showed a piece of insulation foam, possibly covered with ice, peeling away from an external fuel tank and striking the left wing. A report from Nasa engineers, two days before the doomed attempt at re-entry, warned that it could have left a 30in by seven-and- a-half-inch area of damage.

But the technicians decided that it did not present a danger to the craft. Nasa maintains that similar events during launch have occurred before without causing catastrophic problems.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Nasa officials had confirmed that Columbia sat on its launching pad for 39 days -more than two weeks longer than usual. For 23 of those days Cape Canaveral received four times the usual amount of rain, drenching the foam insulation around the 15-storey-high external tank.

The Times suggested that if water soaked into insulation or cracks around it, it could have created significant ice when the tank was filled with supercold hydrogen and liquid oxygen the day before the launch.

The search for wreckage and clues as to what might have caused the shuttle to break up above Texas, has been expanded to Arizona and California where debris could provide evidence of the earliest stages of the disaster. Investigators will also study footage of Columbia breaking up, shot from a military helicopter.

A Nasa official put forward another theory, suggesting that a small meteorite or piece of man-made space junk may have hit Columbia while it was still in orbit, damaging the thermal tiles. Milt Heflin, Nasa's flight director, told the Los Angeles Times: "Did we take a hit? That's a possibility. Something was breached."

There are believed to be more than 1 million objects within 1,200 miles of Earth's surface, including tools left behind by astronauts, pieces of rocket motors and debris from defunct satellites.

In a memorial meeting in New Delhi yesterday, the head of India's space agency paid tribute to Kalpana Chawla, the Indian-born astronaut who died. She was a woman of "rare courage and fortitude who had broken away from tradition to fulfil her dream", he said.

Contributor

David Teather in New York

The GuardianTramp

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