Space Shuttle's Nose Cone Found Near La (Louisiana, that is)

Associated Press

[RCW2001]

NACOGDOCHES, Texas –– Searchers found the front of the space shuttle Columbia's nose cone buried deep in the ground near the Louisiana border, officials said Monday night.

"It's reasonably intact," said Warren Zahner, a senior coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency, which is overseeing collection of shuttle debris .

Other officials said the nose cone was burrowed deep in the ground. A crew was to return to the site about three miles west of Hemphill, near the Louisiana border, on Tuesday to excavate the nose cone.

The shuttle broke up 39 miles over Texas and fell to Earth as it headed for a landing in Florida on Saturday. All seven astronauts aboard perished.

By late Monday afternoon, some 12,000 pieces of debris had been collected.

Officials at the site where the nose cone was discovered described a hole about 20 feet wide in the pine forest. About 10 searchers emerged from the woods with bags full of debris, including metal objects. They filled a bed of a pickup truck with debris.

Throughout the day, investigators went from rural schools to a college campus gathering pieces of the space shuttle strewn across a pine-cloaked disaster scene larger than West Virginia.

Search teams hunted down remains and debris in the rivers and woods of Louisiana and Texas – including a 6-to-7-foot chunk of the shuttle's cabin found in one rural county. Environmental and explosives experts, along with NASA officials, bagged up wreckage and transported it to airports now serving as evidence warehouses.

"We are collecting material that we find on the ground even as small as a quarter," said Gary Moore, a regional coordinator for the EPA. "Obviously, you're going to get to a point where you can't collect every single speck."

The agency is using an airplane equipped with infrared sensors that can spot debris that might be tainted with hazardous chemicals, as well as a mobile unit on the ground to determine whether any shuttle wreckage is emitting toxic chemicals.

Divers plied the murky waters of Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas-Louisiana state line on Monday, scouting for what authorities believe is a car-size chunk of the shuttle. Nothing was found, although divers were expected to return Tuesday with sonar equipment.

NASA shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said NASA was particularly interested in any pieces that may have fallen from Columbia as far west as New Mexico, Arizona or California. The FBI was checking reports of possible debris in Arizona.

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," Dittemore said, referring to tracking bits of the 6-by-6 inch thermal tiles that covered Columbia. "But that is not going to keep us from looking for it."

Recovery teams gathered Monday at a federal command post in Lufkin to be dispatched to counties across the state, said Sue Kennedy, emergency management coordinator for Nacogdoches County. A seven-member squad in Nacogdoches removed 25 pieces of debris from the grounds at Douglass School, whose 340 students in kindergarten through 12th grade stayed home for the day. They then moved on to another public school before heading to Stephen F. Austin State University.

Recovered debris and human remains began arriving at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on Monday "in everything from helicopters to rental cars," NASA spokesman Steve Nesbitt said.

NASA examiners and the independent investigative team headed by retired Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr. have set up shop at the base in a room with a large map, using pushpins to mark the thousands of debris sites. The map was color-coded according to the size of the particles.

The goal is to try to reconstruct what's left of Columbia, and establish a sequence of how each part peeled off during the shuttle's ill-fated journey home.

The recovery effort is daunting due to the size and scope of the debris field. It stretched west to east 380 miles from Eastland, Texas, to Alexandria, La., and north-south 230 miles from Sulphur Springs, Texas, to metropolitan Houston.

Louisiana state police confirmed more than two dozen chunks of debris in 11 different parishes. Authorities recovered a 3-by-4-foot metal panel with small holes from a thicket in Sabine Parish, on the Texas border. Vernon Parish chief deputy Calvin Turner said four chunks of metal were found in the parish

"We'll be finding stuff months down the road. I'd say hunting season is when people will be picking stuff up, or we'll never find it at all," Turner said.

In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry said wreckage had been found in 33 counties sprawling 28,000 square miles of landscape – 10 percent of the entire state, and an area larger than West Virginia.

The area where wreckage was being found expanded westward Monday, said Michael Kostelnik, NASA deputy associate administrator. One debris collection center was opened at the former Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, 180 miles northwest of the Lufkin command center.

Findings included a 3-by-3 foot piece of metal in a bank parking lot in Nacogdoches and a 1-foot diameter piece of gray metal in front of the courthouse. Among the more significant discoveries: a huge section of cabin discovered in a rural wooded area east of Nacogdoches.

County Sheriff Thomas Kerss would not disclose the exact location or provide details, but said teams would continue scouring remote forests in the hunt for more cabin components.

He said federal agents were heading to a home to look for stolen shuttle parts. No arrests have been made, he said.

Kerss stressed that recovering the remains of Columbia's seven-member crew was a top priority. Authorities confirmed about 15 sites where human remains have been found in the county, Kerss said, again declining to provide details.

© 2003 The Associated Press

[bonesmccoy]

Appears to be a portion of the undersurface of the orbiter. Black tiles have been stripped away from the underlying structure, leaving the white silica core visible. Of particular interest is the corner tile which reminds me of the outboard trailing edge of the right wing. If the left wing leading edge and underside were responsible for the loss of vehicle, then that debris should not be located in Louisiana or Texas. The debris in La or Tx should be the material furthest from the structure that lacked TPS protection.

[Rebelbase]

You can find USGS topgraphic maps online at Topozone.com...very cool site!

[Mr Fowl]

I liked the first pic better!

How about this one?
Snowgeese doo doo on the ice! LMAO ROF!

[bonesmccoy]

[Ramius]

In pure jealousy I type... looks like good hunting, friend. I'll be offline for a bit. Thanks for the pics. Enjoyed them.

[deport]

Thanks those are nice. I used to carry many of them in my boat while fishing....

I'm not sure what the poster wanted, if he wanted a topo map or a flight path map. I suspect it was a flight path map....

[okie01]

Topo map of Hemphill, TX and surrounding area, including parts of Toledo Bend Reservoir.

Note that the land is a.) gently rolling, b.) densely wooded and c.) sparsely populated.

To date, something like 90% of the photos and reports I've seen have related to debris landing in a populated area, a rural residential lot or "between the fences" on a road or highway. Since that accounts for only about 2% of the territory actually within the debris field, there must be literally a jillion pieces of debris in the woods.

Call it a "needle in a haystack" or "shrapnel in the woods", East Texas deer and turkey hunters will be coming across debris for years to come.

[Mr Fowl]

In pure jealousy I type... looks like good hunting, friend. I'll be offline for a bit. Thanks for the pics. Enjoyed them.

Anytime!
Bed time for Me, Be Safe!

[ApesForEvolution]

It's extremely interesting to know that the nose cone was found that far EAST...doesn't paint a pretty picture of the last 5 minutes at.

[SuziQ]

Why is it in every other state a county is a county, but in Louisiana its a Parish?

Probably because Louisiana was French territory, and was well established before it became part of America with the Louisiana purchase. The Catholic Church was crucial to its founding, so the areas were called Parishes because they were most likely settled around the local Parish Church.

The Napoleanic code, also heavily influenced by the Church, was the basis for the State laws, and because of that, many things were different from the surrounding states. Though there was still legal slavery, slaves had to be allowed to legally marry, and in the Church if they wanted, and could not be sold away from their families. In most other states, inheritance was through the eldest son of the family. In Louisiana, if there was no elder son, or if he had died, and there was a daughter next, SHE inherited from her father. Women had more legal rights in Louisiana than other states.

[MississippiMan]

Back around Christmas I was on Highway 61 down the MS Delta, when we spotted what looked like a mammoth flock of blackbirds, one of those strings that goes on for miles. I kept looking and realized they weren't blackbirds, but Canada geese. We pulled over and stared in amazement. Never saw anything like it. I would estimate tens of thousands. They stretched north and south as far as the eye could see, in a flock perhaps a half-mile wide. Then while we were watching, they started splitting up into dozens of huge v-formations--talking about just the portion of the flock that was directly over us. Easily the most awesome spectacle of wild animals I've ever seen. The cacophony of honking was unbelievable. Didn't have a camera. :-(

MM

[MississippiMan]

Back around Christmas I was on Highway 61 down the MS Delta, when we spotted what looked like a mammoth flock of blackbirds, one of those strings that goes on for miles. I kept looking and realized they weren't blackbirds, but Canada geese. We pulled over and stared in amazement. Never saw anything like it. I would estimate tens of thousands. They stretched north and south as far as the eye could see, in a flock perhaps a half-mile wide. Then while we were watching, they started splitting up into dozens of huge v-formations--talking about just the portion of the flock that was directly over us. Easily the most awesome spectacle of wild animals I've ever seen. The cacophony of honking was unbelievable. Didn't have a camera. :-(

MM

[Phil V.]

Anyway, when the camera zooms in at first it looks like the shuttle is going sideways with the rear of the shuttle facing camera and the left wing facing the direction of travel!

I saw that too. I also heard that the left side of the fuselage (topside of the left wing) was showing a significantly higher temperature than the right. My gut says that there is more here. I think that the close-up was from a telescope in California, but I'm not sure.

[Phil V.]

. . . on the other hand, it could have been the camera lens' iris . . .

[TigersEye]

bump

[capitan_refugio]

Around my inlaw's home in Tennessee, they are still finding relicts of the Civil War. For that matter, a piece of the shuttle Challeger washed up on a Florida beach recently. People will be finding parts for years and years to come.

[capitan_refugio]

Saw SuziQ's reply too, but I think in Alaska, counties are called "burroughs." Can anyone in the Great White North help me out on this?

[Lurking2Long]

Maybe one day you'll remember to thank Him for giving you your life...

[1Old Pro]

The goal is to try to reconstruct what's left of Columbia, and establish a sequence of how each part peeled off during the shuttle's ill-fated journey home.

Too bad NASA doesn't have high definition cameras strategically plaed so as to take high quality photos of the re-entry of all shuttle flights.

[Monty22]

The live recording of communications on spaceflightnow.com have basically given me nightmares. Lots of noise and static, but also human voices in there.

Awful, awful..