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"Brain drain" at Boeing Co. may have contributed to the aerospace giant's flawed analysis that space shuttle Columbia would land safely despite being damaged soon after launch, the Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday. Falling debris from Columbia's external fuel tank crashed into the shuttle's left wing, allowing superheated gas to penetrate the craft on re-entry Feb. 1, ultimately tearing the ship apart and killing all seven astronauts aboard. Boeing's space shuttle team lost many top engineers when it moved to Texas from California in 2001, contributing to poor analysis during the doomed Columbia flight, according to the Times report....

NASA spaceflight operations officials argued Tuesday that the loss of the space shuttle Columbia was nobody’s fault, and that they couldn’t have done anything wrong because of their pure intentions. They couldn’t think of anything they did wrong, but they also promised to do better in the future. THESE COMMENTS come as part of NASA’s hunkering down in anticipation of being seriously skewered by the report now being written by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. The group, often referred to as the Gehman Committee after the retired admiral who chairs it, has already issued its technical explanation of the loss...

The NASA official who led the mission management team during Columbia's doomed flight swiftly dismissed as a safety threat the launch-day foam strike to the left wing, transcripts released Tuesday show. "Really, I don't think there is much we can do," Linda Ham said on Jan. 21, five days after a 1 1/2-pound chunk of foam insulation smashed into Columbia's wing during liftoff. "It's not really a factor during the flight because there isn't much we can do about it." Referring to a foam strike two flights earlier, during Atlantis' launch in October, Ham said, "I'm not sure if the...

Americans remain strongly supportive of NASA and committed to the nation's manned space program in the wake of the Columbia tragedy, but a majority in a poll commissioned by the Houston Chronicle believes the shuttles should be grounded until the future of the space program has been redefined. The nationwide poll by Zogby International, conducted between June 27 and July 2, confirms what space policy experts have known since the Apollo moon expeditions, that despite the risks and costs, enough Americans want to continue sending humans into space to make ending the practice politically unfeasible. More than two-thirds of the...

<p>NASA managers worry that the official report on the shuttle Columbia accident, to be published next month, will damage morale and distract staff from putting shuttles back into space.</p> <p>"The report will question us at all levels," warned William Readdy, a top NASA official and former astronaut, in a letter sent this month to staff helping to put the shuttle in space again. "Long forgotten will be the many, many scores of safely and successfully accomplished missions."</p>

NASA inspectors charged with making sure space shuttles are safe to fly were forced to buy their own tools and prevented from making spot checks, a Columbia accident investigator says. The investigator, who spoke with The Associated Press in interviews over several days, said NASA's program that oversees shuttle inspections will "take a pretty big hit" in the Columbia accident report due out in late August. Air Force Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, one of 13 members of the board investigating the cause of the shuttle accident, says he obtained crucial information by offering confidentiality to the 72 NASA and contractor...

The Space Shuttle system should be retired, and all further investments in the Shuttle ended, argued the non-profit Space Frontier Foundation today. A growing consensus in Congress and the space community affirms that the Shuttle system is hopelessly inadequate to our needs and cannot be made safe or affordable, stated the group s founder, Rick Tumlinson. It's time for the venerable Space Shuttles to make way for the improvement in safety, innovation, and competitive pricing that would occur if the private sector were to be given the chance to do for space travel what commercial aviation has done for air...

NASA has too many astronauts waiting around for their chance to fly in space and needs to do a better job of matching the size of the corps to the number of missions, the agency's inspector general said Thursday. In a report that should have been released in February but was delayed because of the Columbia disaster, the inspector general's office concluded the space agency was "overly optimistic" in predicting future shuttle flight rates and hired too many astronauts in recent years. The report said that because of an engineer shortage at Johnson Space Center in Houston, high-priced astronauts have...

The foam impact test on Monday that left a gaping hole in a simulated space shuttle wing also graphically unveiled the gaping hole in NASA’s safety culture. Even without any test data to support them, NASA’s best engineers who were examining potential damage from the foam impact during Columbia’s launch made convenient assumptions. Nobody in the NASA management chain ever asked any tough questions about the justification for these feel-good fantasies. THE SHOCKING FLAW was just another incarnation of the most dangerous of safety delusions — that in the absence of contrary indicators, it is permissible to assume that a...

Superheated gases breached the left wing of shuttle Atlantis during its fiery return to earth in hauntingly similar fashion to the demise of Columbia nearly three years later, according to internal NASA documents. Unlike Columbia, Atlantis suffered no irreparable damage during the May 2000 episode and, after repairs, returned to flight just four months later. NASA ordered fleetwide changes in how employees install protective wing panels and sealant materials. The small leak through a seam in Atlantis' wing during its return from the International Space Station was disclosed in documents sought by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information...

<p>CAPE CANAVERAL -- A rushed launch of a rescue shuttle. Two orbiters drifting in tight formation at 17,500 mph. A series of harrowing spacewalks to move astronauts from one crippled shuttle to one that could bring them safely back to Earth.</p>

A highly-regarded spacecraft designer says the space shuttle should be retired and the human space program suspended until a better vehicle can be built. This newest critic is Max Faget, 81, who designed the Mercury space capsule and had a managing role in the design of other U.S. human launch systems, including the space shuttle, Apollo and Gemini. He has received almost every commendation that exists for engineers and was inducted into the Ohio-based National Inventor's Hall of Fame earlier this year. "The bottom line is that the shuttle is too old," Faget said this week. "It would be very...

Admiral Harold Gehman, who is in charge of investigating the shuttle Columbia accident, must be having flashbacks to his secretive investigation of the USS Cole terrorist attack. Evidently, he also doesn't think the public should be in on his investigation into the Columbia disaster. Gehman, appointed by NASA, thinks nobody other than his panel should know all the details of the Columbia report. We're not to worry our pretty little heads about what transpired in all those secret interviews with NASA officials. We're just to assume the panel asked the right questions of the right people, reached the right conclusions...

<p>Little more than three months ago, seven astronauts paid with their lives to remind space officials that spaceflight is unforgiving. Tolerance of any level of malfunction is a recipe for eventual disaster.</p> <p>Now it appears that this lesson still hasn't soaked into the consciousness of some top officials. A serious flaw in a computer that guides the landing of Russia's spaceships — only the latest in a series of such flaws over the years — has been cavalierly dismissed as unimportant because it didn't result in any deaths.</p>

Civilian members of the board investigating the shuttle Columbia disaster -- outsiders who were added to reassure Congress and the public that the board would be fully independent of the space agency -- are actually being paid executive-level salaries by NASA. The agency quietly put the five civilians on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration payroll, at pay rates of $134,000 a year, in order to take advantage of provisions that allow boards composed exclusively of "federal employees" to conduct their business in secret. If the civilians had not been hired by NASA, a federal law would have required the...

'Privileged' Statements on Columbia Won't See 'Light of Day,' Panel Chief Says. Lawmakers and the board investigating the Columbia space shuttle disaster are locked in a dispute over congressional demands for access to information gleaned from hundreds of "privileged interviews" that investigators have conducted with NASA officials, engineers and others directly involved in the failed mission. The lawmakers, including Science Committee Chairman Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), said they received assurances during a meeting with Gehman last week that they and their staffs could see expurgated copies of the transcripts, with the...

HOUSTON -- Nearly three years before Columbia launched, NASA engineers listed a host of potentially risky problems with foam insulation applied to shuttle fuel tanks at Lockheed Martin's factory near New Orleans, agency records show. A list of "high risk" items was circulated among tank program officials in February 2000, including manufacturing processes at the Michoud Assembly Facility. That's where investigators are now probing whether application flaws caused foam debris to break away from Columbia's tank. NASA investigators have zeroed in on wing damage from foam debris as the cause of the Feb. 1 accident that destroyed the $2 billion...

Hundreds of worms being used in a science experiment aboard the space shuttle Columbia have been found alive in the wreckage, NASA said Wednesday. The worms, known as C. elegans, were found in debris found in Texas several weeks ago. Technicians sorting through the debris at Kennedy Space Center in Florida didn't open the containers of worms and dead moss cells until this week. All seven astronauts were killed when the shuttle disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1. Columbia contained almost 60 scientific investigations. "To my knowledge, these are the only live experiments that have been located and identified," said...

Shuttle Investigators Zero in on Breach HOUSTON - Columbia accident investigators said Tuesday they are close to zeroing in on where a hole opened up in the spaceship's left wing and strongly suspect the fatal blow was caused by a chunk of flyaway foam at liftoff. AP Photo Space Shuttle Columbia Special Coverage   "I feel that we're probably within 30 inches of where the actual breach occurred," said Roger Tetrault, a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "We're closing in." A fragment of a panel or seal along the vulnerable leading edge of Columbia's left wing is...

April 22, 2003 3,000 Amateurs Offer NASA Photos of Columbia's Demise Associated PressContrails from the Columbia are seen in a video image taken by two Dutch military pilots training at Fort Hood, Tex., on Feb. 1. This widely circulated image, purported to be of the shuttle Columbia, is actually from the 1998 movie "Armageddon." By JOHN SCHWARTZ OUSTON, April 19 - Dan McNew thought he had shot the home movie of a lifetime. He had aimed his digital video camera at the shuttle Columbia as it returned to earth on Feb. 1; living near Dallas, in the path of...