detonate.net - Columbia, With Six Americans and Israeli, Is Lost Over Texas

The space shuttle Columbia, streaking across a bright blue Texas sky at about 3.5 miles a second, lost contact with its NASA controllers this morning about 15 minutes before it was scheduled to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA repeatedly tried to reach the shuttle, which was concluding a 16-day mission with six Americans and Israel's first astronaut, Col. Ilan Ramon of the Israel Air Force. But Columbia did not answer repeated calls from controllers, and its 9:16 a.m. Eastern landing time passed with no sign of the shuttle — only accounts from witnesses in Texas who said they had heard a thundering explosion and saw big chunks of debris breaking off and tumbling toward earth. "We lost it," a NASA official said in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity. NASA's Web site acknowledged that contact had been lost with the shuttle during its descent and warned the public against picking up debris that the space agency said might be found in the East Texas area. Officially, the space agency described the status of Columbia and its crew as unknown. But the flags were lowered to half-staff at the Johnson Space Center in Houston about 90 minutes after the shuttle failed to land on schedule. More Inside

In addition to Colonel Ramon, Columbia's crew included Col. Rick D. Husband of the Air Force, its commander; the mission pilot, Cmdr. William C. McCool of the Navy; Lt. Col. Michael P. Anderson of the Air Force, the payload commander in charge of the science equipment; Dr. Kalpana Chawla, an aerospace engineer; and two Navy doctors, Capt. David M. Brown and Cmdr. Laurel Salton Clark. Columbia was the oldest orbiter in the shuttle fleet and was on the 88th shuttle mission since the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986. All seven astronauts aboard Challenger, including Christa McAuliffe, who has to have been the first teacher to fly on a shuttle, died. In more than 40 years of manned space flights before Challenger, NASA never before had had a fatal accident during the descent or re-entry of a spacecraft. This morning, Columbia had descended to an altitude of 207,000 feet and was over Texas when it lost contact with NASA controllers. Its crew had completed more than 80 experiments during their time in orbit. The flight had been reported to have gone smoothly except for an incident shortly after liftoff on Jan. 16, when a piece of insulating foam on an external fuel tank broke loose. It was believed to have hit the left wing of the Columbia. But Leroy Cain, the lead flight director at Mission Control, said on Friday that NASA engineers believed that any damage to the wing would have been minor and would not pose a safety hazard as Columbia headed back to earth. President Bush was briefed on the situation at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., and left for the White House in midmorning. He was traveling by limousine because fog prevented his helicopter from taking off. The astronauts had reported a problem with "tire pressure" — apparently astronaut lingo for a reading of some concern on one of the instruments in the cockpit — around 9 a.m. That was the last that NASA heard from the shuttle. On the ground, people heard an explosion. Some said their houses shook. Stumbling outside on a sleepy Saturday morning to see what had happened, they stared at the sky, shrugged and went back inside, only to see bulletins appear on television. Amateur astronomers who had been tracking the shuttle's descent with powerful binoculars and home video cameras assumed that the noise was from a sonic boom created by the shuttle's descent at 12,500 miles an hour. In Palestine, Tex., about 97 miles from Dallas, the police were barraged with calls from witnesses. "They saw vapor trails going across the sky and sparkles and stuff, then didn't see it anymore," said Cpl. Steve Petrovich of the Palestine police. "One person called to say they saw it going east, then turn north, then vanish."