But No One Knew It Was Necessary

It would have been possible. It might have happened. But no one knew a rescue of the seven astronauts aboard the doomed shuttle Columbia was needed.

That's according to NASA, in testimony and documents before the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. The rescue would have been "technically possible, but very, very risky," according to CAIB spokesman Tyrone Woodyard in an interview with Reuters.

How It Might Have Happened: Two Scenarios

Had the space agency known about the damage to Columbia's left wing - damage that the CAIB believes caused the space plane to break up as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere Feb. 1, the shuttle Atlantis might have been pressed into emergency service. Atlantis was scheduled to fly on March 1, but NASA says launch preps could have been dramatically speeded up.

In a second alternative, reminiscent of the in-flight emergency work that saved the crew of Apollo 13 after a disasterous on-board explosion, Plan B would have been to have the crew of STS-107 repair the damage themselves, using whatever materials they had on board.

The key to the Columbia tragedy is that no one knew there was a problem with the shuttle until just seconds before it disintegrated. If NASA officials had known the extent of the wing damage, Woodyard said, the agency would have done "everything possible" to rescue the crew. "Doing nothing is just not an option if they had known the extent of the damage."

NASA could have found out. There were suspicions of damage that might have been caused 82 seconds after lift-off, when chunks of foam insulation parted from the shuttle's huge external fuel tank and impacted the left wing. The National Reconnaisance Office offered to retask spy satellites to take pictures of the Columbia in orbit. NASA officials, however, turned down the offer, believing the damage to the shuttle itself was minimal. They were tragically wrong.

Now, as part of its initial recommendations, the CAIB strongly suggests pictures always be taken of shuttles in flight as a way to guard against just the sort of damage that killed Columbia.

We May Never Know.
And That May Not Be So Bad.

Although the CAIB probe is focused now on the damage to the left wing, there is still no consensus on how that damage occurred. Again, the break-away insulation could have indeed caused structural damage on the leading edge of the left wing. Then again, it could have been space debris or something else as yet unsuspected.

But is that a bad thing? Perhaps not, says Board Chairman Harold Gehman (Adm., USN, retired). "It may be that the fact we don't have a cause-and-effect that hits us in the head like a two-by-four is a blessing in disguise," Gehman told reporters last week. The CAIB will issue its final report before the end of summer, probably citing a cascade-scenario familiar to those who follow aviation mishaps: "multiple causes and multiple flaws," according to Gehman. "Complex systems sometimes fail in complex ways. Sometimes you have to work pretty hard to pin down those complex failure mechanisms. But if you can do that, you will have done the system a great service."

Gehman said, while the Columbia tragedy may never be firmly traced back to the break-away insulation foam from the external fuel tank, "We are going to tell them to fix the foam shedding, absolutely." The falling foam is only a symptom of a troubling pattern in which the flight team somehow "rationalized" such problems as normal and acceptable, he said.

FMI: www.caib.us