On Saturday morning the space shuttle Colum-bia, NASA’s oldest orbiter fleet with a crew of seven, exploded over the Texas sky, killing the seven astronauts on board.
Among the seven members were Israel’s first astronaut and India’s first female astronaut in space.
Mike Chesman, an expert in astronomy and aeronautics at Bays Mountain, said, “In re-entry the crew may have lost hydraulic control causing the wing to burn up, losing control of the shuttle.”
The shuttle was 39 miles above the earth traveling at a speed of six times the speed of sound or 12,000 miles an hour when people on the ground in Texas caught sight of it breaking up as it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere.
On special edition news programs Saturday one man described the sound of the shuttle’s re-entering as sounding like a car crash outside his window.
Mission control lost radio contact with the crew at 9 a.m. Saturday.
There were seven crew members, six Americans and one Israeli. Commander Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon were all headed to Cape Canaveral, Fla. only 16 minutes from their final destination.
Immediate speculation took place Saturday as to what caused the shuttle to burn up in re-entry. Tire pressure could have possibly caused the accident if it ignited a fire on re-entry.
As of Sunday morning investigators were focused on possible damage to the protective thermal tiles on the left wing of the shuttle.
In take-off on Jan. 16, a piece of insulating foam broke off from the external fuel tank and may have knocked against the wing.
Debris fell spreading a cloud of dissipating dust as far as parts of Alabama and Mississippi. Investigators must search a 500- square-mile area of debris or maybe even more.
Even though the space program is usually put on hold after such tragedies, it has provided many practical technologies.
“The space program has brought us many developments from computer technology to engineering,” Chesman said. “The micro-computers used today were developed on the Apollo mission during the space race.”
Later Saturday afternoon President Bush went on the air to speak to the families of the victims and to the nation.
“Our nation grieves with you,”
Bush said. “And those you loved will always have the respect and gratitude of this country.”
This came after Bush made a trip by motorcade from Camp David to Washington to console the families of the astronauts who died in the crash.
Chesman said that Bays Mountain has several of the films from the Columbia’s mission, which dated back to the beginning of the shuttle’s career.
The anniversaries of the Challenger explosion that took place on Jan. 28, 1986 and the Apollo 1 spacecraft fire occurring Jan. 27, 1967 were also remembered this past week.

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