Space/Science
How warning signs were ignored before disaster shuttle's launchAs Nasa braces itself for the official report into the Columbia tragedy, The Observer reveals</> how budget cuts hit vital safety measures David Rose in Chattanooga Sunday June 22, 2003 The Observer It looked like a flawless landing. Two days after Christmas 1999, a little after 7pm, the space shuttle Discovery touched down safely at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, its eight-day mission to service the Hubble space telescope complete. It was another fortnight before a Nasa engineer spotted something unexpected. Running across a reinforced panel on the leading edge of Discovery's left wing was a fissure, a crack so deep that the 'substrate', the weaker material behind the panel, was visible. Unsure what had caused this potentially lethal problem, Nasa did nothing. The official 'inflight anomaly report' filed by the engineer records no resolution. A couple of flights later, when Discovery went back into orbit to visit the International Space Station in March 2001, the same thing happened again. On this occasion, Nasa ordered its engineers to check the wings of all four shuttles. They were not given any specialised equipment, but told to look for cracks with their naked eyes and to prod the vital leading edges with their fingers, to look for soft spots. Another crack was in the wing of the shuttle Atlantis. On 1 February 2003, investigators believe another space shuttle had a cracked left wing. Perhaps the fissure was a little wider; this time, Nasa's luck ran out. As Columbia, the oldest vessel in the shuttle fleet, began to descend into the atmosphere at a speed of five miles per second, a jet of ionised air burnt through the crack, through the substrate, into the wing, incinerating control and sensor wires and melting metal. Debris from the craft fell across the southern United States. The seven astronauts aboard had no chance.
