The Columbia space shuttle breaking up over Texas on Saturday.

NASA: Left-wing damage during launch may have caused Columbia disaster.


NASA stressed in a press conference Saturday that it could not yet determine what caused the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke up over Texas just 16 minutes from its scheduled landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, killing its seven-member crew, including Israeli Ilan Ramon.

But NASA experts discovered that photos of the launching taken by cameras attached to a telescope showed that a piece of the tiling connecting the external gas tank to the body of the shuttle fell off during takeoff and hit the thermal tiles on the left wing.

Ron Dittemore, the Columbia program manager at Mission Control, said that in retrospect, the fact that the debris hit the left wing and that there were data transmission problems from the left wing could mean that wing damage might be related to the shuttle's explosion.

He said the space agency picked up first indications of a problem less than a half hour before the shuttle was scheduled to land, with loss of key data transmissions from the left side of the orbiter.

However, he said NASA experts had checked computer models showing a piece of debris hitting the wing and that all the staff members saw the statistics and agreed that there was no danger to the flight.

Even if possible damage to the Columbia's left wing did ultimately lead to Saturday's explosion over Texas, early recognition of such damage might not have been sufficient to stop the explosion from taking place.

The search is on for the remains of the US space shuttle Columbia, which broke up as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere on Saturday. 

All seven astronauts on board were killed. 

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