Original Source
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Sat Feb 22, 8:38 AM ET

NASA Engineer E-Mails Warned of Columbia Damage


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HOUSTON (Reuters) - A NASA engineer warned of the possibility of grave damage to the shuttle Columbia days before the spacecraft broke up on Feb. 1 and complained that it was hard to get relevant information, according to e-mails released by the U.S. space agency on Friday.

The e-mails by safety engineer Robert Daugherty expressed concern that a debris impact on Columbia's left wing shortly after launch on Jan. 16 may have gouged a hole big enough to cause excessive heat in the shuttle landing gear.
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"Apparently the current official estimate of damage is 7 inches by 30 inches," Daugherty wrote in a Jan. 29 e-mail that went to colleagues in NASA's middle ranks. "One of the bigger concerns is the gouge may cross the main (landing) gear door thermal barrier and permit a breach there. No way to know of course."
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NASA has said that higher-ups in the agency did not see the messages.

Last week, an investigating board said it appeared a breach in Columbia's heatshielding tiles had permitted superheated plasma into the wheel well area, leading to the spacecraft's spectacular demise over Texas. The seven astronauts on board died.
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The board gave no definitive cause for the breach, but NASA has been looking at a piece of what it believes was fuel tank insulation that flew off and struck the left wing about 80 seconds after takeoff.

The debris hit was studied for several days while Columbia circled the earth before shuttle flight directors decided it could not have seriously damaged the nation's oldest shuttle and told the astronauts it was safe to come home.
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They were 16 minutes from landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida when NASA lost contact with the shuttle.

Columbia fell to earth in thousands of pieces in a catastrophe much worse than Daugherty imagined. He worried mainly about tire failures that could make landing impossible.

"It seems that if Mission Operations were to see both tire pressure indicators go to zero during entry, they would sure as hell want to know whether they should land gear up, try to deploy the gear or go bailout," he wrote.
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"We can't imagine why getting information is being treated like the plague. Apparently the thermal folks have used words like they think things are survivable, but marginal," Daugherty said.

NASA earlier released a Jan. 30 e-mail by Daugherty in which he warned of several possible scenarios caused by heat in the wheel well, all of them with dire consequences.
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"Something could get screwed up enough to prevent (landing gear) deployment and then you are in a world of hurt," he wrote.
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Two other e-mails released by NASA on Friday showed that some NASA engineers think ice, not insulation may have struck Columbia.
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In a Feb. 5 e-mail, NASA engineer Dennis Bushnell said ice damage from the 150-foot-tall external fuel tanks has long afflicted the left side of space-bound shuttles, but nothing was done about it.
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"We (the agency) should have done more analysis of this whole situation/taken it more seriously as well as repositioned that tank dump line to minimize ice impingement," he wrote.
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Another NASA engineer, Daniel Mazanek, wrote that a study of video taken during launch indicated that Columbia was struck three times by debris that was most likely ice.
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The impact, he said, "would be the equivalent of a 500 pound safe hitting the wing at 365 miles per hour."

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