Foam

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board is preparing to recommend as early as this week that NASA fix foam insulation problems linked to the shuttle tragedy before resuming space flights, an official close to the investigation said. The recommendation might put a chill on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's plans. Space agency officials have vowed to fly again by early next year, even though they have not figured out how to fix all the problems related to the foam debris.

THINGS I am not doing this summer: Operating a motor vehicle while trying to spoon-feed myself a snowball. Sticking my finger in the coin slots of newspaper street boxes because the last time I did this on a summer day, I got stung by a wasp. Going to Bengies Drive-In without first putting on a disguise, something involving a fake mustache and dark glasses. (Why take any chances on the loquacious owner recognizing me and going on another demonizing tirade over the P.A.?) Eating Maryland crabmeat, Gulf crabmeat, Thai crabmeat or Louis Kemp's imitation crabmeat.

HOUSTON -- Investigators are looking at new scenarios for how hot gases entered shuttle Columbia's left wing, causing it to disintegrate over Texas on Feb. 1. Contrary to previous analyses, investigators said yesterday that they now suspect that an object seen floating near Columbia on its second day in space was a fragment of a carbon panel that wraps around the wing's edge or a seal from that region. Investigators think the piece came loose after being damaged by a chunk of foam insulation that flew off the external tank and slammed into the wing during launch.

HOUSTON - An object seen floating near shuttle Columbia on its second day in space is almost certainly a tile-covered panel that somehow came dislodged from the edge of the ship's left wing, investigators said yesterday. Tests show that the so-called "carrier panel" most closely matches the object tracked by radar while the shuttle was in orbit, said Maj. Gen. John Barry, a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board overseeing the inquiry into the ship's breakup on Feb. 1. A missing panel might have created a vulnerable spot on the wing where hot gases could get inside as the ship slid through the atmosphere on its landing attempt.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - A new photographic analysis of Columbia's launch shows that foam debris falling off the external tank slammed into the orbiter's vulnerable leading edge, rather than the underside of the wing as NASA earlier had believed, investigators said yesterday. Although such an impact was under examination, the analysis is the strongest evidence to date that the shuttle burned up on re-entry because of a breach in some part of its leading edge that allowed super-heated gas into the wing.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA almost certainly violated its own flight safety margins when it repeatedly launched shuttles knowing that they could be hit by foam debris from the external fuel tank, a retired Air Force space expert told Columbia accident investigators yesterday. Since the orbiter was destroyed Feb. 1, the possibility that falling foam had damaged Columbia's thermal protection tiles has played a key role in the investigation. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration long had known that insulation from the tanks had gouged the delicate heat-shielding tiles in previous flights; officials, however, had decided it wasn't a safety hazard.

NEW ORLEANS - NASA investigators at the agency's plant here are looking into the possibility that air bubbles beneath silicone-based insulation on the Columbia's external fuel tank could have caused a chunk of insulating foam to fly off the space shuttle during liftoff, a worker at the factory said. Investigators have been reviewing paperwork related to the Columbia's external fuel tank and documentation of the building of eight other tanks completed here at the Michoud Assembly Facility, the worker said.

NASA's space shuttle program manager backed away yesterday from a key theory that a piece of insulation breaking away from Columbia's fuel tank during launch damaged the craft's heat shield so badly that it was destroyed in the final minutes of its mission 16 days later. "Right now it just doesn't make sense that a piece of debris could be the root cause of the loss of the Columbia and its crew. There's got to be another reason," Ron Dittemore said at a news briefing in Houston. "We believe there's something else."

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was warned in 1990 that the protective tiles around the shuttle's wheel wells were particularly vulnerable to catastrophic failure, partly because of their proximity to fuel tanks and the shuttle's hydraulic system. The study, conducted by experts at Stanford University and Carnegie-Mellon and financed by NASA, also identified ice that builds up on the super-cold external fuel tank as a major source of debris that could fall on the tiles and trigger a cascade of failures that could doom the spacecraft.

NASA investigators seeking the cause of Saturday's shuttle disaster are taking another hard look at a sheet of insulating foam that broke away from Columbia's external fuel tank and struck the craft's left wing during liftoff Jan. 16. Engineers had dismissed the danger from the flying insulation while the astronauts were in orbit. But Ron Dittemore, the shuttle program manager, said during a news conference in Houston yesterday that it remains the best lead in the mysterious disaster that claimed the lives of seven crew members.