-
Related
Remains have been found from all seven astronauts killed when the shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry into the atmosphere, NASA said.
"We found remains from all the astronauts," Bob Cabana, director of flight crew operations, told a news conference about Saturday's shuttle disaster in the skies over Texas.
"It's still in the process of identification," he said.
The Columbia was carrying six Americans, including Indian-born Kalpana Chawla, and the first Israeli in space, Ilan Ramon. Five of the astronauts were men and two were women.
"We are treating those remains with the ultimate respect and care that they deserve," Cabana said. "We're honoring our fellow crew mates, and we're taking care of them."
He said astronauts had been assigned to the families of the dead crew members to offer support and whatever other help they needed.
"It's a tough time but we're going to get through this," Cabana said. "We're family and we support one another ... we're going to continue to fly ... and continue to do great things."
NASA has vowed to "leave absolutely no stone unturned" in an exhaustive investigation into why the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry.
As Americans mourned the deaths of seven of the "best and brightest" astronauts, police and soldiers fanned out across Texas in a grim and sometimes gory search for clues as to what caused the shuttle to break apart on Saturday, just 16 minutes from landing at its home base.
"We're leaving nothing to chance. We're looking at every piece of evidence, we're securing all the debris and assuring we look at every possible angle of what could have caused this horrible accident," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe told CBS' "Face the Nation" programme.
"It's been an accident of epic proportion."
On ABC's "This Week," he said investigators would "leave absolutely no stone unturned in that process," but that it was too early to speculate that insulation foam that came off in the launch and nicked a wing was behind the accident.
Columbia disintegrated high above the Texas plains almost 17 years to the day of the explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986, also killing the six astronauts and one American school teacher on board.
Body parts, fragments and pieces of the shuttle Columbia were strewn across a vast area. In some rugged rural areas, horses and four-wheel drive vehicles were used in the search.
"We cannot avoid the obvious," County Sheriff Thomas Kerss of Nacogdoches in Texas said on Sunday. "We have found remains."
With the United States jumpy about a countdown to possible war with Iraq and with an Israeli astronaut as part of the crew, US government officials were quick to rule out terrorism in the disaster.
On "Fox News Sunday," Ambassador Mohammed Aldouri, Iraq's representative to the United Nations, said only, "This is an unfortunate accident ... In Iraq they view this accident from that point of view. Certainly this is unfortunate for the families ... and for all people here in the United States."
World leaders sent their condolences to the United States.
A grim-faced President George W Bush, who led the nation in its grief and vowed the space shuttle programme would continue, attended church across the street from the White House where the congregation prayed for the astronauts.
Body parts, wreckage
Debris from Columbia rained down on fields, highways and a cemetery in northeast Texas, sending dozens of residents to hospitals for minor treatment after they were exposed to the smoldering metal wreckage. No was directly injured by the catastrophic break-up on the ground.
The destruction of what was America's oldest space shuttle was heralded by an ear-splitting series of booms that rattled houses across the area.
Police and national guardsmen fanned out to guard pieces of wreckage ranging in size from a postage stamp to the trunk of a car, marking them with a traffic cone or yellow tape, until NASA officials could collect them. The main search area is about 160 km long and 16 km wide.
"Our objective is to find out what caused this, fix it and make sure that we support the dream, the vision that those folks gave their lives to," NASA chief O'Keefe said. Authorities warned the debris could be hazardous.
Police outside Lufkin, Texas, were reported to have found human remains and in Nacogdoches a resident, William Pinkston, told Reuters he found human hair among debris in his yard.
The space agency has promised a seven-day-a-week, 24-hours-a-day probe. It will include studying everything from photos taken by spy satellites to examining every bit of debris recovered from the end of the 16-day scientific mission.
Beside the NASA investigation there will be a separate independent inquiry led by retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman, who was the co-chairman of an independent commission that investigated the attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
NASA officials said the three remaining shuttles are grounded until the cause of the disaster is found and corrected and they are working to unlock the mystery of what happened.
The Challenger disaster kept the shuttle fleet from flying for almost three years until its cause - faulty welds in rocket boosters - was discovered and corrected in a programme that cost billions of dollars.
Government agencies, including the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, joined the investigation and the military was called in to help the search-and-recovery effort.
Keeping the shuttles grounded raised questions about the resupply of the International Space Station because the shuttle is the main resupply vehicle for the space outpost.
Russia goes ahead with launch, nations grieve
The world's other big space power, Russia, sent condolences to Washington, but on Sunday went ahead with the launch of a cargo rocket carrying food and fuel to the space station.
The disaster plunged Americans into a national grief not felt since Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by hijacked airliners on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A nation seemingly poised on the brink of war with Iraq and fearful over the state of its economy suddenly had another crisis to ponder.
America was not alone in its heartbreak. The crew of the shuttle Columbia was a mosaic of nationalities that included the first Indian-born woman and the first Israeli in space.
The Israeli killed, Ilan Ramon, an air force colonel, was a national hero whose exploits aboard Columbia had been followed closely at home. The son of a Holocaust survivor, Ramon was the youngest pilot to take part in the successful 1981 Israeli raid that destroyed a controversial Iraqi nuclear plant.
Heading out to space, Ramon was entrusted with a palm-sized Torah scroll kept safe by a Jewish boy who survived a German concentration camp during World War II. Ramon's 5-year-old daughter Noa, in America to welcome her father home, was reported to have asked her mother: "How can you die in space? People are supposed to die only on Earth."
In Karnal, India, friends and relatives streamed through the streets to grieve at the house where Kalpana Chawla, a 41-year-old aerospace engineer aboard the shuttle, was born. Although she became a US citizen, Chawla, remained a symbol of pride for millions of Indians.
Dramatic television images of the shuttle's descent showed several white trails, tinged with fire, streaking through blue skies after the shuttle fell apart 16 minutes from home.
VIPs assembled to greet the astronauts at Kennedy Space Center were led away after reports of the break-up. They included Israeli astronaut Ramon's wife and four children.
Speculation on the cause of the disaster centered on the loss of temperature sensors in the spacecraft's left wing on re-entry. The area had been hit by a piece of foam rubber insulation just after the shuttle's launch and officials said they would look closely at the impact of the insulation.
Besides mission commander Rick Husband, Ramon and Chawla, the Columbia crew consisted of Pilot William McCool, Payload Commander Michael Anderson, Mission Specialists David Brown and Laurel Clark.
© Reuters/AAP
