US: The crew of the space shuttle Columbia were doomed from the moment it blasted off from Cape Kennedy for its 16-day flight, according to the theory now favoured by scientists at the US National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA officials said yesterday that damage to Columbia's thermal tiles during lift-off is now the leading candidate in the search for reasons for the shuttle's disintegration as it re-entered the earth's atmosphere on Saturday morning.
The cable news channel MSNBC claimed yesterday that an internal NASA memo written two days before the planned touchdown warned that a tile, which broke away from the fuel tank installation 80 seconds after lift-off, hit the underbelly, causing a 7.5 by 30 ins gash.
New evidence released by NASA showed that the temperature on Columbia's left side rose sharply in the five minutes before the craft disintegrated.
US President George Bush summoned the head of NASA, Mr Sean O'Keefe, to the White House for a personal briefing on the tragedy yesterday. Afterwards Mr Bush vowed that "America's journey into space will go on".
Mr Bush's budget proposals, released yesterday but drawn up before the disaster, propose increasing NASA's funding by about 3 per cent to nearly $15.5 billion next year and increasing the shuttle programme from $3.2 billion to $3.9 billion.
However, the programme's future is in much doubt now. NASA has lost two of its ageing fleet of five shuttles, and all 14 American astronauts lost in space died in shuttle accidents - seven in the Challenger explosion in 1986 and seven in Columbia.
The President will today attend a memorial service in Houston, Texas, for those who died as the shuttle re-entered the earth's atmosphere at 9.00 a.m. on Saturday.
Though possibly doomed, the crew almost certainly did not know it, as seen from a cheerful e-mail sent to friends on the day before the tragedy by astronaut Laurel Clark of Wisconsin, the mother of an eight-year-old son, on her first shuttle mission.
"Hello from above our magnificent planet earth," she wrote. "The perspective is truly awe-inspiring . . . I have seen some incredible sights: lightning spreading over the Pacific, the Aurora Australis lighting up the entire visible horizon with the cityglow of Australia below, the crescent moon setting over the limb of the earth, the vast plains of Africa and the dunes on Cape Horn, rivers breaking through tall mountain passes, the scars of humanity, the continuous line of life extending from North America, through Central America and into South America, a crescent moon setting over the limb of our blue planet."
NASA expanded the search for debris yesterday to an area from central Texas to western Louisiana. Thousands of fragments were found over the weekend and an additional 270 reports of debris sightings were received up to midday yesterday. Fifteen of these were human remains.
A NASA official said it was concentrating on the recovery of body parts. "We are trying to recover these national heroes and get them back to their families as soon as possible," he said.