Professor: 'Mission was Doomed'

11:31am UK, Sunday February 02, 2003

The space shuttle Columbia was "doomed" from the launch of the mission, a leading British scientist has claimed.

Professor Andre Balogh, of London's Imperial College, told Sky News he thought the spacecraft had effectively been crippled on take-off.

Prof Balogh: 'NASA was aware'

At the time, 16 days ago, a piece of protective foam was seen to have come loose as the shuttle left the ground, striking the shuttle's wing.

The damage done to the wing, said Prof Balogh, was "just there and waiting to destroy Columbia".

The flight, he said, "was doomed from the launch".

He told Sky's Jeremy Thompson it was clear to him that this was the cause of the shuttle breaking up under the rigours of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.

"The thermal protection was breaking up and failing and that failure was due to the impact that happened on launch," he said.

Pressed by Jeremy Thompson, Prof Balogh said he was satisfied that NASA had been fully aware of the problem and had, in all probability, known all along it was potentially fatal.

Ron Dittemore, NASA's space shuttle programme manager, confirmed the insulation came off the fuel tanks at liftoff on January 16 and banged into the spacecraft's left wing.

He said it was judged by ground controllers not to have damaged the orbiter's critical heat shield.

But on Saturday, after the Columbia had reentered the earth's atmosphere to head home, sensors in the left wing began to fail, indicating excessive heat was seeping into the shuttle structure.

NASA lost contact with the shuttle at around 1400 BST while it was almost 40 miles above Earth.

"The first indications of a potential problem .... were of the loss of sensors, temperature sensors in the hydraulic systems on the left," Dittemore said at Johnson Space Centre.

"They were followed seconds and minutes later by several other problems, including loss of tire pressure indications on the left main gear," he added.