Just two days before Columbia’s mysterious break-up during its fiery descent, a safety engineer warned by e-mail about risks of “catastrophic” failures from extreme heat causing the shuttle’s tyres to burst inside the spacecraft, Nasa has disclosed.

A recovery team in Texas has found the nose cone of the space shuttle Columbia after it crashed to Earth on Saturday.

Hundreds of airline crash experts, engineers and forensic scientists have converged on Texas and Louisiana to help retrieve pieces of the space shuttle Columbia.

Charred human remains have been found among the debris from the stricken space shuttle Columbia.