NASA vows to find why shuttle exploded

NASA yesterday vowed to “leave absolutely no stone unturned” in an exhaustive investigation into why the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board.

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 said.

“It’s been an accident of epic proportion.”

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 January 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 yesterday. “We have found remains.”

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.

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 break-up on the ground.

The destruction of America’s oldest space shuttle was heralded by an ear-splitting series of booms that rattled houses across the area.