Posted on 02/04/2003 1:35:26 AM PST by kattracks
The hunt for the remains of the space shuttle Columbia expanded all the way west to California as officials announced late yesterday they had found the front of the doomed shuttle's nose cone in Texas.The search zone, initially limited to a 500-square-mile swath of southeast Texas and northwest Louisiana, was broadened after NASA received reports that Columbia might have started breaking up sooner than first thought.
"If we find any debris upstream of Fort Worth, New Mexico and Arizona, that's really important to us," said Ron Dittemore, manager of the space shuttle program. "That would be a real key to the puzzle."
The front of the nose cone was found in Hemphill, Tex., buried deep in a thick pine forest near the Louisiana border.
"It's reasonably intact," said Warren Zehner, an Environmental Protection Agency official, who estimated the piece weighs about 500 pounds.
But investigators are especially eager to find tiles from the shuttle's left wing, which could hold clues to what caused the Columbia to break apart Saturday morning.
One tile was found outside Fort Worth, Tex., shortly after the blast, but apparently it wasn't the tell-tale tile, Dittemore said.
"It's like a needle in a haystack," he said. "That missing link is out there. We need to be persistent, and we will find it."
More than 12,000 shuttle pieces have been found, most of them in and around the sleepy college town of Nacogdoches, Tex.
"But collecting and cataloguing them take time," said Gary Moore, an on-scene coordinator with the EPA.
He said they've assembled seven-member teams to collect shuttle pieces ranging from postage stamp size to a pickup-size section that includes a 7-foot portion of Columbia's cabin.
Treacherous terrain
When a piece is identified, Army demolitions experts first ensure it won't blow up before EPA experts tag and bag it - and carry it off to one of three collection centers the feds have set up, Moore said.
But that painstaking process has been slowed even further by the treacherous terrain along the Texas-Louisiana border, a region that holds four national forests, covering almost 700,000 acres, and two reservoirs - including Toledo Bend.
This is where searchers using sonar - acting on a tip from a fisherman - found a car-size chunk of shuttle resting on the bottom in 20 feet of water.
There are more bobcats than people in these parts, and "there is no way to describe how many pieces there are and how spread over the landscape they are," said James Kroll, a mapping expert from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches.
"Ten years from now, folks are going to be walking around the woods and finding stuff," he said.
That doesn't deter searchers like Bryan Bell, 35, a paramedic from Lavaca, Tex., who searched Sabine National Forest with his cadaver-sniffing dog, Boomer.
"This is about the families of these astronauts," Bell said. "It's our civic duty to try the best we can and bring these seven people back home to their families."
The 15 body parts found about 60 miles west of the Texas-Louisiana border have been collected by FBI forensics agents and shipped to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for identification.
"We continue to recover human remains, and we're handling it with the utmost care, the utmost respect and dignity," Dittemore said.
I would be surprised if any smoking gun survives. Is this going to be another TWA800 style investigation?
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