Isles share in
mourning tragedy'Columbia is lost,' Bush tells nation
Maui telescopes may offer clues to tragedy
Dreams and drive unite Magnificent 7By Leila Fujimori
lfujimori@starbulletin.com
For Claude Onizuka, watching video of the flaming Columbia space shuttle disintegrate early yesterday morning brought back memories of a day almost exactly 17 years ago. Onizuka, the brother of astronaut Ellison Onizuka, witnessed the space shuttle Challenger carrying his brother burst into flames and plunge into the sea seconds after liftoff on Jan 28, 1986.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Debris from the space shuttle Columbia streaked across the sky yesterday over Tyler, Texas. Amateur photographer Dr. Scott Lieberman shot a series of photos showing the break-up of the spacecraft.
"It (today's shuttle accident) opened up a lot of wounds," he said. "A little over 17 years later and we lose another seven astronauts. It's a sad day."
At the Onizuka Space Center, a space flight museum at the Kona International Airport in Keahole, a small memorial was set up for the Columbia crew.
The crew's photograph adorned with a white tuberose lei sat next to a vase of roses and a space shuttle model.
Claude Onizuka visited the center yesterday, which had more visitors than usual.
All across Hawaii, people joined the rest of the nation in mourning the loss of the Columbia crew members .
At the state capitol, military installations and other buildings, flags were lowered to half staff. A moment of silence was held before the Hula Bowl on Maui.
For 23-year-old Mandie Leonard, an aspiring astronaut who works at the Onizuka Center for International Astronomy's visitor information station on Mauna Kea, the news hit hard.
"I was just mortified because that's hopefully going to be me one day, and it really hits close to home," said Leonard.
Leonard, who double-majors in astronomy and geology at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, is interested in planetary geology.
"The shuttle news just made me want to cry when I heard it," said Leonard.
Art Kimura, who with his wife, Rene, runs Future Flight Hawaii, a program that uses space flight to teach children about science, said he must find a way to discuss the tragedy with students.
Kimura will be visiting four Oahu schools, conducting the Astronaut Ellison Onizuka Family Science Night this week.
He also works with the Challenger Center Hawaii program at Barbers Point Elementary School, where a flight simulator is set up. One classroom is designed like a space station; the other like a mission control room.
As soon as the news broke this morning, Kimura began planning how to talk about the tragedy, got a graphic about the Columbia ready and pulled out a shuttle tile.
"I'm going to try and frame it in a way to not have this tragedy diminish their future and their dreams," said Kimura.
On Tuesday, the anniversary of the Challenger crash, Norma Sakamoto laid flowers on her brother Ellison's grave at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, which she visits weekly.
But yesterday, his death didn't seem so long ago.
"For the families, it's very sad," she said. "We can understand what they're going through."
Claude Onizuka said his brother went into the astronaut program with his eyes wide open, knowing the dangers.
"If anything went wrong, he knew he was sitting on top of a giant bomb," said Claude of his brother, who was two years his senior.
"This morning, Hawaii and the rest of our country woke to the sad and terrible loss of seven brave explorers who were living their dreams during the space shuttle Columbia's 16-day mission," said Gov. Linda Lingle in a written statement.
"These men and women were an inspiration to all Americans and to those from other countries who were represented. What was to be a time of celebration of human triumph, turned tragically into grief."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Fans in the stands of War Memorial Stadium observed a moment of silence in honor of the space shuttle astronauts who died earlier in the day, before the Hula Bowl game yesterday in Wailuku.
In another written statement, Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris said, "As we contemplate the significance of their actions as pioneers of science and space exploration, let us be grateful for their accomplishments and proud of their service to our country.
"As a nation we can honor these seven brave astronauts by ensuring that our voyage of discovery continues."
BACK TO TOP |
‘Columbia is lost,’ WASHINGTON >> The space shuttle Columbia broke up yesterday morning on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard and sending fiery debris over Texas in the second loss of a space shuttle in 17 years.
Bush tells nation
The 7-member crew dies
Isles share in mourning tragedy
upon re-entry as debris
from the shuttle
rains across Texas
Maui telescopes may offer clues to tragedy
Dreams and drive unite Magnificent 7
Star-Bulletin news services
There was no immediate explanation of what caused the disintegration of the oldest shuttle in NASA's fleet, but there were some clues. By late yesterday, space agency engineers were describing a cascading series of failures of sensors on the left side of the craft.
That led to speculation that some kind of structural damage took place -- perhaps caused by insulation that fell loose when Columbia lifted off 16 days ago, perhaps from some other cause -- that triggered a catastrophic failure about 9 a.m. EST.
Just a little over a minute into Columbia's launch on Jan. 16, a chunk of insulating foam peeled away from the external fuel tank and smacked into the left wing, which like the rest of the shuttle is covered with tiles to protect the ship from the extreme heat of re-entry into the atmosphere.
Yesterday, that same wing started exhibiting sensor failures and other problems 23 minutes before Columbia was scheduled to touch down. With just 16 minutes to go before landing, the shuttle disintegrated over Texas.
Shuttle manager Ron Dittemore said there was nothing that the astronauts could have done in orbit to fix damaged thermal tiles and nothing that flight controllers could have done to safely bring home a severely scarred shuttle.
The disaster occurred roughly 40 miles above Earth as the shuttle slipped into the netherworld between outer space and the upper atmosphere, just as it was slowing to 12,500 mph and was minutes from its destination, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
But miraculously, officials say, the countless bits of flaming debris that rained down in east Texas, and then in Louisiana, injured not a soul on the ground.
There were horrifying discoveries, nonetheless. Officials confirmed last night that human remains were found in Sabine County, Texas; there, in Hemphill, a hospital worker said he found a charred torso, thigh bone and skull near debris on a rural road.
The grim fallout scattered along a track at least 100 miles long and 10 miles wide, officials said. In Nacogdoches County, Texas, close to 1,000 reports of debris had come in by late afternoon, covering 500 square miles, more than half the county's area. But it seemed likely that there was more than one track of debris: Fragments of the shuttle were also discovered some 80 miles north in Shreveport, La.
The loss of the Columbia, coming nearly 18 months after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and amid the growing likelihood of war with Iraq, was a particularly harsh blow to a nation under enormous stress.
ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTOS
Flowers sat next to a piece of debris yesterday from the shuttle in Nacogdoches, Texas.
President Bush, informed of the disaster at Camp David by his chief of staff, Andrew Card Jr., rushed back to the White House. He appeared drawn and stricken as he addressed the nation five hours after the shuttle broke up.
"The Columbia is lost," he said from the Cabinet room. "There are no survivors."
But as President Ronald Reagan did 17 years and four days ago, when the shuttle Challenger exploded, Bush vowed that the American space program would go on.
The best-known member of the crew was the first Israeli to go into space, Ilan Ramon, a colonel in the Israeli air force.
Because of Ramon's participation in the mission, security was extraordinarily tight. Experts said it was extremely unlikely that the shuttle had been deliberately struck, noting that it was so high in the atmosphere that it was out of range of antiaircraft systems and missiles. A review of satellite data, administration officials said, detected nothing untoward.
The flight was under the command of Col. Rick Husband of the Air Force and piloted by a Navy commander, William McCool. The mission was an unusual one for NASA these days in that it was intended purely for scientific experiments, more than 80 in all. More commonly, the shuttle is used to transport crew, equipment and supplies to the International Space Station, and to support military missions.
The scientific payload was overseen by Lt. Col. Michael Anderson of the Air Force; Kalpana Chawla, an aerospace engineer; and two Navy doctors, Capt. David Brown and Cmdr. Laurel Clark.
Seeking the cause of the disaster will be the subject of two investigations, one conducted by the space agency and another directed by someone outside NASA.
"We will find the cause, we will fix it, and then we will move on," said William Readdy, a former astronaut who now runs the agency's manned flight operations.
ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTOS
Security officers at Kennedy Space Center lowered the U.S. flag and the space shuttle Columbia flag yesterday at the center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., after the loss of Columbia and its seven-member crew.
