The tragic fate of the space shuttle Columbia left many questions in our minds. Why did it explode? What caused the multi-million dollar shuttle to disintegrate 39 miles above Texas, 16 minutes from a safe landing in Florida?

The first thing that came to everybody’s mind was terrorism. No, that was not it. They repeatedly made that clear the day of the crash. What then, could it be? Space shuttles don’t just crash, do they? Well the fact is that we take it for granted that space shuttles don’t just crash. In fact, they do, and it only takes a very small thing to go wrong in order to initiate a disaster.

In 1986, when the Challenger exploded, they assigned a group of investigators to find out what went wrong. They called this group the Rogers Commission. They found that the destruction of the Challenger was the result of exhaust flames leaking through the right solid rocket booster and field joint, which penetrated the external tank and ignited the hydrogen and oxygen fuel, causing the explosion.

That sounds like a lot of scientific mumbo-jumbo, I know. Basically, what happened was that exhaust gases hit something they weren’t supposed to on the shuttle and the results were catastrophic. There was no pre-emptive warning for the Challenger, but there was for the Columbia.

A Feb. 4 article by the New York Times revealed a 1997 report from a senior NASA engineer, which found that hardened foam tearing off the external fuel tank of the Columbia shuttle had damaged more than 300 heat- resistant tiles during a flight. A number of other flights had also experienced damage due to the falling foam, according to the report.

I know that foam doesn’t sound like it could cause that much damage, but when you’re traveling at 17,600 miles per hour, falling foam can be a big problem. According to the New York Times, NASA decided that this problem was not crucial to the existence of the spacecraft, and they ignored it.

Get out the red flag, and blow your whistles now.

There is no official word as to what went wrong on the Columbia expedition, but NASA has assigned a team of investigators to look into it – dubbed the Gehman Board, after retired Navy Administrator Harold Gehman Jr. The board consists of Air Force and Navy officers, FAA investigators and NASA employees. The team has recovered a lot of debris, most notably a large piece of the left wing, believed to be the area where the trouble may have started.

The current hypothesis is that failure of the thermal control tiles on the left wing caused the disaster. These are the same tiles that were damaged during earlier Columbia flights. Each of the 27,000 tiles is marked with a serial number, so the more pieces the investigators find, the more they will be able to pinpoint the area that caused the problems.

Incidentally, Time magazine named the 2002 “whistleblowers” of the year as: Coleen Rowley, the FBI attorney who sent a memo to the head of the agency after the bureau brushed off her pre-Sept. 11 pleas to keep tabs on a man now accused of being a Sept. 11 co-conspirator; Cynthia Cooper, of WorldCom, who told the board of directors about the company’s phony bookkeeping; Sherron Watkins, the Enron vice president who sent a warning about the company’s improper accounting to her boss, Kenneth Lay.

Let’s hope that for the sake of the families and friends of the crew of Columbia, the investigators find the cause to be something other than hardened foam. I’m sure the public relations people from NASA would appreciate hearing that, too.

Watson is a sophomore print journalism major and a columnist for The Spectator.