Sunday, February 1, 2004
KSC: ‘It is her final resting place’
By SANDRA FREDERICK
NEWS-JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — Buried underground in two abandoned silos on the Air Force side of this complex, broken parts of the shuttle Challenger lie at rest.
Seven miles away, some of the 83,000 pieces of Columbia, too, are in their “final resting place” in the words of Shuttle Launch Director Mike Leinbach.
Some are in boxes, others prominently displayed inside a 7,000-square foot air-conditioned room on the 16th floor of the Vehicle Assembly Building. A small, closed room to one side holds the reconstructed cockpit and some of the seats that held the seven astronauts on their way home from their mission to space on Feb. 1, 2003.
“With the Columbia, it was a hypersonic breakup in space, something that has never happened before,” George Diller, NASA spokesman for Kennedy Space Center, said Friday. “In the case of the Challenger, it was the kind of explosion we knew about.”
Diller said the debris from the 1986 accident is available for research - just like the Columbia´s will be - but not much has been done with it. About 60 percent of the orbiter was found, he said.
In contrast, the Columbia disintegrated and burned up when it came into the atmosphere, so only about 38 percent was found.
Some of the cardboard boxes in the Columbia room are marked “unknown” because the parts are so small or burned they cannot be identified. NASA officials are still receiving about eight shuttle parts a month from throughout eastern Texas, said Leinbach.
The area containing the remains of the Columbia is not open to the public, but NASA hopes to use it as a research resource for scientists and engineers. There has been talk about displaying the debris at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., but no decision has been made, Leinbach said.
“This is not a museum. It is not a laboratory. It is her final resting place,” Leinbach told a group of media during a tour Friday. “It is thought of as Columbia´s Arlington (National Cemetery).”
Special Report: THE COLUMBIA CHRONICLES |  |