ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO The multi-state hunt for shuttle Columbia wreckage is likely to fuel debate regarding future flights over populated areas of experimental space vehicles.
Search teams are recovering tiny to sizeable pieces of Columbia, with some items causing damage to property on the ground and narrowly missing people.
While the hazardous rain of space plane fragments are being collected in the hopes of piecing together an answer to what caused the tragedy another likely outcome is how future spaceports should safely handle outgoing and incoming traffic.
Public safety
The Challenger mishap 17 years ago with the vehicle disintegrating shortly after takeoff caused a massive ocean recovery campaign to find space plane rubble.
Now the Columbia disaster highlights public safety issues in terms of high-speed, high-altitude reentry of vehicles over populated territory.
"This is the first reentry of a major object like this over a populated area," said William Ailor, Director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California.
Large reentering objects in the past, like the Russian Mir space station, smacked down in a stretch of remote ocean waters. So too did Americas Skylab space station, although flaming chunks of debris fell into out-of-the-way spots in Australia, Ailor said in a phone interview.
Throughout the decades, Ailor said, scores of satellites, old rocket parts, and other hardware have shot through Earths atmosphere. On occasion, some pieces crash on land, but of those, little in the way of property damage has resulted, he said.
However, with the dawn of reusable space planes coming back from space, "it is something that has to be considered carefully," Ailor said.
Real concern
Reentering vehicles that fly over land will become a real concern and an issue, said William Gaubatz, President of SpaceAvailable, LLC in Newport Beach. The consequences stemming from Columbias destructive dive above Earth "will cause much more emphasis on survivability [of a vehicle] through anomalies. Preferably, how do you avoid that kind of breakup," he told SPACE.com .
"Theres really no real analogy for that in aircraft. Occasionally, things do fall off airplanes. But the size of the area, the kind of dynamics and energy involved, is far different in this case," Gaubatz said.
Gaubatz was a key official in the building of the reusable rocket, the Delta Clipper, flown repeatedly at a White Sands, New Mexico test site in the late 1990s. He is taking part in the Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF-2003), being held here February 2-5.
Crop of Spaceports
At the STAIF-2003, sessions on spaceport development in New Mexico, Oklahoma, California, and other locations are underway.
Highlighted in various venues is the building of new types of suborbital and orbital craft, seen as critical to growing a multi-billion dollar space tourism market over the next few decades.
A crop of spaceports around the globe would allow point-to-point travel of passengers and cargo, predicts Jay Edwards, Executive Director of the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority in Oklahoma City.
Edwards told SPACE.com that the Columbia loss will yield an important data base of the debris patterns, and the fact that so little damage was done over a wide swath of territory. "That may well open up the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to reexamine their equations as to what is and is not allowable," he said, in terms of future regulations of space vehicles operating out of spaceports.
"There are some companies that are looking at their reentry corridor saying it would be much better to operate out of Australia, somewhere that you dont have a problem. But I dont think we want to drive launch systems out of the country either," Edwards said.
Edwards said that Oklahoma spaceport officials are winding up an environmental impact statement study this year. That analysis will also include anticipated exit and arrival corridors for vehicles operating from Oklahoma, "to determine whether or not we can be approved as a licensed spaceport," he said.
Reentry footprint
Columbias tragic ending created a large "footprint" of fragments, strewn across hundreds of miles. Reentry tiles, tanks, wiring, super structure, as well as helmets, patches and astronaut remains have been recovered to date.
"It is what you expect to see for reentry of something like this. Major portions of the vehicle survived and are being found. It might be surprising to people to see the variety of things that survived," said Ailor of The Aerospace Corporation.
"Its like opening an onion in a sense. There are all these various levels of skin on the outside designed to protect things on the inside. Those items are protected for a long time. They survive because something else will take the heat. Thats why were finding some of these things on the ground," Ailor said.
Ailor said a next step is collecting all the debris found, as well as sorting through video recorded by individuals of the last minutes of Columbia, as well as telemetry and radar data.
"This all has to be put together into a good comprehensive story of what was seen. Everything has to come together hereto provide a good understanding of what happened."
Parts of Columbia that showered down over California early on its destructive path -- will be critical pieces, Ailor said. They could offer the best clues as to what went wrong, he said.
Ailor said the public and law enforcement have all acted responsibly in dealing with this issue. Use of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites to precisely note where objects have been found, taking pictures of the fragments and cataloging the items, will be critical in revealing details about the space planes final moments, he said.
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