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NACOGDOCHES, Texas (AP) -- Astronaut Eileen Collins will always have a special bond with space shuttle Columbia. In 1999, it gave her the opportunity to become the first woman ever to command a shuttle flight.
On Thursday, more than two months after Columbia broke apart, Collins and two other astronauts came to East Texas to pay tribute to the spacecraft by helping volunteers search for debris.
About 32 percent of Columbia, or more than 50,000 pieces, has been recovered. They are being taken to a hangar at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"I have a special place in my heart for Columbia. When I walked into the hangar and saw the pieces, it was very sad and I still feel sad about it and I'll feel sad for a long time. But we need to overcome this and we need to get on with spaceflight,'' Collins told reporters.
Collins, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi and U.S. astronaut James Kelly -- all scheduled to go into orbit aboard the shuttle Atlantis when flights resume -- spent more than two hours scouring the leaf-littered ground of a wooded area near the Nacogdoches airport.
The work by the astronauts and about 40 other searchers paid off.
"We found a tile, yeah, yeah,'' Noguchi told Collins, his commander, as he handed her a sealed plastic bag with the piece of broken tile. ``I'm very happy.''
All three astronauts wore the same thick yellow shirts and yellow hard hats as the other searchers. The only way to distinguish them was by the NASA stickers and stickers of their mission patch pasted on their helmets.
"We wanted to come down and get an idea what they are doing, as well as to thank these guys and hop in there with them and let them know we're completely behind them on this,'' Kelly said. ``The bottom line is they're part of the team. If they don't do their job, then we're not going to get to do our job later.''
Shawn Martin, a U.S. Forest Service worker from Washington who was among the searchers, said he was grateful for the astronauts' assistance.
"They wanted to pound brush with us. They fell in line and stuck up with us and bled with us,'' Martin said.
Columbia broke apart over Texas on Feb. 1 as it aimed for a Florida landing. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. Shuttle debris was scattered across East Texas and Louisiana.
A board investigating the accident suspects a 2-pound chunk of insulating foam from the shuttle's external fuel tank ripped away during its Jan. 16 launch and caused a breach along the leading edge of the left wing that let in hot atmospheric gases as the spacecraft re-entered the atmosphere on its return home.
Efforts to improve shuttle safety could add tasks to the next mission, the astronauts said. That work could include taking photos in orbit of the shuttle's underside and leading edges of its wings.
"Anything we can do in orbit to check those things out and anything we come up with over the next few months is obviously going to make us feel more comfortable that we got a handle on the things that went wrong with Columbia,'' Kelly said.
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