3/5/2003: Columbia reconstruction room

[Undertoad]

Thanks to Elspode for passing this along.

So far, thay've only found 10% of the shuttle Columbia... and here some of it is, in a big room marked off in a grid pattern that they're using to reconstruct it to try to figure out exactly what happened. The details are in the story here, along with another image that clarifies: the above shot is only a small area of the entire large room, a hangar that's obviously larger than the shuttle itself.

Details in the story are interesting: Only about 10 percent of the shuttle's weight, 270,000 pounds, has been recovered, or about 8,110 pieces of debris. Of that, 5,297 pieces have been identified.

But also interesting was this thought: The shuttle reconstruction gives employees something to do so they don't sit idle while the space shuttle fleet is grounded indefinitely.

Ouch.