Report on Columbia Details How Astronauts Died

[TheMercenary]

Seven astronauts slipped into unconsciousness within seconds and their bodies were whipped around in seats whose restraints failed as the space shuttle Columbia spun out of control and disintegrated in 2003, according to a new report from NASA.

While the astronauts’ upper bodies flailed, the helmets that were supposed to protect them ended up battering their skulls, the report said, and “lethal trauma occurred to the unconscious or deceased crew due to the lack of upper-body support and restraint.”

Investigators state bluntly in the 400-page report that better equipment in the crew cabin would not have saved the astronauts on the morning of Feb. 1, 2003, as the Columbia disintegrated after re-entering the atmosphere on the way to its landing strip in Florida. “The breakup of the crew module and the crew’s subsequent exposure to hypersonic entry conditions was not survivable by any currently existing capability,” they wrote.

They added, “There is no known complete protection from the breakup event except to prevent its occurrence.”

The report’s goal, NASA officials said, is to provide a guideline for safety in the design of future spacecraft. In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, N. Wayne Hale, Jr., a former head of the shuttle program, said, “I call on spacecraft designers from all the other nations of the world, as well as the commercial and personal spacecraft designers here at home, to read this report and apply these lessons which have been paid for so dearly.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/sc...ml?ref=science

This was an interesting piece of closure to the Shuttle Program.