Columbia's Final Minutes

Newsday has a very long and interesting analysis and reconstruction of the events that caused the destruction of the shuttle Columbia early last year.  All the news in past months about the "chunk of foam" damaging the wing and ultimately causing the accident was somewhat confusing to me, because the idea of a piece of foam (connotation=soft) damaging a wing that’s designed to withstand thousands of degrees of heat (connotation=hard) just didn’t make sense.  But this article explains it thus:

Ultimately, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board was able to conclude, without qualification, that the foam impact was the root cause of the accident; that the impact had knocked a 6- to 10-inch hole in the lower half of RCC panel 8 on the shuttle’s left wing; and that a plume of super-heated plasma entering through that breach had destroyed the wing and triggered the destruction of the orbiter.

The team concluded the foam broke away from the left bipod ramp 81.7 seconds after liftoff and hit the underside of Columbia’s left wing two-tenths of a second later.  The foam measured 21 to 27 inches long by 12 to 18 inches wide.  It was tumbling at 18 revolutions per second.  Before the foam separated, the shuttle - and the foam - had a velocity of 1,568 mph, about twice the speed of sound.  Because of its low density, the foam rapidly decelerated once in the airstream, slowing by 550 mph in that two-tenths of a second.  The foam didn’t fall on to the leading edge of the left wing as much as the shuttle ran into it from below.  The relative speed of the collision was more than 500 mph, delivering more than a ton of force.

On July 7, investigators using a nitrogen-powered cannon fired a 1,200-cubic-inch block of foam weighing 1.67 pounds at RCC panel 8, taken from the shuttle Atlantis.  Traveling at 530 mph, the foam blew a ragged 16-inch hole in the RCC panel, vividly demonstrating how much damage foam could do.

The article then goes into the second-by-second account of the events recorded by the various sensors, and the adjustments that the computers made to try to compensate for what was happening.

It’s really sad as you think of the seven people on the ship, who had no idea anything was amiss until seconds before they would be killed by it.  Still, to me, those are just seven random people whom I don’t know.  I can’t imagine being a friend or family member and reading this article.

What’s even more sad is the final line of the piece, spoken by the man who found the remains of one of the crew members: "I am a very devout Christian, and I prayed for that person’s soul."  That’s sad because the man who said it (along with many other "Christians") has a completely inaccurate understanding of why Jesus came to this earth.  God doesn’t choose what happens to a person’s soul when that person dies.  Each person must decide that for himself, and it’s a decision that must be made during life, not after death.  It’s truly saddening to see people like this, claiming to be "devout Christians," and then completely misrepresenting the most fundamental teaching of Christ.