Fragments of a Mystery

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As is the case in all investigations, officials want to point not merely to the hardware responsible for the accident but also to the people responsible for mission safety. In 1990 a NASA-commissioned study looked into the problem of tile damage and warned of some of the very problems that might have occurred on Columbia's final flight. A study conducted in September pointed to debris breaking off the external fuel tank in the first 80 seconds of flight. Whether NASA officials could have done more with this information or whether the flaws were woven too deeply into the shuttles will become part of the ongoing inquest.

The business of turning over all these rocks is getting under way. Immediately after the accident, the agency announced the formation of an in-house panel to sift through the evidence and come up with answers. Critics howled that no agency--particularly not one in such hot water--should be allowed to investigate itself. Late last week, after 16 Democratic members of the House wrote a letter of protest to the White House, NASA backed away, ceding the job to an independent review board.

Congress will do some reviewing too. Both the House and Senate are ginning up for hearings into the disaster. President Bush, a Texan who has reason to wish the home-state space program well, declared his support for NASA last week, but space-agency employees remain worried. "It's really pretty somber here," says a NASA contractor at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "People are worried about layoffs, like after Challenger." In New Orleans, the work force at the Lockheed Martin plant that applies the foam to the shuttles' external tanks had already fallen from 4,800 before the Challenger explosion to 2,000 now. There's concern that Columbia's death could slash the payroll even further. Things are similarly glum in Chicago at the headquarters of Boeing, the shuttle's principal contractor, where workers are still reeling from the 15,000 layoffs that followed the terrorism-related slowdown in air travel.

For now, the American people seem to be willing to give NASA a chance. In a TIME/CNN poll, 46% of respondents said they were "deeply upset" by the disaster, compared with 63% right after Challenger--suggesting either post-9/11 grief fatigue or an acceptance of the risks of space travel. Seventy-one percent did say space flight is worth the risks. But 64% want all shuttles grounded until the problem is fixed, and only 49% want money to be spent on a ship to replace the lost one.

Despite this, both the shuttle and the International Space Station may be rigged for survival--if not for success. More than half of all congressional districts already drink from the ISS trough, and the giant project cannot survive without the shuttle trucking up its parts. Buy one, and you're stuck with the other. "No one is going to write off the shuttle and station. We're too invested in them," says Representative Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics.