Utahn says shuttle lost debris in 1985

Utah astronaut Don Lind was aboard space shuttle Challenger as it roared into space in April 1985 when an incident eerily similar to the latest crisis occurred.

"We saw a big chunk of ice come off the external tank and hit the OMS pod," he said.

The OMS pod houses the Orbital Maneuvering System, engines that maneuver the shuttle in space and send it back to Earth. The pod is in what's termed the shuttle's thermal shadow. That is a location that protects it from the huge heat buildup experienced by other parts when the vehicle re-enters the atmosphere.

"When you re-enter, this (the OMS pod) is not the highly critical tiles on the underbelly," Lind added.

Challenger's crew asked NASA officials if they wanted them to turn their television cameras toward the pod and show where the ice struck.

"They weren't even interested enough on the ground" to have the astronauts document the site, he said.

Lind, reached by telephone at his home in Smithfield, noted that in other shuttle flights, "We've had pieces of foam and ice come off all the time."

During the recent launch, a large piece of foam insulation detached from space shuttle Discovery's external fuel tank, leading NASA to ground future flights until the debris problem is solved.

So far, no danger seems to face the seven astronauts. The foam apparently did not seriously damage Discovery. Careful inspections had not turned up any alarming damage by Thursday afternoon.

But the event was a sickening echo of the accident that destroyed Columbia 2 1/2 years ago. At launch, a piece of insulation foam from the external liquid fuel tank blew off and punched a hole in the left wing. That let superheated air tunnel through when the ship re-entered the atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003.

Columbia was destroyed, and the seven astronauts were killed.

Lind's trip on Challenger happened nine months before the 1986 accident that killed the crew of Challenger's flight STS-51-L, and nearly 18 years before the Columbia disaster. Back in 1985, NASA was more casual about flight incidents.

Today, 20 years after Lind's flight, NASA still has not solved the problem of debris coming off the external liquid fuel tank.

"The damage on our flight was orders of magnitude less significant than what happened to Columbia, because that was on the leading edge of the wing," Lind recalled. "Ours was in the thermal shadow, and it literally was not a big deal."

During the expensive effort over the past two years to improve safety, according to NASA, "redesigning the external tank became a top priority in the agency's return to flight work."