NASA Plans Early Return For Shuttle

NASA is making plans to return the space shuttle to orbit as early as this fall and has instructed engineers to be prepared to make any "corrective actions" recommended by the board now investigating the Columbia tragedy.

William F. Readdy, NASA's associate administrator for space flight, issued a memo this week instructing agency officials to organize a team to plan for quickly making changes in the space shuttle – or its operations – so that the craft would be quickly ready to fly.

"The team will prepare for a safe return to flight as soon as practicable," the March 12 memo said. "As a goal, the SSP (Space Shuttle Program) shall plan for corrective actions and reviews which support a launch opportunity as early as the fall of 2003."

Readdy said that NASA will be guided by the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which is studying the factors involved in the Feb. 1 destruction of Columbia in which the seven crew members perished.

Meanwhile, sources close to the investigation have told CBS News they now believe the shuttle's left landing gear door was in place and was not the source of the breach in the left wing. They say the evidence points to initial damage on the wing's leading edge.

Some newly recovered debris includes part of the well, reports CBS News Correspondent Peter King, and burn marks indicate the hot plasma was not entering the wing through the well area, it was flowing outward, meaning the heat came from somewhere else.

One source says a breach in the reinforced carbon leading edge seems more likely.

Officials have said that shuttle debris probably will be found intermittently over the next several months.

One piece was found Thursday in Nacogdoches, Texas. Local residents stumbled upon a long metallic strip behind an old business, and called authorities who confirmed that the piece was in fact part of the doomed space shuttle.

One of the big questions about the Feb. 1 accident that killed the Columbia's seven astronauts is still just how much damage could have been done when foam insulation hit the shuttle's left wing after launch. Sources tell CBS News investigators will take a big air gun used to shoot test objects into jet engines, and fire large pieces of foam at sections of the leading edge from other shuttles.

Some of those pieces have been flown on Discovery, but other pieces will come from the prototype shuttle Enterprise, which never flew in space. Those tests could begin within a few weeks.

Although Thursday's debris discovery was something of an accident, much of the recovered debris has been the result of a local search method that has reportedly "awed" NASA officials.

Using 200-acre-grid maps produced by James Kroll and Darryl McDonald — Stephen F. Austin University professors who handled initial mapping efforts — officials sent a small group of surveyors to the search sites to mark off boundaries.

Twenty-member search teams then searched within the grids.

Each team was equipped with GPS marking equipment, plastic collection bags, gloves and spray paint. They marked progress boundaries and debris sites with spray paint as they went.

"We came up with that," Nacogdoches County Exposition Center manager Bill Plunkett was quoted in Friday's editions of the Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel. "And after we initiated that system, we had several phone calls from astronauts and other people who wanted to know how we had collected so much material."

Officials reported that as of Wednesday they had covered approximately 41 percent of the total air search area and about one-quarter of the total ground search.