AMERICA was plunged into mourning yesterday after the space shuttle Columbia burst into flames as it re-entered the atmosphere at the end of a 16-day mission. Explosions ripped the craft apart, killing all seven crew members and scattering debris over hundreds of miles.

Mission controllers lost contact with the shuttle minutes before it was due to land at Kennedy Space Center on the Florida coast. It was descending from orbit at 18 times the speed of sound when it disintegrated 200,000ft above the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas shortly after 9am Florida time (2pm British time).

Sean O’Keefe, chief executive of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), described Columbia’s loss as “a horrific tragedy”.

George W Bush cut short a weekend visit to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland to comfort relatives of the victims. “This day has brought terrible news,” he said in an emotional televised address. “The Columbia is lost. There are no survivors.” He insisted, however, that the American space programme would go on.

It was the first time in 42 years of manned space flight that America had lost an astronaut during landing. Nasa staff wept after data from the spacecraft disappeared from their computer screens. The disaster followed months of warnings by space experts that the ageing shuttle fleet was becoming unsafe.

In a dramatic reconstruction of Columbia’s final moments, Nasa officials revealed the crew — which included two women and Israel’s first astronaut — may have known for more than a minute a problem was developing as their craft plunged towards Earth at 12,500mph — faster than a bullet.

Nasa computers first picked up signs something was wrong when temperature sensors stopped working in hydraulic systems on the left side of the craft at 8.53am. Three minutes later temperatures began to increase on left side brake linings and tyres, Milt Heflin, the chief flight director, said.

At 8.59am measurements of leftside tyre temperatures and pressures were lost, sending a warning message to crew display screens.

“Columbia, Houston, we see your tyre pressure messages and we did not copy your last,” mission control radioed the shuttle. The crew responded: “Roger, uh . . .” before the connection was lost for ever.

Shortly before the final descent, television viewers in Texas were told to look out of their windows as “they might see something rather cool”.

Video cameras tracking the descent instead showed a burst of smoke that turned into a broad swathe of vapour trails as parts of the spacecraft plunged from the sky. Nasa said the crew, led by Commander Rick Husband, would have had no chance to save themselves.

People on the ground in the town of Palestine, Texas, more than 35 miles below the shuttle, heard a loud boom and a whooshing sound. John Ferolito, of Carrollton, north of Dallas, said the bang was like “a car hitting the house”. Another witness compared it to “an express train coming up the driveway”.

Potentially toxic debris was scattered over at least three states, from eastern Texas to Louisiana and Arkansas. One piece crashed onto an apartment complex in a Dallas suburb, starting a fire. A hospital worker in Hemphill, Texas, reported finding what appeared to be a charred torso, thigh bone and skull near other debris.

There had been additional security at the launch in Florida on January 16 because of the presence on board of Colonel Ilan Ramon, a famed Israeli fighter pilot. But both Nasa and Bush administration officials said Columbia was travelling too high and too fast to have been targeted by terrorists.

Nasa set up both internal and independent inquiries into the crash, but early speculation focused on an incident shortly after liftoff when pieces of foam insulation fell from one of the rockets carrying the shuttle and hit its left wing — suggesting the mission could have been doomed from the start.

Columbia, flying for the 28th time since it entered service in April 1981, was the oldest orbiter in Nasa’s fleet. It was almost mothballed in 2001.

Leroy Cain, the flight director for the re-entry, said all systems were checked on Friday morning. “The vehicle performed flawlessly,” he said.

The disaster occurred four days after America marked the 17th anniversary of the loss of the Challenger shuttle, which exploded soon after launch on January 28, 1986.

Nasa was warned by an independent aerospace safety panel last year that “current and proposed budgets are not sufficient to improve or even maintain the safety risk levels of operating the space shuttle”. Don Nelson, a retired former Nasa engineer, wrote to Bush last summer listing a series of shuttle mishaps and calling for a presidential order to halt all further flights until they were addressed.

Additional reporting: David Adams, Miami

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