The doomed astronauts on the space shuttle Columbia were violently thrown around the cabin as they tried desperately to regain control of their spacecraft before it broke apart upon re-entry five years ago, a new report has found.

Nasa has detailed the last moments of the seven-member space crew who died when the Columbia disintegrated over Texas as it descended back to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on February 1, 2003.

The destruction happened so quickly the astronauts did not even have enough time to close the visors on their helmets, according to the report, which took four years to compile.

The report, released by the US space agency on Tuesday, found that the crew had no way of surviving the disaster. It concluded that their safety belts, space suits and helmets failed to work as expected and detailed other factors - including winds, shock waves and other extreme conditions in the upper atmosphere - that were potentially fatal to the crew.

The seven astronauts who died in the tragedy were shuttle commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, US astronauts Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut in space.

It is not known if the astronauts were knocked unconscious from the decompression in the cabin, or died as it spun wildly out of control, however the report concluded they could not have survived.

Nasa's deputy associate administrator, Wayne Hale, described the crew’s desperate efforts to regain control of their spacecraft – including flicking switches in response to alarms and resetting the shuttle’s autopilot system - as “valiant”.

"This report confirms that although the valiant Columbia crew tried every possible way to maintain control of their vehicle, the accident was not ultimately survivable," said Hale, who oversaw the shuttle program during its return to flight after the accident.

The investigation also found problems with the shuttle's seats and parachute landing system, which requires astronauts be conscious to operate manually, and the report recommended that the parachutes that future shuttle crews wear during takeoff and descent should deploy automatically.

"I call on spacecraft designers from all the other nations of the world, as well as the commercial and personal spacecraft designers here at home to read this report and apply these hard lessons which have been paid for so dearly," Mr Hale said.

The 400-page report concludes the investigations into the Columbia tragedy, and will be used by Nasa to help design a new space shuttle replacement capsule.

The Columbia tragedy occurred after a chunk of insulation that broke off from the shuttle's external fuel tank during takeoff and gouged a hole in the shuttle’s left wing heat shield, led to the craft disintegrating as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.

The tragedy was the second shuttle accident since the programme was launched in 1981. The Challenger shuttle blew up 73 seconds after lift-off, killing seven astronauts on board on January 28, 1986.

The three remaining shuttles - Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour - are due to make eight more flights to the orbiting International Space Station to finish construction and carry out the last maintenance mission on the Hubble Space Telescope.

The fleet is due to be decommissioned in 2010, after 30 years of service.

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