A NASA top official wrestled with what he thought was a hypothetical question: What should you tell the astronauts of a doomed space shuttle Columbia?

When the NASA official raised the question in 2003 just days before the accident that claimed seven astronauts' lives, managers thought wrongly that Columbia's heat shield was fine. It wasn't.

Columbia, NASA's oldest shuttle, broke apart over Texas 10 years ago Friday upon returning to Earth after a 16-day mission.

But the story of that question retold a decade later illustrates a key lesson from the tragedy, says Wayne Hale, a flight director who later ran the shuttle program for NASA.

That lesson: Never give up. No matter how hopeless.

And to illustrate the lesson, Hale in his blog tells for the first time the story of his late boss who seemingly suggested doing just that. The boss, mission operations chief Jon Harpold, asked the now-retired Hale a what-if question after a meeting that determined wrongly that Columbia was safe to land despite some damage after takeoff.

Space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale, shown here in a 2007 photo, said NASA would have tried to save the Columbia's crew had it realized the true severity of the problem with the heat shield. (Wildfredo Lee/Associated Press)"You know there is nothing we can do about damage to the (thermal protection system)," Hale quotes Harpold a decade later.

"If it has been damaged, it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done until the air ran out."

When Harpold raised the question with Hale in 2003, managers had already concluded that Columbia's heat shield was fine.

They told astronauts they weren't worried about damage from foam insulation coming off the massive shuttle fuel tank during launch, hitting a wing that allowed superheated gases in when the shuttle re-entered the atmosphere. No one was aware of the seriousness of the damage at the time.

See the rest here:

NASA discussed not telling astronauts about Columbia's doom