Nothing found in shuttle debris search

Monday, March 10, 2003 | 9:26 a.m.

The search for space shuttle parts in southeast Nevada came up empty handed over the weekend but resumed today.

Volunteers with the Civil Air Patrol and Lincoln County Sheriff's Office personnel had searched for debris from the Columbia disaster Friday through Sunday about 180 miles north of Las Vegas. The search had been on hold for a week after snow fell in the area.

Twenty-seven fragments of metal and other finds picked up in the desert during the initial days of the search northeast of Panaca were sent to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and were found to be non-shuttle debris, officials said.

Casey Wood of United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor, was among the search team this weekend and was en route this morning to today's search area.

"We didn't find anything new this weekend, but we still have two large areas of about 15,000 acres to search," he said.

A dozen bits of foil and a plastic switch were among the pieces discovered by volunteer searchers last month in a 15-square-mile section of Lincoln County near the Utah state line where NASA officials, based on radar reports, believe that a piece of the shuttle may have broken off.

"None of the (Nevada) materials were from the space shuttle," Bill Jeffs, a spokesman at the National Aeronautics Space Administration's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said today. "To date the furthest west of any confirmed piece is Littlefield, Texas.

"So far, about 14 percent of the shuttle has been found."

The Columbia was destroyed Feb. 1 on its return to Earth with seven astronauts on board, all of whom perished, including Pilot William McCool, whose parents work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.