Is any of the debris still dangerous? I know that for over a week after the accident, folks were still being taken to the hospital after getting too close to some of the stuff.
Google turns up nothing on this topic because it has never been in the media, nor will it expected to be in the media. As to the age of the bodies found I have no information.
At the base camp where I was located, there were no instances of anyone encountering any hazardous Shuttle debris. The EPA found nothing at all locations to my knowledge where searchers complained of illness. All cases were determined to be caused by heat exhaustion, dehydration and/or searchers overcome by natural substances such as swamp gas or concentrations of animal dung and urine. In the latter cases, apparently some cattle preferred to crap and piss in concentrated areas, raising the ammonia levels sufficiently to create a lousy environment for searchers to enter.
What about the American astronauts in the Space Station? What was their regular scheduled date of return? How long can they wait? Will they have to hitch a ride home with the Russians? And, can the craft handle the excess weight in the cockpit (as opposed to payload)? - Jinx
Your questions are outside of the OP, but I can answer the question. At an astronaut presentation, we were told the ISS has a Soyuz escape pod attached to it at all times. The astronauts can return to Earth in it without having to send up a US or Russian retrival ship at all. Since the Soyuz escape pod has a capacity of three souls, this is the maximum number of individuals who can occupy the ISS when it is not being visited by the US or Russia.
Of course, this means if the Soyuz escape pod is used, the Russians must then launch a new rocket containing a new Soyuz escape pod to replace the one used.
Idealogically speaking, should NASA be spending millions of dollars a day trying to figure out what happened when a nearly 30-year-old spacecraft that’s flown many, many successful missions in the past, when the money could be spent building a newer model?
-lv
Sorry, can’t answer your question. 
However, I do believe your question is a valid one.
Perhaps you should pose the question to the familes of the seven who died in the Columbia tragedy? I have no answer whether they would agree with you or not.
Well, if we don’t know what caused this design to crash, how can we be certain that the next design won’t crash for exactly the same reason?
I appologize in advance for the hijack.
When Challenger blew up, it was 6 years and 14 missions into the shuttle program. I believe that they were even still building new shuttles then, and it was very important to see if this was a fluke, a procedure flaw, or a design flaw, and how to correct any flaws found. That’s 2 or three missions a year for 6 years before th o-ring problem was found, and IIRC there were concerns about the safety of the O-Ring design even before that, and that the flawed design was a budget decision Congress came to regret.
But now, we’re 14 years and 88 mostly mishap-free missions removed from the Challenger disaster, which was easily the best safety record in the history of manned spaceflight (even with Columbia, it likely still is). And Columbia’s been there from the beginning (at first I overestimated the age of the shuttle, it looks like it was closer to 21 years old). It’s far, far more likely to be a maintenance issue (or a part or piece of infrastructure exceeding it’s duty cycle) than it is to be another fundamental design flaw that hadn’t occurred over the previous 100+ shuttle missions. Space is too exacting, you don’t get 88 mostly mishap-free missions with a fundamental design flaw.
I’m sure the families want nothing more than for something like this to never happen again, and IMHO the way to insure this is to design and build a replacement for the aging shuttle fleet.
-lv
I understand the very rare Challenger piece is still recovered by fluke after all these years… wash ashore, whatever. I’ve heard that NASA quite vigorously tracks down new reports of them and entombs them in the silo with the rest of the shuttle.
LordVor, it probably wasn’t a design flaw, but without knowing what it was, we can’t try and take steps to prevent it from happening again, no matter what type of vehicle we’re using. For example, if it turns out that the problem was caused by something that impacted the shuttle in orbit, then we’ll know that we need to keep a closer eye on those things while they’re up there. If was falling debris from the tank, we need to make sure that the next space craft design isn’t susceptible to those kinds of things. Assuredly we do need a replacement for the shuttle, but at the same time, we can’t afford to simply say, “It blew up. Too bad, we’ll build something else.”
Even if NASA started today on construction of a new space craft to replace the shuttle, it’d still be years before one actually flew. In the meantime, we can abandon the manned space program as we did during the long-dark time of the mid-70s, or we can continue it. I vote for continuing it.
But Tuckerfan, we already KNOW it could have been a micrometeor in orbit (fluke), we already KNOW it could have been something falling off of the tank(maintenance). We also know that it’s very likely to be one or the other. But we’re very unlikely to find enough of the shuttle to conclusively determine anything at this stage that we don’t already know. So why continue spending money to actively search for the rest of it? We CAN and SHOULD try to make the next shuttle design less susceptible to such things, but we should NOT spend money retrofitting the existing shuttles to withstand what was probably a fluke event. We SHOULD look a little harder at the maintenance budget, to expand the life of the existing shuttles until their replacements are ready.
-lv
Yes, but we don’t know how it caused the shuttle to break up. All we know is that something caused a drag on the left wing of the shuttle, hot gas entered into the wing structure, and the shuttle broke up. Until we know how it happened, we can’t be certain that we can design a solution to the problem. Pretty pointless for us to do massive work on reinforcing the wing of the shuttle against impact when the problem was caused by workers spitting in the tile glue again.
About the issue of finding bodies: As a matter of fact, I DID hear about this story on the news. Apparently, yes, they did indeed find two bodies, not astronauts. Never any mention of if they were crime victims or what.
Because it could have been something else, and if so we need to know. “Very likely” is not good enough. The most important thing in engineering is to learn from mistakes. Accident investigation is a vital part of the Shuttle program.
The major problem with rockets is that we don’t get to do extensive test flights. Very few rockets are made and most of them are expendable rockets that can only be used once. Accidents give us vital information about where the weak spots are. Even if we don’t build another Shuttle, that information will be vital to the next design, otherwise we’ll just end up with another Shuttle with the same problem. If we try to fix all the possible causes of the accident, we’ll waste millions of dollars and make the rockets unnecessarily heavy, and we might still miss the real cause of the accident. Even if it is a maintenance issue, it must be addressed: either the design must be changed to make maintenance easier, or we need to modify the maintenance method, or add a few items to the checklist. I can’t stress this enough: accidents give us valuable information about what the weaknesses are.