Astronaut Says Site Is Dangerous

SPACE CENTER, Houston--A space shuttle accident on landing at Cape Canaveral is a certainty because the site is dangerous, says chief astronaut John Young in a memo written before the Challenger disaster.

Meanwhile, ABC News reported Tuesday that two problems discovered during delays preceding the launch of the shuttle Columbia in January could have resulted in a disaster as catastrophic as the Challenger explosion.

Young, who urges that all future shuttle landings should be at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., says in his memo that the weather, runway surface and water surrounding the Kennedy Space Center all make the Florida site dangerous.

The astronaut, who has flown more shuttle missions than anyone, wrote the memo Jan. 6, six days before the launch of Columbia on the last successful shuttle mission and 22 days before Challenger exploded.

Columbia, which was launched Jan. 11 after seven delays, was scheduled to land at Kennedy, but was waved off to Edwards because of poor weather.

"Our present experience is telling us that if we continue to use the Shuttle Landing Facility [at Kennedy] for end-of-mission landings, sooner or later we will have an accident due to the single runway, its condition ... the unpredictable ... weather, component failures including the flight crew, or, more likely, a combination of the above factors," Young wrote.

In its report, ABC cited an internal National Aeronautics and Space Administration memo by Arnold Aldrich, manager of the shuttle project in Houston, that said an operator at Cape Canaveral inadvertently dumped 18,000 pounds of liquid oxygen from the shuttle's external fuel tank Jan. 6.

The flight was delayed for other reasons but the problem was not discovered until later, the memo said.

According to ABC, the memo said that if the shuttle had been launched, the engines could have quit before the craft entered orbit, leading to a possible emergency landing in Spain and "serious safety-offlight consequences."

In another incident, which was reported at the time, engineers found after the flight's second delay that a temperature probe had wedged in a valve leading to the main engine.

That problem could have caused the engine to blow up eight minutes after launch, the memo said.