Cover-Up? Searching for an Astronaut's Ring

April 4, 2007 — -- Astronaut Laurel Clark wore her wedding ring on a chain around her neck while she orbited Earth in the space shuttle Columbia.

Four years later, the whereabouts of that ring, believed to be stolen, have puzzled law enforcement and embarrassed NASA.

Video shot on that Columbia mission shows Clark laughing as she works on experiments on the shuttle's middeck, the ring floating on the chain in zero gravity.

It was Clark's first mission, and her last. She died when Columbia broke up over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003, leaving behind her husband, Jonathan, and her son, Iain.

The shuttle crashed because foam had come off the external fuel tank during the launch. It punctured the leading edge of the left wing. During re-entry, superheated air penetrated the wing and spread through the orbiter, causing it to break up as it headed toward Florida to land at the Kennedy Space Center. Columbia disintegrated over Texas, at a height and speed that made it impossible for the crew to survive.

It took months for searchers to recover the shuttle's pieces, which were scattered across east Texas. The bodies of the seven crew members were recovered, but to protect the grieving families of the crew, little information was released.

Documents reviewed by ABC News as part of an investigation into Robert Cobb, NASA's inspector general, detail an effort to cover up the search for Clark's wedding ring.

The report states, "The remains of deceased astronaut Laurel Clark were recovered shortly after the Columbia accident, and a ring was allegedly present on, and then stolen from her recovered remains."

Texas Rangers were investigating the theft of the ring and wanted to release a public Crime Stoppers Report to the public to find the stolen ring.

Jonathan Clark wanted his wife's ring found, according to the report, but in a meeting with Cobb he was told that going public with news of a stolen wedding ring would not be good publicity for NASA.