Transcript of Press Event with Sean O’Keefe and Bill Readdy (Part 2)
QUESTIONER: Larry Wheeler [ph] with Gannet News Service.
Just a couple of points on Mr. Readdy’s return-to-flight memo here. I just want to make sure I am not misunderstanding it.
You want to look at on-orbit inspection and repair to the thermal tile system. You want to review policies for photographic and radar coverage, and then there is also an item here about whether things are being brought up the management chain appropriately.
That seems to be a direct response to things that we have been speculating or reported by the media about what we did and didn’t know about a satellite photograph. Can you talk a little bit more about why these specific things are here, and are we wrong to say maybe you guys thought something should have been done differently on STS-107 and you want to make sure that changes in the future?
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: Let me ask Bill to elaborate here, but I will just give you an open proposition, I guess.
There is no question, again, reporting — I don’t take issue with anything that has been covered here. The only point that I have gotten to the point of repeated rhythmic insults — I apologize for it — is to say don’t fall in love with any one theory. There are lots of them out there, and we are narrowing them down. The Gehman investigation is going through its methodical fault tree analysis, and again, they are beginning to hone in on what they believe to be more dominant or more prominent probable-cause areas of examination. I think he said that very bluntly in his commentary this past Tuesday and the previous Tuesday.
So everything I am hearing is what you are hearing in terms of the way they are just kind of focusing down on this, and the follow-the-heat theories and all those kinds of engagements that are involved. So, no, I don’t have any problem at all with the coverage, and I think, again, by and large, fairly accurate in terms of the diligence the press corps has engaged on this, but it is more that there seems to be a, more or less, focus or dominant or favorite theory that emerges from time to time. And my only plea has been to say don’t fall in love with any of those because that might it or it might be something totally different. I would hate to kind of lead you down a path that would prove to be one that — just being open and above aboard as we can, that may not turn out to be the fruitful path, not because we know anything about it, but because the way this process is being conducted by the independent accident investigation board. They are looking at every possible permutation.
So what has come out of this, though, and I think as accurately reported and has been pretty evident to us at the time in which we examined the issues as well, is we ought to at least go back and look at what our standing policies and procedures are for prelaunch activities, launch day, and on-orbit activities.
So part of what I think Bill has responsibly done here with putting this in motion with Michael Greenfield is for us to have a deliberate, thoughtful examination of what those policies and procedures are in terms of how we conduct activities and in light of what we now know or at least understand or think we know about what is going on. So any one of those activities, let’s examine those issues so we are prepared and have kind of gotten through the preliminary discussions and debates and thought, so that when that report comes out from the Gehman board and when their findings are rendered and when their recommendations are put forth is when we are in a position to respond to them rapidly, rather than saying, “Well, gee, we haven’t thought about that before. We have got to go back and start doing some noodling on this point now.”
There is a lot of things that are pretty evident here. Again, we have been very up front about the point last week when we got together that during the course of this investigation, there is going to be a lot of stuff that is going to come through all of this that we are examining and we are seeing and they are seeing that has absolutely nothing to do with what happened on that day or anything leading up to it, but that are nonetheless the kinds of things that we ought to look at because, if there is a better way to do it, we ought to be doing it. So that is a lot of what Bill’s memo does.
Did you want to elaborate at all?
MR. READDY: Yes. I would just like to give you a little background here.
Before I wrote this, I had a number of considerations, and I was guided by sessions I had with Dr. George Miller, who is the associate administrator for Space Flight Factor and [inaudible]. I talked to Vice Admiral Truly [ph], who is the associate administrator, to go over return to flight post-Challenger.
The timing of this, you are probably scratching your head, “Why now? Why now?” At the service the other day, it was an Old Testament — I don’t remember it because it was a popular song back in the ’60s, the Byrds. There is a time for every purpose. Out of respect for the families, the promise that we made them on February 1st was that we were going to take care of them and honor the crew appropriately, but also that we were going to honor the crew by returning to flight. And they insisted on that, that day.
So, after Captain Dave Brown’s funeral, I came back to the office and signed out this memo in order to get the team focused on return to flight.
Now, this isn’t a prescription here. This is a tasking memo. I have asked General Gestelmik [ph], who is the program executive for Station Shuttle, to provide a plan, and if you read it very carefully, it is, first of all, not to prejudge the outcome of Columbia Accident Investigation Board, far from it, but we don’t view things that are in this task as being serial necessarily receiving the board’s findings and recommendations. So the plan is nothing, but the planning that goes into the plan is everything, and we wanted to get the team focused on return-to-flight effort. So that was the motivation behind this.
The five areas that I highlighted, the reason for putting those in — and it also says “not limited to the five” — those were clearly observations that have been made after the fact. You know, that is the elephant in the room. Are we going to ignore those? Hardly. So we want to examine those.
You all, I think, have reported on it pretty lively. We can’t ignore those. We don’t want to ignore those. We want to find out what happened. We want to know if there are ways that we could improve our process, and at the end of the day, there will be three outcomes. And there may be combinations of these three. The hardware failed, process broke down, and there was an error in judgment. Maybe some combination of all three. Then the Gehman board is going to tell us what they think happened.
We are going to be guided by their results.
QUESTIONER: [Keith Cowing, NASA Watch] Center Director Harry McDonald made some comments based on a report that came out of the [inaudible]. Although those things were mentioned in hearings and the report was widely circulated, he seemed to be implying that lessons had not been learned in terms of he was harping on you can’t look at this database or this is on paper, this is not.
How much of that has actually been implemented since then? How much are you in the process of doing now, and given what you just said, are you going to be [inaudible] records to make stuff more efficient?
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: Okay. That is a good question.
And to provide you with a little bit more context, I actually was the one that tasked Dr. McDonald to do that red team on us as a result of STS-93 in-flight electrical short that we experienced, and also the fact that in the combustion chamber I think of one of the main engines, a pin or a piece of material was liberated that caused several of the nozzle tubes to leak.
So I asked Dr. McDonald to go ahead and do that red team on us and not simply to look at those particular areas, but to look and see if there was anything systematically wrong with the system.
He assembled a team, a cross-disciplinary team, went out there, and as I recall, he has I think 80 recommendations. And some of them were — I think there were about four or five that were due before the next flight. There were some that were due within the next year and some for downstream consideration.
We acted on those, and I think that one is still in work in terms of probabalistic risk assessment, updating that, but we conducted the reviews that he requested, and I think we acted on — with this one that is still in progress and estimated for completion in the summer, 82 out of 82. I think we did take his report very seriously and instituted reviews on each and every one of the program projects within the Shuttle program as a result of that.
We have the Aerospace Safety Advisory Board. We have the NASA Advisory Council, the National Research Council. We invite people to come in and critique us to make us better, to make us stronger, and we really applauded Dr. McDonald for his efforts. It was a very thorough review, and we were guided by his findings and recommendations and acted on it.
MR. READDY: There is a point that we saw the other day, too, that goes through a methodical view of —
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: We can provide that to you. I mean, the triage on every one of the recommendations, we can get that for you.
QUESTIONER: I want to go back to [inaudible] for a second. How deep into the [inaudible] are you prepared to entertain ideas of change; for example, encapsulated crew escape system? Are we talking about enhanced parts of systems that are already there?
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: I am reticent to exclude anything from that equation. I think, again, much of what we are preparing to do here is to position ourselves so that when the Columbia Accident Investigation Board renders its independent judgments and recommendations, we can act on them expeditiously.
We are certainly looking at how do you make the range of adjustments, modifications, upgrades, technology insertions, that would not substantially alter the structural integrity of the Orbiter because those clearly are the kinds of things we have thought about and examined most intensively over the last few years, and I think now we have got an organized procedure in which we say, “Okay. We made a decision last fall to proceed ahead with prioritized set of those modifications, upgrades, and technology insertions. So let’s look at what those are,” but it might well be that there are proposals, recommendations, or findings that may require us to think about the whole line of the Shuttle.
And that is not off the table, by any means, but it is one that certainly would be a degree of difficulty, more intensity, but that, by no means, is to suggest signal or that we are unprepared or unwilling to accept that kind of a deal. Whatever it is that comes out of the recommendations is what is going to come out of the recommendations, and those will be exactly right. We are going to act on this, and we will assess what it is going to take in order to do it.
Yes, sir.
QUESTIONER: Nick Anderson with the L.A. Times.
I have two unrelated questions. Just to be clear, when we talk about having the Shuttle operate potentially through the next decade, are you talking about the next 10 years starting from now or through 2020 as someone talked about?
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: Potentially through 2020, sure.
QUESTIONER: That is what the Nissho conversation is going to be about, 2020?
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: Sure. And again, it is what the budget implies or — I’m sorry — very explicitly states. It is not an implication. It is what the November 13th amendment of 2002 very explicitly stated.
It is what our plan was last summer and during the fall to say let’s specifically look at what it is going to take to operate this for a long as possible. What you do in any of these cases is look at what those investments are that you need to make based on that priority set, and then you make a determination at what stage are you making an investment in an asset which there is diminishing markings of utility.
That appears to be no less than 10 years from now, more likely probably a dozen, and I am not sure how many more after that, and that is what this particular effort will also help us do. It is another step in that process that was planned months ago, and rather than say, “Well, gee, in light of events of February 1st, let’s change the plan,” the event is we are pressing on exactly the way we planned, and this planned has been scheduled for several months.
QUESTIONER: This is unrelated. The last couple of days, there have been reports about issues dealing with requests of imagery from the Defense Department of spy satellites and so forth from NASA to agencies. Even this morning, a story in The Washington Post quotes anonymous sources.
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: Do you care to comment on that?
QUESTIONER: I wondered if you could verify whether this story is accurate, the story on the front page.
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: Again, this is not — I apologize for being repetitive here. What we have been talking about all the way through since the very beginning of this tragedy, there are a lot of — again, the point I think Bill just mentioned here a minute ago, we fully expect that what the board will come back with are recommendations, findings and recommendations that will pertain to the hardware or the process or judgments.
This falls in the category of a judgment, and as a consequence, all of the information pertaining to all that has been reported and much more has been released to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board within days after the accident.
They have all of the information. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have all of the information. The Inspector General has all of the information. So we have gone through every effort we know of that was aware at the time as it pertained to judgments about the use of national assets.
We have made it available to all those appropriate venues. So they have got it. We full expect that they will render some views, findings and recommendations, and in this case, it will pertain to process and judgments of the three, although it might actually talk about hardware, but I don’t know how that would be [inaudible]. But it could be. We will leave opening up to you for that to be discussed.
So, as a result, we will be guided by that set of findings, but it is about judgment calls. They have all of that information, and that is as far as I want to go in terms of discussing the origins of what is out there.
As we are gaining more and more information and rounding up all the — as we are continuing to go through the e-mail traffic and everything else that has been going on, anything and everything that has any application to this question is being turned over to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the Inspector General, and the Intelligence Committees. So everybody has got it, and we are working through that.
Again, from the very opening days, all that information, as we received it, was being turned over to the appropriate sources, and the appropriate officials, particularly the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, for their determination about process and judgments rendered, and those are the ones that were rendered. So there is no walking away from that.
QUESTIONER: Could you address whether you made this request, as The Washington Post reported this morning?
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: I have seen Jeffrey’s article. I saw it this morning. Part of it is correct. Part of it is not. It is attributed to sources on sources.
I could tell you that we were approached by an individual, and not me personally, but secondhand. The offer was relayed. This had already followed the determination from the engineering community and the mission management team if there was no safety-applied issue, and therefore, it didn’t warrant an increasing of the priority of the request.
MR. READDY: The issue is really — what is critically important here is that the determination was based on a series of judgments about what we thought at the time was the information that supported any analysis or expectations of what kind of on-orbit problem may have emerged.
There were no sensor readings. There was nothing that would suggest any anomalies on flight, on orbit. So, as a consequence, it was speculation of what could be there based on, again, a lot of very reasoned people making judgments about what they thought could be the nature of the problems and lots of recommendations back and forth.
QUESTIONER: I just wanted to be clear because it is on the front page of a national newspaper.
MR. READDY: Lots of things run on the front page of national newspapers, and if we commented on all of them, we would be here for all day.
QUESTIONER: That is exactly [inaudible].
MR. READDY: No. And I said the word “request,” and I misspoke.
We were approached by another agency, and this offer was broached to us, as I said, after the determination had been made that there was no safety-applied issues.
The exchange that occurred, basically, this is a routine request or routine offer. I guess it wasn’t formally a request. It was an offer of routine precedence for support using national assets.
There was no rationale at that time to support increasing the priority.
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: Again, the judgments were rendered, and that is what the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and others are all privy to, and this will be a rendering of judgment about those judgments. We fully expect they will opine, and when they do, we will be guided by those views.
Yes, sir.
QUESTIONER: About the judgments, also about the Rogers Commission which specifically called for changes in NASA management, your memo doesn’t talk about changes in structure. It sort of implies almost the exact same structure you have already, with the addition of Mr. Greenfield.
Are you looking at changes in structure, and if it is judgment calls, which you seem to be talking about a lot, couldn’t people who make bad judgment calls be held accountable? Do you plan to hold them accountable? Will there be management changes?
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: On the first part, there is no question. If there is an observation or any view that is expressed by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board that, hey, folks, you are fundamentally organized in a way that prohibits or impedes or whatever else, the proper conduct of operations or preparation for launch and so, therefore, you ought to rethink how you are organized to do so, you bet you, we are going to look at that and absolutely implement whatever it is that we need to in order to do this right.
I don’t have any opening bias that says that that isn’t right now, but if that is their judgment, if that is their set of recommendations, you bet, we are open to anything. There is not a limit here of what is involved.
In response to Frank’s question as well, even that deals with the technical question, that is a really far-out proposition of saying something altered the structural make-up of the Orbiter, but even that, anything, it doesn’t matter what it is they come back with. There is nothing I am telling you — or any of us are telling the Gehman board, “Hey, you can only look at these things, and don’t even think about recommendations.” No. Anything they come back with, that is entirely their call, and we are prepared, as tough as it is going to be, of looking at the full range of whatever it is they prefer.
On the issue of accountability, make not mistake about it. I have offered plenty of observation on this point. When the full story is out here and we see all the findings and we understand exactly what it was occurred, there is no doubt about it, we are going to be looking at how we hold ourselves accountable for this activity. And that accountability starts with me.
There has not been one moment from day one on this in which I have had any doubt in my mind that, first and foremost, the responsibility begins with me of what happened on that day and everything leading up to it, no walking away from that at all, and I am prepared for whatever answer comes out of that. And I think we all are.
First and foremost, make not mistake about it, we want to find out what happened, and when that judgment is rendered, we are going to make it [inaudible] as necessary, get back to flying safely, and along the way, we are going to be accountable for all of those activities. Make no mistake whatever about that.
QUESTIONER: Does that mean someone? You expect someone’s shop to change?
ADMINISTRATOR O’KEEFE: When the facts are released and everything comes out and the findings are rendered, we will act on that. Before that time, I think it is positively — and this has been a point that I have talked about publicly as well as in every written correspondence — we are not going to walk around making snap judgments based on what we think we know at any interval in this process. When you get the whole picture, the whole understanding, that is when you do that, and before that is premeditated and in a way that frankly is premature, premeditated being premature.
I don’t want to even go there. I just don’t think that is appropriate to make judgments until you see the whole picture of what is involved. I don’t know any other way to do it. That has been my entire professional experience has been that is the only way to do this responsibly, and if you reach judgments prior to fully understanding what is involved, you run the risk, the probability of being inequitable, unfair, and more knee-jerk in your reaction to things, and I will not do any of those.
