Transcript – Columbia Accident Investigation Board Press Conference Tuesday, April 1, 2003 (Part 1)

LT. COL. WOODYARD: Good afternoon and welcome to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board press briefing. We will begin today’s briefing with opening comments from the chairman of the board, Admiral Gehman.

ADM. GEHMAN: Good afternoon, everybody. We’ll use our usual format here today. We have a couple of introductory comments to make. We will let each of the board members speak, representing their group, and then we’ll take your questions.

First of all, I would like to thank the Center for Advanced Space Studies, particularly the Lunar and Planetary Institute, whose facilities we’re using here again. I appreciate it very much. Thank you very much.

This has been a good week for us, not just because of the promise of data from the famous OEX recorder, which we’re going to get into in great detail, but also because of progress on a number of other fronts which we will mention here.

I think it’s worth mentioning to kind of remind us all: Today is two months to the day since the loss of Columbia. Maybe it’s useful for us to just take a second and reconstruct what we’re doing.

The board is essentially working on three fronts simultaneously. The first is to determine the direct cause or the initiating event of this tragedy. As we have mentioned on several occasions, to do that, we are essentially pursuing six parallel avenues of technical investigation, and I have mentioned these before. That’s the thermodynamic analysis, the aerodynamic analysis, the reconstruction of the debris and the testing of debris to learn what we can, the building of a detailed time line based on the telemetry and now the OEX recorder, analysis of the photos and the videography that we have received, and analysis of the maintenance and modification documentation. Those are the six areas.

If we find the direct cause because of physical evidence, that would be wonderful; but if we have to infer or deduce the initiating event, what we will do, of course, is to attempt to get these six avenues of investigation to line up somehow. Somebody has once described it to me as getting the holes in the Swiss cheese to line up. Then that, we believe, will point us with some degree of surety toward the initiating event.

The second front that we’re working on in parallel with great rigor — and will hear about it today — is the investigation into all the contributing and root causes. This has to do with all the issues of budget and management and committees and boards and processes and all of this that’s about ageing spacecraft and E-mails and all those kinds of things. We are going to run all that stuff to ground in due course; and it will be part of our report if it rises, in our view, to the level of being a contributing cause. You’re going to hear about that today.

Then the third front that we’re working on is this context issue that I had mentioned before — that is, we’re going to put our report in context. By “in context,” I mean that this accident, in our view, is not necessarily a random data point on a continuum graph. It probably fits into some kind of an overall context. That context could be the context of budget patterns. It could be a context of changing priorities. It could be the context of perhaps the psychology of continued success. It could be the context of work force patterns — that is, it could be that the work force has changed or the way they look at the shuttle program from being an operational or a research and development — a whole number of contexts that we will attempt to put this accident in, and it will be part of our report. Several members of Congress have indicated to me that their work just begins when our work ends, and so we’ve got to provide them a document which will be a smooth bridge into the things that they need to do.

That’s really all I have. I want to get to the meat of the press conference, which is listening to my colleagues here on the left. We’ll start off with Steve Wallace, who is in the group we call Group 2, which is basically called the operations.

MR. WALLACE: Thank you, sir. So following Admiral Gehman’s three fronts, I think we are largely in the second front in Group 2 in terms of contributing on root causes. The two gentlemen to my left are a little more into the debris and hardware, and we’re more focused on decision-making and processes.

Let me just first give a quick report on where my colleagues are. There are three board members assigned to Group 2. Major General Ken Hess is at the Marshall Space Flight Center this week. He’ll be doing a series of interviews and inquiries relating to external tank issues, particularly disposition of falling foam events in earlier flights and their role in the Flight Readiness Review and Certification of Flight Readiness process.

Dr. Sally Ride is the third member of our group, who is just this week kind of off, closing up some other personal commitments from her past life before Admiral Gehman drafted her to join our board. So she’ll be back with us next week. I will say we worked with her for a couple of weeks before and she is a very effective and valued member of our team, especially on issues of communications and decision-making, obviously brings a terrific historical context and a great deal of technical expertise, as well.

I’m going to talk about foam a little now. Our part of the foam, again, is largely the decision-making on the disposition of prior foam events and we are doing what we’re sort of calling foam audit where we’re looking at falling foam throughout the history of the shuttle program, both when it was sort of popcorn and falling and then different events and particularly, of course, issues of bipod ramp foam and a particular focus on STS 112 where there was a substantial piece of bipod foam and the sort of disposition of that and whether there was a tendency to sort of normalize falling foam, it happens all the time, or whether it needed to be a distinction between the sort of popcorning small pieces of foam that was addressed a long time ago and these later issues. I will say we’ve reached no conclusion on foam’s exact contribution. There’s testing going on this week under Mr. Tetrault’s group, or in the near future will be some testing to determine the possible foam impacts on different parts of the TPS system.

The other issue that we’re heavily involved in is the request for DOD assets, the much-discussed on-again-off-again requests for DOD imaging. That’s largely the subject of all the E-mails that have gotten so much publicity. I’d like to say about the E-mails that they are important but they are one part of a very complicated story. Other parts include interviews which we have done, over a hundred by this board already. In a great number of those, some of those same issues that are in E-mails are discussed — minutes of meetings, various logs, audio recordings of meetings, comparing those to the minutes to try to get a sense for the dynamic. Mr. Tetrault will be talking later about all these various sensor inputs, sensors that were downlinked and sensors from the OEX recorder. I think I sort of view all these E-mails and interviews as our sensor inputs. We have a very complicated story that we are trying to fit together and ours is not a sort of mechanical story but it’s very much of a human story in terms of interaction and decision-making and communications. And that part of our story on the overall safety processes, those that are written and procedurally defined, of which there are many, I think this is a very process-intense operation, a deeper question for us is how these work in reality and how communications, the various dynamics of the organization, which this part of our inquiry then flows into Group 4, not here with us today but recently constituted, headed by Dr. Logsdon, who is the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. And Admiral Gehman spoke earlier about putting our findings into context, work force patterns, budget. I think his group is entitled Organization and Policy. That’s where we sort of meld into Dr. Logsdon, who will be having the lead on that issue and who is pulling together an extremely qualified group of experts who have a lot of historical context in the NASA organization.

Just to touch briefly on a couple of mundane aspects, relatively speaking, of our group’s work. Training and payload issues. We’re bringing those to closure. I can say we are close to completing a very thorough review of the training of the ground and flight personnel for STS 107. The records are not flawless; but they are such that, while it’s not officially off the table, we’ve found nothing that would suggest any contribution to the accident. And the same with payloads. There’s actually a fault tree on payloads that NASA will be closing out, and we’re doing it in an effort in conjunction and oversight of that. Again, there were some minor irregularities with payload but nothing that would suggest a contribution to the accident.

Again, we are following and talked about this a little bit in the last press conference, about return-to-flight issues. There’s the effort going on in the program level, there’s an effort now directed from NASA headquarters with Astronaut Jim Halsell melding these two together, and the board will also be, in its recommendations, working on some return-to-flight issues. I would emphasize that we’re all largely, I think, along the same lines; and there isn’t a contest here. We all want to get back to flight. So that’s the Group 2 update.

ADM. GEHMAN: Thank you very much.

General Barry.

GEN. BARRY: Sure. Good afternoon. I’ve got a couple of updates. First of all, Admiral Steve Turcotte, another member of our board, is at Langley today. General Duane Deal is here at JSC with me for the week. We’ve got a couple of trips with our subgroup members who are going to KSC and Marshall. So we’re going to spread out again.

Let me give you a couple of updates. Maintenance, management and human factors, and then materials and structures. Let me just briefly mention on the maintenance side.

This Friday the board will receive a briefing that will close out, provided we approve it, the SSME as one of the fault trees, followed by, shortly, the SRB and the RSRM next week. So we’re getting a full briefing, and we’ve been involved and engaged all along. So we’ll be taking that.

ADM. GEHMAN: John, maybe you better spell out those abbreviations.

GEN. BARRY: The SSME is the space shuttle main engine; of course, the RSRM is the replaceable solid rocket motor; and then the solid rocket booster.

The other point I want to make is on management human factors. We’ve been engaged with numerous interviews, examining the Palmdale move and the Huntington Beach engineer move. So there’s been a lot of work being done on that by our group.

The main thing I want to talk to you is to give you an update on foam, RCC ageing, and the Day 2 debris that we’ve got some updates on.

If I could ask for the first slide.

General Deal has been leading the charge on the foam for our efforts. We’ve got Lieutenant Colonel Larry Butkus from the Air Force Academy who’s been helping also, as has Clare Paul. What I want to do is concentrate and focus your eyes on our dissection that we’ve got on the Y pod. We’ve also started cutting into the left side. So this is the right side, plus Y, minus Y, and I’ll give you some information here.

Next slide. All right. Again, the big picture. I want to focus here. This is where it’s located on the external tank, as indicated in red up here. A lot of different kinds of foams on the external tank, but we’ll be focusing on this area.

Next slide. All right. I just wanted to show some of the loads that happen. This is the exact time that we’ve been able to record, 2.46 Mach is when the bipod foam came off on the left-hand side, allegedly. We’re still trying to confirm that 100 percent. This is at the 81-second point. You can see it’s a pretty dynamic engagement zone right now insofar as the aerodynamic loads.

Next slide. This will give you a color depiction. Again, there’s a lot of intersecting shocks that are happening at this point for vortex pressures. You can see there’s a lot more pressure from inside out here. There is no indication right now that the bipod design has not been adequate enough to accept these aerodynamic loads. However, I do want to point out that we’re still examining cryopumping. So it looks like something else other than the aerodynamic loads is one that contributed to some of the losses in the past and the one we’re looking at right now with STS 107.

Next slide. All right. Here is just a rehash on the previous ones we’ve had. This is in Challenger in ’83. You can see the location of the actual paragraph and then a little bit of a schematic illustration of what they think actually happened. This was ’83.

Next slide. ’90. Again, the picture and then what piece we think came off.

Next. This is ’92. And again, a larger piece.

Finally the one prior to Columbia. Next slide.

This was ten years later from the previous one. Last one before this was ’92, and this was the piece that came off.

All right. Next slide. We are examining closely, as you know, the cryopumping issue; and what we think is there’s purging that goes on in the internal part of the external tank. So inside here is purging to kind of act as a safety gas between oxygen and hydrogen. Well, some of that turns into liquid and seeps out and gets into the ablative or gets into what I’ll show you here as the voids. So the cryopumping is a flash evaporation when it goes from very cold temperatures, liquid, to warmer temperatures and then turns into gas and has to find some vent there.

Next slide. Now, here is the cuts that we’ve been experimenting with down at Michoud. This is where I’ll show you some of the photographs. This is Region 6A here, as indicated right back. We have problems with voids and de-bonding.

Next slide. You can see here we’ve got void and rollover. That’s when the foam goes over the top as it’s applied, disbonding, and then primer. We have some problems at the bonding levels.

Next slide. There are some closer photographs now here of voids that we have found in the right side pod of ET 120. That’s the one we cut into. We’re trying to get better at our ability to do this cutting and looking into it so when we tap into ET 94 — that is the one that’s exactly the same as ET 93 — and ET93, as you will recall, External Tank 93 was the one that was on the STS 107.

Next slide. We’ve got a bigger picture here of the voids that were indicated. Again, these can capture liquid, which eventually can turn to gas when it gets warmer and then looking for a vent or a flash evaporation.

Next slide. Here’s another picture of voids. Now, right now we’ve found about 14 voids in the right side and we’re up to 18 on the left side now that we’ve cut into it in the last couple of days.

Next slide. All right. Now that I talked about the foam, follow the foam, this is a little bit about following the ageing. This is a pinhole on the RCC. So we have the foam come off and one of the scenarios, as you all know, is we’re looking at something that hit the RCC. This was first discovered on 102-12 in 1992 and we’ve been examining some of the potential contributory elements that may have gone to them and we think one of the leaders is the corrosion from zinc oxide.

Next slide. Scale on the pinhole. If it is greater than .04 inches, it is out of tolerance. So this one right now is out of tolerance because of the increase in the expansion on the corrosion.

Now, this pinhole was first discovered in ’92. It’s on all the orbiters now, and at any given time you can look at any panel and you can count 20 to 40. The root cause of the pinholes is the paint primer that seeps down after the rain from the infrastructure that’s on the pad. So the pad topcoat hasn’t been refurbished and the primer gets exposed and then zinc becomes zinc oxide which then falls on the leading edge of the RCC and then we have pinholes.

Let me show you the next slide. You see the orbiter on the pad. When we have the collapse of the rest of the pad over it and expose some of the areas of that infrastructure that haven’t been painted, we get the primer and get the zinc oxide. So that’s one of the things that we’ve been contributing.

Okay. Bring down the slides, please.

All right. Day 2 debris. That’s the final thing I want to bring to your attention. We do have some more information on that. As you remember, this was discovered on the sixth day after the mishap, by DOD. It was one of the most laborious reviews of radar data in history of Space Command. If you will recall, we assessed this thing when the shuttle was going on a rear vector. It turned into a right wing vector and then back to a rear. In the course of those maneuvers, we noticed that something came off; and this is what’s been commonly called the debris of Day 2.

All right. Here’s what we have so far on the testing. With the 3100-plus observations of Columbia by DOD, we’ve got a lot of radar cross-section feedback. There have been 29 various materials examined at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and we’ve concluded right now that only the carrier panel remains a viable candidate for the Day 2 object. Now, this radar cross-section came from Pave PAWS radar at Cape Cod, space surveillance radar at Eglin, Pave PAWS at Beale and Navy fence radar. All those combined gave us a pretty good data base on what to look for on this Day 2 debris. Then, of course, we took it to Wright Patterson Air Force research lab and put it in the sound room that we have over there and then tested it.

We think with the horse collar and the carrier panel it gives us one of the best candidates we’ve had so far, after reviewing all the testing, to be the leading candidate; but we still have some more testing to do. The engineer is going to do follow-on testing for four tiles versus three tiles on the carrier panel, and we also have some other looks that we want to take a look at.

Thermal blankets from the bay were also considered a possibility but because of the correct area and mass ratio when it re-entered the atmosphere, it doesn’t look like that is a possible candidate. So the bottom line is the carrier panel. It looks like our best candidate so far. We do have some final refinements, and we’ll continue to work that as we go forward.

ADM. GEHMAN: Thank you very much. In my opinion, it’s a good week’s progress; and we haven’t even mentioned the OEX recorder yet.