Transcript of CAIB Press Conference 22 Apr 2003 (Part 1)

MS. BROWN: Welcome, everybody. We’re ready to begin, and let me turn you over to Admiral Hal Gehman.

ADM. GEHMAN: Good afternoon. We’ll use our usual format here. As the regulars are aware, we don’t save up our news for Tuesdays. This is really an opportunity to dialogue with members of the board. That’s what we’ll do today.

I have a couple of odds and ends, and then I’ll turn it over to my colleagues here to my right. First of all, in the world of debris picking-up, the total as of April 16th, which is the last report I have, we had picked up 72,750 pieces of debris total, for a total weight of 79,900 pounds – about 36 percent, by dry weight, of the orbiter.

I think, as we announced last week, the board has approved NASA’s plan for how to terminate the searching. We still find interesting pieces of debris. As a matter of fact, we were just talking about an interesting piece of debris that’s just recently been found. So the debris search is still very important to us.

We’re beginning kind of a new phase in the board’s work. We’re beginning to concentrate on the report. We’re beginning to think about integrating some of the facts and theories and scenarios and analysis. We’re beginning to analyze some of the interviews that we’ve conducted. This will take a couple of months; but a manifestation of that, of course, is the fact that we, last week, issued our first two interim findings and recommendations. They were released last week. You’re all aware of those.

As the board deliberates more and reviews what it is that we know and what it is that we don’t know and what it is we’re going to have to go and do and what kind of work we’re going to have to pursue in order to change one of the "I don’t know’s" into an "I do know," more of these interim recommendations can be expected. Once the board is satisfied with a subject, we will release it. We are not interested in surprising NASA at the end. If there’s something that NASA can get to work on, we want them to know about it as soon as possible. I don’t have any particular projections as to what the next recommendation will be, but there are four or five that are milling about.

Just to give you an example, I mentioned last week that the board had approved the closeout of two of the NASA fault trees. When we do that, when we go through the closeout of the fault trees, we frequently find interesting observations, we frequently find things which the board wants to note, and we may put those in the category of observations rather than findings and recommendations, but we’re doing that all the time.

I will issue my first but not my last "no comment" on the press report that Mr. Dittemore intends to resign.

I would make one other comment by way of clarification – just so that, when you hear terms, that we are both using the same terminology. The board is going to attempt to structure the report in terms of a direct cause of this accident; contributing factors – and a contributing factor would be one which we would hope we could tie to this accident; and then a category of items which we would call root causes – these are cultural kinds of things or historical kinds of things or budget kinds of things that you can’t tie directly to this accident but we feel in some way or another are related, distinctly related; and fourth would be a category that we call significant observations. A significant observation is something that the board has come across that may have nothing to do with the accident of the Columbia but it might have to do with management or safety or something else and we feel NASA would benefit from us noting it. So those are the four categories of things. So when you hear terms thrown around, try and couch it along those lines.

Okay. That’s enough for me. I’ll turn it over to my friends over here. First of all, from Group 1, Admiral Turcotte.

ADM. TURCOTTE: Good afternoon. From the maintenance, materiel, and management group, I would like to give you a short update of a couple of issues I addressed last week – one, on the dissection of the foam and some of the anomalies we found and, two, some of the RCS testing.

First a report on my colleagues. General Deal just returned from Michoud. He was there last week during all of the dissection; and General Barry today is at Kennedy, looking at the debris field and doing some other work.

The next slide, please. As I talked to you last week, we had dissected ET 120 and found some anomalies. This week we had the opportunity to look first at the closest sister tank, ET 94. You recall Columbia had ET 93. Again, here’s what we’re looking at, the bipod foam. There’s the first analysis where we found several electronic anomalies.

Next slide, please. Then I’m going to show some examples of some of the anomalies we found. We found a total of 74 observations on this sister tank. You can see some foldover with some other debris in there.

Next slide. You see some voids. A little bit bigger than what we found on ET 93. More volume. Bigger void.

ADM. GEHMAN: Not ET 93.

ADM. TURCOTTE: I’m sorry. ET 94. I keep doing that.

Next slide. Then again you can see some more voids. Much bigger volume and a little bit different patterns that we found on ET 120.

Next slide. Under the radar cross-section. I reported last week that we had submitted a T seal; and, again, that’s what a T seal looks like. We showed a cross-section last week. We got the results back. We found that that T seal that we did submit passed both the radar cross-section and the signature ballistics required that was tracked upon re-entry. So that did correspond exactly with what we saw on the duration of the mission.

That concludes my remarks.

ADM. GEHMAN: Group 2, Steve Wallace.

MR. WALLACE: Good afternoon. I’m going to talk quickly about training. We haven’t talked much about training during the course of the investigation, and it is an issue that we are fairly close to concluding an actually very extensive, although fairly low-profile, assessment of the training program. I’ll talk about training briefly in three different pieces – the training of the astronauts, the training of the mission control personnel, and the training of the launch control personnel.

The astronaut training actually went on for 126 weeks. Because of the very extensive repeated delays of STS 107, their training was dragged out over a period over twice as long as what might be typical. 5,000 cumulative training hours for the crew. A lot of these are integrated training exercises with the mission controllers and the launch controllers, and they do a certain amount of retraining. When they have long slips, they also will go into sort of a maintenance level training and then re-peak up again before the mission. Really the crew records of training was all in perfect order, and all of the evidence indicates that the crew was extremely well trained for the mission and that crew training was certainly not a factor.

The mission control team training. There were actually some discrepancies found, which we would probably characterize as an area for improvement – that is, that 7 of the 77 mission controllers involved in the mission actually had some recertification requirements missing. Now, not to overstate this, they were actually highly qualified, in our view, for the mission. Nonetheless, there were some recertification requirements, exercises that weren’t completed; and these discrepancies were not drastic in the preflight control process. So there’s an issue there that I think the board will speak to as something for improvement, but clearly not in any way considered to be a contributing factor.

The launch control, which is a group down at Kennedy, that part of the training is still being completed. So assessing all the records there.

Our two big issues that we always talk about, sort of the foam story and the DOD imaging story, which really is the focus of a lot of the energy of Group 2. I think I’d like to discuss a little bit how these stories fit together and, that is, the foam story, which is all of the prior foam events, the disposition of foam events, and particularly the most recent prior to 107, which was the STS 112 event. We see in the documentation and we see in recordings "not a safety-of-flight issue." "Not a safety-of-flight issue." That same expression is kind of the same drumbeat we hear in the decision-making regarding not ultimately requesting utilizing imaging assets that might have been available during flight. So that’s sort of the common thread and, indeed, the part of the story that pulls those issues together.

All three of the members – my colleagues, Dr. Sally Ride and Major General Hess – we’re all very much focused on that. It’s probably the bulk of what we are working on, looking at all these various processes of the boards and particularly – it’s easy to look back at these things; it’s hard to look forward and envision a process where that sort of thing, where you can eliminate it. I know that some of my other colleagues have drawn the comparison to the Challenger situation and how an organization that is so effective and has such thorough processes, these breakups can still occur.

Other than that, we’re also following return-to-flight issues. NASA has, of course, extensive efforts going on in that area. We did issue our first two recommendations, as Admiral Gehman referred to. They were both characterized as return to flight. In other words, all of our recommendations ultimately will not be that way. There may be some longer-term organizational-type recommendations. However, the first two issued, the one on the inspection of the RCC panels and the other on use of imaging assets, both were prefaced with "before we return to flight." A number of our recommendations will be that way, and a number will not.

NASA has, again, extensive efforts that many of ours will parallel and there won’t be any contest there. I will say that the RCC recommendation was something that NASA did not have on their return-to-flight agenda directly; whereas the other one on imaging, they had several different imaging efforts underway. So we’ll be following those issues and issuing further recommendations in that area.

ADM. GEHMAN: Thank you very much.

Dr. Hallock.

DR. HALLOCK: Good afternoon. I’ll be talking about the work that Group 3, which is the engineering and technical analysis group, has been working on; and we’ve been quite busy of late. We’ve been looking at everything from the OEX data to aerothermal analyses, looking at the debris and trying to analyze what it is we’re seeing with the debris, and also getting ready for the tests that will be coming up shortly at Southwest Research.

My colleague, Scott Hubbard, that’s what he is working on at this point, is helping to finalize the test plan. I believe the idea is to start testing next week. They will be starting with the main landing gear door and looking at the tile on the door itself as a beginning. A lot of that’s going to give them a chance to shake out the equipment and so on, as eventually we’ll be moving on from tile to the RCC panels themselves.

Doug Osheroff is actually down at Cape Kennedy. This is his first chance to visit down there. He has been working on the role of the chemical effects in this superheated air environment, which is interesting because not only do you have to worry about how everything is flowing but the environment in which you’re operating is very important in the sense of you don’t have an oxygen molecule, you have maybe an atomic form of the molecules instead, individual atoms, and hence they react a bit differently. He’s also spending some time thinking about possible new ways of doing some non-destructive testing because obviously that’s going to become a very important issue with respect to things like the RCC.

Sheila Widnall is continuing the work she reported on the last time she was here. That is the aerodynamic responses to all of these extreme heating events. It’s not a very simple area. In a lot of places, some new ground has to be broken in order to be able to understand the effects that we are seeing.

Also, my colleague Roger Tetrault is also down at Kennedy and will be down there all week.

A lot of new things are coming in in the sense of results from chemical analyses and X-ray studies. Part of what we’re really interested in is when you see this material that’s on all of the equipment down there, called slag anomaly, the intent is to find out what is it made of because if you can determine what it is made up of and map that with the idea of what the temperature would have to be for such a thing to melt, you then can get a sense a little more of what is really going on, what is the temperature environment and also where is this material possibly coming from.

The main area, though, a lot of us are now starting to look into is this whole idea of taking all of this evidence that we have – that is, the telemetered data, the debris analysis types of things, the OEX data that we talked about, the videos, the timing of events and so on – and trying to put all of these together and try to come up with some hypotheses as to what happened back on February 1st.

You sort of take an event, such as a broken T seal or something like that, and starting from there, start looking at all of this data and see if you can actually tell a story. The problem is getting through a lot of it. We’ve been working on things; the NASA folks have. On Thursday of this week, the board will be meeting with NASA to exchange some ideas and actually some hypotheses also. The intent, as I say, is to share this information because we’re all trying to get to the same result – that is, what did happen back on February 1st.

To develop these hypotheses, it gets very important to really understand the nature and how these sensors behave – and not only how they behave but how do they fail. I’ve been working very closely with Professor Bruce Starling from the University of Washington, who is helping us to look at the sensors themselves, how do they actually work and then what are the failure modes of doing it. What I’d like to do is to show you some OEX data here but more in the sense of trying to say that we’ve got to understand what is actually going on.

The data itself is interesting but you have to, as I say, first spend the time to understand what is it you can say or not say about the data. So we have various kinds and types of things. We have a lot of the data which is what we would say is nominal flight data – in other words, it looks just like data that occurred on the last five or six flights of Columbia. So here what we’re seeing in various colors are previous flights of Columbia and looking at whatever this happens to be. This happens to be the left OMS pod, which is an important issue for a lot of what we’re looking at. The types of things you’re looking for is where does it differ from most other flights.

As you can see, we are talking about something happening here. Normally everyone seems to get excited about temperatures rising and rising a lot. Well, here we’re interested in the fact that it didn’t rise as much as it did on previous flights and that says something, but it also says sometime later, at 540 seconds after, it started its re-entry thing. Then temperatures did start changing and changing a lot and doing a lot of different things at the time.

Go to the next one, please. Here’s another one which is going to be interesting, which is the front spar panel. Now, this is fairly simple; but you’ve got to be careful of how you look at it, in the sense of you do see a small beginning of something happening and then it goes fast and it goes way up here. Some people at times will say we’ve reached a temperature of 450 degrees. Well, it turns out this sensor, by the way, is calibrated such that the highest temperature it will ever show you is 450 degrees. So you have got to be careful about trying to take that number and doing something with it because in this case it’s actually started rising faster and faster and, in fact, it was going so fast it got overloaded and eventually the sensor itself failed. So you have to look at how they do it.

One thing I forgot to mention is that these times are very interesting. The good news is that all of the data that we have, the telemetry, some of the data we saw many months ago when we first started to meet, showing, you know, temperatures changing inside the wheel well and all of that, that was a different data system and the OEX is a completely different system, but the good news is they’re all using the same time base. So when we start putting the data and looking at them together, we can feel fairly confident that the time is what it says it is. So when we say something may have differed by 5 seconds or something, we’re fairly confident that that can be used as part of our investigation to understand what is going on.

Next slide, please. Here’s another one where different types of things are going on and lots of stuff. Here’s a case where some of the previous flights had one sort of response and others had a different type of response, but in this one it’s another one where you start seeing things happen but then suddenly it goes down to zero and in this case starts vibrating like mad. Well, these are cases where we’re talking about the sensor itself probably melting or the wiring next to it at the time.

Next one, I think. Here’s another one which we’ve seen a number of times in the data where it goes along and then in the space of one time increment, a second, something jumps up something like 300 degrees. Some people may try to look at this and say, wait a minute, look what happened, we have something that’s 300 degrees hotter. Well, things like this can happen; and in this case it probably happened back at the source of power for this particular sensor. As it works out, it’s just one bit. As you know, the data is transmitted as a series of bits. It starts off as 10 bits and as 8 bits. So what is happening is one of these bits – and I think it’s the fifth one – actually just changed in magnitude because of what was going on because of a problem in the electrical power supply, which in itself was probably being affected by the temperatures that are going on.

So the point I’m trying to make, there’s a lot of things we need to look at which is sort of more the unglamorous part of all this – that is, to really dig down and understand how the sensors are operating and what kinds of failure modes they can go into. So some things tell you that the S temperatures are rising, but the other part we need to understand is was it with the wiring.

Another part of this unglamorous part of the thing is that we’ve been looking at all of the closeout photos. These are photos that are taken just before they start buttoning up the shuttle itself and getting it ready to move to the launch pad area. They take photos of everything. So now we can see here is where that sensor is and here are all these cables. So we take those and the engineering diagrams and try to track down, okay, where is that wire. Okay, here’s a wire that obviously got burned at such and such a time; and here’s another one that did at the same time. Well, let’s now look at it and see are they in the same wire bundle or not, or is there someplace where they at least come together so we can say that’s probably where the heating event occurred, rather than just hitting the sensor part itself.

So there’s a lot of these kinds of things that need to be looked at and we’re spending a lot of time on it and, as I say, it’s important to understand these things because, frankly, I’ve heard a lot of statements people are making which are wrong because they’re trying to draw too much from some of these sensors, such as like the first one I showed. Someone could say, gee, it went up to a certain temperature. Well, it could be more; but that was the highest that it was set for calibration and it just happens to be that where you’re plotting just happened to be a larger number of degrees that it could have plotted but it was not part of it.

One last thing that we’ve been doing is we’ve always said many, many times – and could we have the next viewgraph, please – that the debris is telling us a lot. We’ve shown these pictures and we’ve seen a lot of things showing what happens to the debris. Well, another interesting part of that is to go back and look at where did we find all of this debris. And I’ve filtered out a lot of the information so all I have on this particular one are just the RCC panels – not the sides part, not the mounting brackets, just the panels themselves. It shows a very interesting thing. You can see here’s 9. Here’s 8. There’s 7. Here’s 6 and so on. All of it seems to show this thing. I mean, it shows that things were coming apart when this happened in somewhat of an order centered somewhere about 8 and 9, because that’s another thing we’ve been looking at. The higher-numbered ones also showed somewhat the same thing, not as clean as this particular one; but it does, once again, give you another feature of things to look at as you’re trying to develop all of these hypotheses.

That’s what I have.

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