CAIB News Conference NASA JSC 25 Feb 2003 – Part 1
- Adm. Harold Gehman, USN
- Brig. Gen. Duane W. Deal, Commander, 21st Space Wing, USAF
- Maj. Gen. Kenneth W. Hess, Commander, HQ USAF Chief of Safety
- Mr. G. Scott Hubbard, Director, NASA Ames Research Center
STAFF: Hi. I’d like to welcome you all, with the members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. We’d like to let you know that we have a new website up and running today. It’s www.caib.us. And with that, I’d like to turn it over to Admiral Hal Gehman.
GEHMAN: Good afternoon. As usual, I’m joined by three of my fellow board members, who I will introduce to you. I’ll make a few opening comments. They will make a few opening comments.
And then we’ll be delighted to take your questions and questions from any of the other centers. To my right is Brigadier General Duane Deal, U.S. Air Force, who is on the group that’s looking at material and management issues. To his right is Major General Ken Hess, U.S. Air Force, the group that’s looking at operations and flight issues. And on his right is Mr. Scott Hubbard, who is on the group looking at technical and engineering evaluation issues.
This is really your opportunity to dialogue with the board. As you know from my previous statements, we don’t save up news to be released on Tuesdays. But I do have some announcements to make as to what we’ve been doing this week and some things like that, as will my colleagues.
Each one of them will make a statement as to what activities they have been doing and where they are. But in general, we don’t save up news to be released at this conference.
Our commitment to finding out what happened to the Columbia and her crew remains just as firm. The energy that we are pursuing has increased. We are now more active. We’ve got more things going on than we did before, far more activities going on.
We have now got investigators out in the field. And as I will tell you a little bit later about our activities, I think you’ll see that the pace has picked up considerably.
But our commitment and our resolve to get to the bottom of this is undiminished. I’d like to give public thanks to the many agencies that are assisting us. In particular, I’d like to mention the NTSB and the Department of Defense, who have been very helpful to us.
I would also like to mention state agencies, particularly in the states of Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California. It’s these state agencies and local police, firefighters, sheriffs that have really borne the burden of all the debris pickup and are really carrying a great deal of the load. And we’re very much grateful to them.
Debris continues to come in. We’ll get some numbers here for you. We have some numbers to pass out.
Debris continues to be important to us. We are now beginning to learn some things. That’s probably too strong. But we are now beginning to see some interesting trends and evidence in the debris. So debris continues to be very important to us.
The board is now working simultaneously in a number of areas as we speak. We are working simultaneously at JSC, KSC–Kennedy Space Center–Marshall, Palmdale–the plant where we used to overhaul shuttles and make them, and the Thiokol plant in Utah.
We now have our own budget, of which I am the budgeting officer. It’s controlled by me. As Laura Brown indicated, we now have our email address. Our 1-800 number and websites are up and running. And I believe, at the end of our broadcast here, those will be put up on the screen.
Our first public hearing will take place on Thursday, March the 6th at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. Details can be found on our website.
We are, as I indicated, we are finding some interesting things from debris. Let me show you one here. And I think that it may appear on our television screens as we do that.
This is the same–these two are two pictures of the same piece of debris. This is the underside of a piece of tile that was found about 30 miles west of Fort Worth in the town of Powell, Texas in Navarro County.
This is still being analyzed. But what I would point out to you, this is the underside of the tile. This is the tile which is near the metal surface. What appears to be at the ends here–here and here–are essentially worn away, probably by hot gases.
I’m now going to show you the top of the tile. This is the surface of a tile which faces the heat. And while it’s being analyzed right now, including what those little orange specks are, I am told that this is not typical of a re-entry tile. This is very unusual.
One of the riddles that we have to sort out is whether or not this damage was done while the tile was still attached to the orbiter or whether this damage was done after the breakup and that’s what it looks like when you try and re-enter the atmosphere at 15,000 miles an hour in a non-aerodynamic state.
So this is now what I like to call–we used to call this the westernmost piece of debris. We now have another piece of debris, which has been found farther west of this, near the town of Littlefield, Texas. It is a fragment of a piece of tile. And I don’t have a picture of that here.
But it’s coming in. And we will take a look at that also.
The tile at Littlefield, Texas that we don’t have in the system yet appears to be a tile from the upper surface of the wing, near what we call the glove area, which is near where the wing attaches to the fuselage. So it appears to be from that section on the top part of the wing, forward, near the body of the orbiter itself.
So the fact that that tile was found significantly farther west is interesting. We’ll have to get the tile into analysis to see what it is.
And I’m told that it’s a fragment of a tile. It’s not a complete tile.
So debris is important to us. And we thank the public for their energy in going out and picking up debris. We reaffirm the instructions to the public to call the number, get some help. Some of this stuff may be hazardous. It’s very important to us.
For my own plans, I’m traveling to Washington, D.C. tonight. And I will spend all day tomorrow in meetings with senators and congressmen who are in the oversight committees that exercise oversight over NASA. And I will be explaining to them what we’re doing and how it goes.
So those are my opening comments. I would now like to turn the microphone over to Brigadier General Duane Deal. And he has some opening comments.
DEAL: Good afternoon. I’d like to echo the admiral. Thank you for the opportunity to get with you today and explain some of the things that we are up to.
To reiterate what our panel does, we call ourselves kind of the “3-M Panel”–the Materiel, Maintenance and Management Panel. I’ll give you a little bit more granularity into that. In the materiel and maintenance aspect, we’re looking at the things that you would probably expect us to: design modifications of the shuttle; the entire shuttle system refurbishment procedures; maintenance processing; the overhaul; quality assurance; inspections; the vendor issue; aging platforms; and also, the entire shuttle integration.
Then under the management aspect of it, which all the groups will be contributing to, we’re looking at: the boards and the committees that work the various aspects of the shuttle; the internal processes that lead up to launch and also recover from launches; safety programs; the decisions that have been made and the decision levels at which those decisions were made; the oversight and, what some of you are familiar with, the end sight programs; budgetary programs; contract management; and things such as that on the management side.
And on our team, we have Major General John Barry from Air Force Materiel Command, Rear Admiral Steve Turcotte, from the Naval Safety Center, plus a great staff team. And as the admiral said, we’re bringing vast experience in these past investigations. And we’re committed to do our part to get to the bottom of this terrible accident.
As the admiral alluded to, we’re going from being simply wide now to being a deep and wide type of analysis. We’re in what we affectionately call the “show me the numbers mode.”
We’re entering this with no assumptions. We’re not assuming anything is broken. And we’re not assuming everything is solid, 100 percent. And our duty is to examine everything objectively.
What we have been up to is we’re gathering and reviewing a number of past reports for the actions that were taken and also for the follow-ups to those actions, some things that you are familiar with and many of you have reported on, things such as: the foam incidents on Flights 732, 50 and 112; other past reports, such as the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel reports, the Shuttle Independent Assessment Team reports; maintenance actions that have occurred, not just on Columbia, but also throughout the fleet; the non-destructive inspection type of processes we have; and something some of you are familiar with, the government mandatory inspection points. Those are the items that the government is still required to inspect in quality check of what the contractor has done.
We have started the process of conducting interviews. And we kind of lump that into three different categories.
We bring in outside speakers, some of which are provocative and some of which have appeared in your media. We bring in factual background experts that are independent experts. An example of one of this that we just had last week is a Dr. Jean Gebman of the RAND Corporation, who brought some perspectives on his extensive study of aging aircraft.
We’re also starting the process of interviewing witnesses that were involved with the Columbia program.
So in addition to finding the cause, another key aspect that we’re all going to be looking at is not just what the cause was, but also what we have to eliminate from what happened, what we do not believe was an impact. And that’s going to include the entire program again.
And I could give you an example of looking at the payload itself of the Spacehab modules. There was experimental equipment that we have to rule out that included a huge range that many of you are familiar with, from an ergometer to student experiments that were on board, to crystal growth experiments. Not that we assume that that’s a part of it, but we have to eliminate them.
We’re on the road this week, as the admiral mentioned. The other two members of our team are on the road. One was at Thiokol in Utah yesterday and today. Another was at Palmdale yesterday and today.
I’ll leave and join them tonight at Kennedy Space Center. And then we’ll split again, where one of us will go off to Marshall Space Flight Center and another of us to the Michoud assembly facility in New Orleans.
And again, the bottom line is that we are looking at everything, deliberate and thorough, and looking to do it right, for the causes and to prevent the recurrence.
And I’ll leave you with two final perspectives. The first is to reiterate what you all already know. The shuttle is a research and development vehicle. Columbia was on its 28th flight and the shuttle system, on its 113th flight.
It’s not an airliner or a production operations aircraft; otherwise, it would have had thousands of flights before it went operational. And it’s not a Mercury or a Gemini or Apollo that were one-use type of systems.
And so it’s very much an R&D environment, which leads us to why we brought in someone like Dr. Gebman, because we are examining it as an aging spacecraft in an R&D environment.
And the second and final point I’ll leave you with is the complexity of what we all face. Admiral Gehman is leading a huge task force, doing all this. NASA has what I would term the mother of all fault trees, its tremendous fault trees that we’re examining and looking at, in addition to our own scenarios.
I took 30 seconds and measured on of the fault trees, which was three feet by 15 feet long. And that only went down 15 different levels. And it can go another 50-plus levels down below it.
So you can imagine the steps taken to design, produce and maintain just one component that’s a part of that fault tree, which also includes the designing, the producing and maintaining the equipment with which it’s manufactured. So you can appreciate the task that we all have ahead of us.
So we’re pressing forward, as smartly as possible. No longer just receiving data but, as the admiral mentioned, analyzing it with our experts and generating our own evaluations.
And I thank you for the opportunity to convey where we’re headed. We have much to do. But we wanted you to have a flavor of what we’re up to.
GEHMAN: Thank you very much.
Ken?
HESS: Sir. Good afternoon. I’d like to echo the comments not only of the admiral, but also of General Deal and the fact that, in order for the Accident Board to complete its work, we’re going to have to look at a lot of processes that will take us into places that are not currently being covered by the news media at all.
And when we do that, like General Deal says, it’s not because we actually think that there is going to be a cause there. But to do a complete investigation, we have to look at those programs because there may be ideas and concepts that would be worthy of note back to NASA that have nothing to do with approximate cause of the mishap.
Now our portion of the board is going to take a look at things like training, mission operations and life sciences. And in the training aspect, as General Deal said, there is a decision tree that is very, very detailed that we have to work our way through to be able to get there.
Not only do we have to look at the process for how the crew was selected for this particular mission, but also how the crew was trained, not only to do their individual jobs with the orbiter itself on orbit and during ascent and re-entry, but also how they were trained to be able to conduct the experiments that were in the Spacehab that General Deal talked about. We have to look at how the crew was trained that ran the flight from the ground, both the ascent and re-entry crews, as well as the crews who monitored the performance on orbit.
Each of those was trained by an expert team that we have to look at, to look at their qualifications and look at the certifications of the individual members who were on, so we can assess the overall training for the mission itself.
And so, in the first part of our business here, we’re going to take a look at the training operations and do some of the initial medical clearance stuff that has to do with the crews and their health and their readiness to do their mission. And once we have finished that background look, we’ll transition into more of an operational look, starting with the flight readiness review, and take the flight readiness review into the lock sequence and then look at performance on orbit to measure it against the plan and see how that went.
In all, we think that the background processes will probably take us another 2.5 weeks to get through. We have just hired an expert in the training processes that will help us get through and understand the different words and vernacular that are being used here.
We also have a life sciences specialist that was in the public release this morning, Dr. Jim Bagian, who is helping us in the life sciences area. And so we’re making good progress. And our interviews are starting this week and taking a look at those people who did such things as the payload integration, looking at the safety aspects of the initial operations inside the shuttle before launch.
Now our team travel is expanding a little bit. Steve Wallace, whom you met last week, is on travel to Kennedy this week. And he’s going to endeavor to tease out the information involved with the launch sequence, the ice control or ice teams that take a look for ice as a potential debris problem on launch, as well as the last waiver processes at the go-for-launch decision.
And to augment our staff, we have added two people. We have added an NTSB investigator this week. And we have another FAA accident investigator coming in.
Both who have tremendous background in investigating some of the major aircraft mishaps that have happened over the last several years, but also the FAA investigator is an expert in air traffic control and radar. Because we’ll have to get into the range and range safety issues to ensure that they were in accordance to the plan as well.
So kind of to summarize, we’re just now getting to the point where we have enough understanding to begin digging very, very deeply into a lot of the key processes. And we’re adding more process each day, as our understanding grows.
And the key members interviews with NASA and members of the USA contractor are just beginning toward the end of this week for us.
Thank you.
GEHMAN: And the “G” in front of Scott’s name stands for General.
(LAUGHTER)
HUBBARD: So I can fit with the rest of the brass up here. The engineering and technical analysis group–which includes Jim Hallock, Roger Tetrault, Sheila Widnall and myself–is applying a systems approach to our work.
It’s well known that accidents in complex systems often involve a chain of events. It’s not often one single thing that caused the whole accident.
So this complex series of events needs to be evaluated together. For example, eventually, we would like to see if you can couple the external tank shedding event with TPS sensitivities with the calculations that are being done by the aerodynamics folks.
Whoever is beeping out there owes the board a case of beer. Thank you.
So what we’re doing right now . . .
(LAUGHTER)
So what we’re doing right now is trying to bound the event in the orbiter. We’re trying to go from the town to the ballpark to the seat. Let me give you three examples of data that the NASA Mishap Response Team has put out there and point out the challenges of being able to bound this event.
They did a hypothetical study of a 20-square inch breach in the wing, four by five. Near the main landing gear door of the seal, it seems to account for the temperature rise. But this is a first cut, with an initial set of assumptions.
Figuring out what might happen to a plume going inside of a wing is a very complex task. It’s a good first step. But we don’t have an answer there yet.
Secondly, the sensor data that we have all looked at–the rise in temperature, the sensors going off line–seem to be consistent with wires going through the wheel well being severed. But there is a sensor near the front of the spacecraft that also had an anomaly.
How do you account for that? Again, it’s a little early to conclude that we have a complete story.
And finally, some initial aerodynamic analysis seems to indicate there was some disturbance going on in the vicinity of the left main landing gear wheel well. But eight different calculations all gave somewhat different answers.
So the story I’m trying to communicate to you is that it’s early yet to draw conclusions that we have boxed this story in, that we really have bounded the event. We’re making good progress. But we need to validate the data interpretations with analysis of debris, experimental tests and, in selected cases, with independent calculations and perhaps some independent tests.
We need to look at the system.
A couple of current data findings that are relevant. First of all, the downlink telemetry during ascent and on orbit–this is the telemetry now, not the visual observations that were made–all appear to be in family nominal. As far as we can tell, everything in ascent and on orbit, from the telemetry, looked like the mission was fine.
Subsequently, we have looked at the 32 seconds of data. And we have been able to analyze the MRT, as provided to us data, in which we look at the first five seconds and the last two seconds. The first five seconds, I think you know about. It shows that the orbiter was running normally, except for the temperature rises and the other sensor outages that have been noted.
The control jets were firing. The attitude of the vehicle was stabilized. The vehicle was under control. And the auxiliary power units–the so-called APUs–were running.
The last two seconds show that the APUs were still running, but the hydraulic fluids are now at zero. And the hydraulic fluid reservoir is at zero percent for all three units.
The conclusion seems to be–and again, we have to be very careful as we move on this–is that somewhere in the 25 seconds of unrecovered data, there was some sort of a failure that affected all three hydraulic units. Another piece of data in this puzzle that we’re working on.
Now our group has plans for some next steps. We are initiating independent expert input. We had a presentation yesterday by Professor Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, a Stanford colleague of mine, who was the principal scientist doing studies on shuttle tiles, on the risk analysis on what was known through the first 50 flights or so. She gave us some excellent ideas for things we might do as a follow-up analysis.
We’re developing themes in our group, which will help to test the NASA fault tree. We’re going to follow the sensor data, follow the external tank insulation strike, follow the thermal protection system–its history, its sensitivity. And we’re going to follow the debris.
Roger Tetrault will be down at KSC starting tomorrow with two experts–one in thermal protection systems, one in entry dynamics. And also, beginning tomorrow, the board will have an on-site resident there to help us review the debris and begin to look at what we might want to do or what might make sense, how we interpret things.
So to conclude with my part, the data and the twisted metal are speaking to us. But we’re just developing the ears to hear.
Back to you.
GEHMAN: Thank you very much. And we will be pleased to take questions, whomever Ms. Brown wants to recognize.
STAFF: I’ll take one question from each person here. And then we’re going to move on to the other centers and take questions from them. And then we can come back here and do some follow-up.
QUESTION: So on the photographs of the tiles that have been found so far, on the first side of it, the inside–and you say it shows wear around the edges, from heat, you said. And I wonder if that means that whatever it is that makes this tile come off, that that indicates an inside source of the heat that makes the tile separate.
And second part of the question is on the flip side of the tile, you see those orange specks. And what are the various things that might cause orange specks?
GEHMAN: The answer to your question is it’s premature to assign a cause to that eroding channeling on the underside. We’re going to look very hard, through all kinds of different kinds of analysis, at what might have caused that.
Keeping in mind that that may have caused post-breakup. In other words, that just may have been what it looked like when it was going 12,000 miles an hour, no longer on the shuttle.
On the other hand, it might be a clue as to what caused the breakup. That’s why we were anxious to find things that came off the shuttle early.
We also–the serial number on that tile was obliterated, regretfully. So we can’t tell exactly where it came from. But we can tell, from its shape, thickness, makeup, dimensions, approximately where it came from. And NASA is working on that right now.
Scott, do you want to follow up with any of the details of what we know about that tile?
HUBBARD: I think the fairest thing to say is that we’re going to get a first good look by some thermal protection system experts later this week. They will be down there with Roger Tetrault. And at least one of the fellows–Howard Goldstein, I believe–has significant–he helped develop some of these tiles initially. And I think he can look at it and begin to give us some ideas of what we ought to go further and do.
If the tile was hit laterally and sheared off down to what’s called the densified layer–this is the layer at the bottom of the tile that helps it stick to the materials underneath–then what you see in some of these places might be like reheating styrofoam, if you will. It tends to slump.
But it is too early to say that this is an explanation. I think, stay tuned for the expert analysis.
QUESTION: The orange?
HUBBARD: The orange specks, I don’t want to speculate on. It could be a result of landing out in a field somewhere.
STAFF: Go ahead down there.
QUESTION: A real quickie and then my question. Which wing is the second tile from? You didn’t really say right or left.
And then my other question is, in the 32 seconds of analysis, how do you account for that big gap of information in between? What’s your theory on why we’ve got five seconds, nothing and then two seconds?
GEHMAN: We believe that the tile found in Littlefield–the fragment of tile found in Littlefield, Texas, which is the westernmost piece of debris, is from the left wing. That’s preliminary, because it’s a fragment of tile.
And Scott, again, I’ll let you talk about the missing 25 seconds.
HUBBARD: I think you know that the way the data comes in the control room, there are voting procedures. There are multiple lines of signal. And if you don’t get a good signal from the signal path, then it’s not recorded. It’s not sent on to the control room.
During the period of atmospheric entry, it is not uncommon to have signal dropout. This has to do with the positioning of the antenna, as well as the receiving assets, like TDRS, you know, the tracking and relay satellite and ground assets.
So the fact that there was some dropout was not unexpected. It is fortunate that we have been able to recover what we have. The actual signals themselves in that period, at least what I’ve looked at, it’s barely visible at all. It may be that that never gets recovered.
DUNN: Thank you.
