CAIB Press Conference Transcript 8 April 2003 (Part 1)

LT. COL. WOODYARD: Good afternoon and welcome to today’s Columbia Accident Investigation Board press briefing. We’ll conduct this briefing as we have all our previous one. We’ll begin with comments from the chairman, Admiral Hal Gehman.

ADM. GEHMAN: Good afternoon. A couple of general comments and then I’ll turn it over to my colleagues here, as we usually do. I’ll introduce them and they’ll make a opening statement and we’ll take your questions.

During this week the board has listened to a presentation for the first of the NASA fault tree closeouts. The first fault tree to be closed out was the space shuttle main engine fault tree. They briefed us on Saturday; and the board concurred with the closing of that fault tree, with a couple of administrative comments. So as we had indicated before, the fault tree system is really a NASA system, it’s not a board system, but the NASA part of the investigation has to get our concurrence to close out a fault tree. We have another one that’s just about ready to come to us, depending on how it fares as it goes through the NASA accident investigation team process, which is ongoing right now. So we may have a second one closed out later this week.

Debris searching. We also received a briefing on how and when we will terminate the search for debris. The ground search for debris in the primary debris areas is 76 percent complete. That is, 76 percent of the area which is considered the primary debris area has been walked by people, by these 5,000 to 5500 people that are doing this every single day. So we’re about 76 percent complete with that. 32 percent of the Columbia by dry weight has been recovered. I don’t have the exact number of pieces, but it’s slightly above 50,000 pieces have been recovered.

In addition to the ground search, there are also metrics for air searches and things like that which are also moving along. The water search, the diving, looking in lakes and reservoirs and things like that, is essentially 100 percent complete. They are just about finished. They had some 2900 objects that they detected by site scan, sonar and magnetometers and other things like that which they then dove on; and they’ve unfortunately only found one piece of orbiter debris in any of these lakes. The search in Louisiana is essentially complete, with the recovery of a couple of main engine parts.

At the request of the board, the searchers are looking with some vigor west of Interstate 45 in Texas. This, of course, would relate to the earliest shedding events and they are finding — they always were searching out there. It’s not anything that the board invented, but we asked them to energize that search a little bit more and they have and they are, indeed, finding RCC pieces and tiles west of Interstate 45, which was not in the primary debris field. I’ll let Dr. Widnall talk about the westernmost piece of debris, the famous Littlefield tile. We have some more information on that we would like to pass on you to.

The board is very, very grateful to the many agencies that have provided debris searchers. There are over 90 agencies at one time or another which have provided manpower or expertise. Right now the bulk of the burden is being carried by the U.S. Forest Service and the Texas Forest Service; and the board is very, very grateful for their work and would like to acknowledge the wonderful work that they’ve done.

As you probably are aware, two weeks ago we lost a helicopter and we lost two lives in this process. The board is very sensitive and appreciative to that fact and feels that the debris searching is one of the pillars that this investigation is built on. It’s enormously important that we continue to find things in the debris. We continue to discover things in the debris. So it remains important and particularly in the western area, the search area. So this is very important. We are very grateful to the thousands of people that are working it so hard, and we look forward to more findings.

We concurred in principle with the plan of the team to close out the debris collection in phases, based upon, first of all, the 100 percent search of the most probable areas; and then there are some conditional-based events on searching certain other areas, depending on what we find. In other words, we’ve ask for some other areas to be searched; and if they find anything, then they will search some more.

I would also like to make a comment, by the way. Another group of people that have been very helpful to this investigation — and I don’t want anybody to take this incorrectly — but the press has been very helpful to this investigation. I don’t want you all to report that because it seems self-serving, but actually your digging and your analysis and your research and your commentary has also aided in our work and we appreciate that.

I would also like to note that the board now consists of more doctors than generals; and if that’s progress, then we’re making some progress.

All right. I’m joined today by one of the board members from each of our three groups. General Duane Deal from Group 1, Dr. Sally Ride and Dr. Sheila Widnall from Groups 2 and 3 respectively. I’ll ask each one of them to make an introduction, and then we’ll be glad to take your questions.

General Deal.

GEN. DEAL: Great, sir. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Just to give you a real quick update on what our board’s up to, General Barry is in town this week. He’s putting his focus pretty much on the management, human factor arena; and he’s also busily working to update and integrate all the board’s inputs together for one cohesive story. Rear Admiral Turcotte has been in D.C., doing interviews, and he’ll be at Kennedy Space Center next week with me, doing more interviews. I’m leaving for Michoud tomorrow, and I’ll give you an update on that because they have just finished their dissection of the ET 120, the External Tank No. 120, and I’ll give you some results of that shortly in slides. They’ll be presenting the plan to us for the dissection of the sister tank to ET 92 that flew with the Columbia, that’s ET 94, and what they’d like to do with that so we can move ahead with our testing.

We have three subgroups. We have the Maintenance Sustainment Group with Air Force Materiel Commands, Colonel Dave Nakayama and Lieutenant Colonel Chris Morris. We have Management Human Factors with Navy Captains Jim Frasier and Bill Smith and then Major Lisa Sayegh. They have been out to Huntington Beach, doing some interviews out there with reference to the transition from Huntington Beach to Johnson Space Center. We have Materials and Substructures, which I’m going to be covering a lot in the slides shortly. That has Mr. Chuck Babish, Clare Paul, and also Lieutenant Colonel Larry Butkus who’s a PhD that’s out of the Air Force Academy in engineering mechanics.

We’ve been cutting a pretty wide swath as we continue our gumshoe work, as the admiral calls it. We’ve been auditing paper processes; and paper processes within NASA is everything from thousands and thousands of pages, including one document, for example, is 81 pages worth of ice inspection criteria that you do out on the pad before it launches. Several of us such as I have been stationed in both North Dakota and Montana. So I know a little bit about ice but not ice effects on foam. So we’ve had to get smart on this kind of stuff so that we can know what type of questions to ask.

We also look at thousands of pages of electronic data with past work and actually quality stamps, and it tells who has done what so we know who to talk to and also, from the contract aspect, to find out have we been fulfilling the contract as we should. We’re doing lot deeper looks into the qualification verification process. I’ll speak briefly about it in a second, and we’ve also been heavily conducting interviews with technicians, contract quality inspectors, government inspectors, and also management.

We’ve also been monitoring some testing. Again, the testing at Michoud underway the last couple of weeks, I’ll show you pictures in a second. Then also, as you’re aware of, Wright Patterson Air Force Base has been doing testing on what could have been that mysterious object floating around in space. We’ve tested 30 items to date. The tests are still inconclusive. We cannot say for sure what it is yet, but we’re getting a lot closer. We have several candidates, based upon the on-orbit detection capability and the radar cross-section. We’re going to have some further testing over the next week. You’ve heard it reported it could be a carrier panel, and it could because it’s got a lot of characteristics we’re looking for, but we’ve added to the carrier panel three-tile and four-tile carrier panel with the structure brackets back behind it to test.

We’re also testing two other things. Instead of a full RCC panel, a partial RCC panel and also a T seal. Then we also have our 50-pound brains that will be doing the ballistic predictions to see how it degraded its orbit and how it re-entered the atmosphere. We’ll try to correlate it. So we should have some results for you next week on that.

The quality program has been a key area of examination for us. As has been reported, the inspections are down across the shuttle program, though many inspections have been shifted to the contractor; but so far our interviews are reflecting that we need to update our procedures and the steps to examine. We’ve been through it once and we made the transition to the contractors. We need to look at it again and fine-tune it and also the methods of examination such as the surveillance of work that does not occur as work is in progress, it’s only at the end.

I’ll remind you of a previous point on that. You know, we’ve got to acknowledge that the bulk of NASA is contracted. So we’ve got to examine not just the contractor performance but also the contract they’re performing to; and we’ve added a Mr. Jack Lehman from the Defense Contracting Management Agency. He’s bringing in other people to help examine those contracts in the context of are they covering what they should be covering.

I’d like to drive your attention to the slides. Tom, if I could have my first slide, please.

Now, this is something you’ll never see fly again on the space shuttle. That’s the bipod ramp as it existed on Columbia and that’s one we had built up for us at the end of the table, making its third appearance at a press conference today. Again, to remind you, the +Y and the -Y, because that’s going to be key to what I’m going to show in inspection.

Next. I’m going to show you a short, 45-second video clip of a four-to-five-day process of how they make a bipod. You’re going to see foam being sprayed in different layers, which you’ll bear that in mind as I go to show you some samples of a dissection. You’re going to see it carved; and, again, this is not unlike a sculpting.

So let’s go ahead and roll the next slide, Tom.

It is greatly sped up. You can see them spraying different layers, just essentially spraying a glob on the external tank. Then they’re starting the sculpting work. They’re doing it with angles. They’re doing it manually with very sharp knives. They’re doing it with lasers. Again, this normally takes four to five days. So I hope that gives you an idea of some of what they’re going through to build that thing that’s on the end of the table.

Next slide. Now, you know that there have been some known bipod ramp anomalies; and I’ve got to emphasize to you "known," because we have too many people that are saying, well, that entire program, there’s only been five, including STS 107. We don’t know that. What we’ve asked for is how many external tank separation videos we can see the bipod ramp, because we’ve had nighttime launches where you don’t see it, we’ve had times like on STS 107 that by the time the crew filmed the external tank separation, the tank had already rolled around to the other side and you couldn’t even see the bipod ramp. So it could be 5 out of 60. We don’t know right now, and we’ve asked to find out what type of footage we have from the past so we can give you something that’s a little bit more conclusive.

Next. Now, as we start to do the dissection of the ET 120 ramp, this is how we do it. We’ve marked it out in various quadrants, cut it out, and then started looking at it very closely. That’s what it looked like when it’s totally stripped off of the tank.

Next. This is the +Y bipod that we found. In the +Y we found a total of 43 different voids; and for those of you that were in the hearing yesterday, you heard about cryopumping and what can happen when you have a void there.

Next. In the -Y we found 83 different types of defects there. There are some examples of them. Most of them, if you can look, you can see where I mentioned how they’re spraying it on in layers. You can see how those layers are there and those little lines in between the layers.

Next. One of the defects that bothered us a little bit was a piece of tape, a FOD that was embedded inside of this ramp. That’s why at the hearing yesterday we asked the question about tape and how that could affect the cryopumping. This is actually a piece of duct tape. All you guys in the audience, we know how to use duct tape. Well, they use duct tape here. On one side of the duct tape, it’s kind of clear. That’s where the adhesive is, and that’s what that’s showing. Then they purposely broke this in two, and you can see the dark side of the duct tape here. So this was found inside the bipod ramp.

Next. Changing subjects to the carbon-carbon. One of the previous speakers from the hearing this morning covered this pretty darn well. I’m going to give you an additional data point that’s inconclusive at this point in time; that’s one of the things we’re looking at.

Next. You know about pinholes, first discovered back in ’92; and they have since been found on every single orbiter. The number of pinholes increased with the amount of flight exposure that you have, up to 20 to 40 over to a time period. Potential root cause, as was mentioned this morning, the zinc that came out of the service structure paint primer could be an example, and then it adheres and as the shuttle starts to re-enter the atmosphere, you can combine them with the heat and with the silicon and oxygen to form those pinholes that we talked about.

Next. This is a picture. You’ve all seen this before, but coincidentally the left wing is facing the service structure.

Next. This is the data point. Again, it’s inconclusive at this point in time; but when we look at the exposure of the different orbiters once they leave the Vertical Assembly Building all the way to and from the pad — for example, they have to roll back in — the total time exposed, Columbia is significantly different than the rest of orbiters out there. As a matter of fact, when you remove the rest of the fleet from the days that were spent out exposed, Columbia is nearly a week more on average than the rest of the fleet, out exposed to the weather. So it’s exposed to corrosive salt air as well as the zinc in the past from the platform.

Next. Then as an example, just to let you know some of the things that we’re looking into, we have Colonel Nakayama and Colonel Morris that are really digging down into this. These are examples of past reports and what they’ve focused on the recommendations that they’re looked at that we’re also looking into. Infrastructure. How they’ve funded that thing. How the five-year plans may or may not be out there to address some of the ageing of the platforms, quality programs that I’ve already mentioned. Safety program — and this is more the tactical level because Dr. Ride and her group are maybe looking at the strategic level but we’re looking at the worker type level. Maintenance, as I’ve mentioned. Contracts that Mr. Lehman’s looking at heavily for us. Also, security, which appeared for the first time back in the post-9/11 arena, that ASAP report of 2001.

Next. So that’s all I’ve got.

Dr. Ride.

DR. RIDE: Thank you. I’ll give you just a quick update on Group 2. First of all, General Hess and Mr. Wallace, Steve Wallace, are both in town this week. They’re conducting interviews that are focused on some of the areas that I’ll be talking about, and we’re also working pretty hard to put together what will be our group’s report to the board later on this week, just giving an assessment in some detail of where we are.

We’re finishing up an assessment of the STS 107 training. That’s the training of both the crew and the flight controllers. We’re about at the point where we can say that there were no significant contributors to the accident from training.

We’re also finishing up an assessment of the payloads, the STS 107 payloads; and we’re working with Group 1 as they look into NASA’s closeout of the payloads. The payloads also don’t appear to be contributing factors to the accident.

We’re really focusing now on two specific areas that are less tangible; and as a result, Group 2 comes equipped with no visuals like Groups 1 and 3. We’re really focusing, on the one hand, on trying to understand how the foam impacts were classified, how they were analyzed, how they were discussed, and how they were dispositioned. The other groups are working on, of course, the foam impacts as well, but we’re really trying to focus on the decision-making process and we’re starting with STS 107 and then kind of working our way slowly backwards, so just next flight back where there was a problem, STS 112. We’ll take a look at how that problem was classified, the meetings where it was discussed, including the STS 113 FRR, and then following that through. We’re at the early stages of that, and we’re starting to do quite a few interviews associated with that. General Hess was down at Marshall last week, conducting interviews that were related to that.

On a similar note, kind of the same sort of tone, we’re focusing heavily on the discussions, the analysis, and all the decisions surrounding the STS 107 debris damage that occurred on ascent, what discussions went on during the mission, what analysis went on during the mission, what decisions were made about the potential results of the impact, and decisions made or decisions canceled regarding whether imagery should be taken of the shuttle on orbit. So we’re, as you can imagine, looking into all the channels of communication, the decision-making process that went on, how the impact was treated, and broadening a little bit more generally into how anomalies that may have some history were treated, and using this almost as a case example. So we’re really trying to put together the story here by using lots and lots and lots of interviews. We’re trying to interview all the principals involved, from the engineering level through the contractors to the program level and management level. That’s a very labor-intensive process. These interviews are one to two hours each, sometimes longer.

We’re also supplementing those with minutes and briefing charts and also with the E-mails that you’re all so familiar with. All of these together are helping us put together almost a storyboard of what went on during 107. We’re making quite a bit of progress in this. I’d still classify it as a little bit of a fog it’s kind of hard to get your arms around. We’ve got a pretty good idea of what happened when and how the decisions were made and where communications may have broken down, but we’re still in the process of really trying to get a full characterization of that. As I said, we’re going to be using that to take a look really more systematically at the communications process, the decision-making process, and the way that anomalies are treated and how the culture might or might not creep in. So do you have to prove that it’s safe to fly or do you have to prove that there’s a problem? That sort of issue. Has one success led you to not consider problems that you may have seen before because you had the problem once but everything turned out okay, so maybe it’s not the problem you were originally thought it was? Those are the sorts of things that we’re trying to get to in this.

Then finally, because we’re putting a lot of focus on these decision-making communications processes, we’re going to start grafting into the work of Group 4, which is a group that’s really just getting up and running, now that John Logsdon has joined us. They’ll be looking at these similar sorts of issues but from a larger perspective, looking at the larger management issues, larger decision-making processes, work force issues, contractor issues. So we’re going to be working to make sure that they’ve got a good background from all the interviews that we’ve done.