Columbia Accident Investigation Board Press Briefing May 28, 2003 (part 1)

Center for Advanced Space Studies
Lunar and Planetary Institute
3600 Bay Area Boulevard
Clear Lake, Texas

LT. COL. WOODYARD: Good morning. Welcome to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board weekly press briefing. As always, we’ll begin with remarks from our chairman, Admiral Hal Gehman.

ADM. GEHMAN: Good morning. I have a couple of small, short announcements to make; and then we’ll get to the panel members.

This is our last full board press conference here in Houston. We’d like to thank the Lunar and Planetary Institute for allowing us to use their facilities here. They’ve been very gracious, and we thank them very much. It’s worked out very well for all of us.

Our next press conference will be on the 12th of June in Washington, D.C., which is the same day as a public hearing which will also be on the 12th of June in Washington, D.C. The reason why we’re not having a press conference next week is it’s a transition week. We’re moving to Washington, D.C.; at least about two thirds of us are. Some of the board will remain here in Houston to close up business, but you’ve kind of got us half in Washington and half here. So next week there will not be a press conference. Also, one of the reasons why there won’t be a press conference is because we are now digging into the report-writing phase and we don’t have a whole lot of news to put out; but just like last Friday when we discussed the what-if scenario, anytime there is something worthwhile, we’ll be available if there’s something to discuss.

When we close up shop here on the 31st of May, at the same time we are going to begin the process of closing up our process for receiving unsolicited voluntary comments from the public – that is, our hot lines and all those kinds of things. I thought I would share with you, just for matter of record, what the numbers are on the different categories of what I call unsolicited public inputs. We have had a total of 3,150 public inputs to us, broken down kind of as follows. About 2,464 were messages posted on our website. About 73 were E-mails. About 291 messages were left on our telephone hot line, and we received 322 written pieces of correspondence, either faxes, hard-copy letters, or someone would mail in an E-mail. Now, some of these numbers are duplicative because somebody may have sent us an E-mail and then also mailed it in.

A total of 3,150 total inputs from the public, unsolicited. About half of these were what I would call serious inputs. That is, they were not of the category of, "I saw a Martian spacecraft" or something like that. A goodly number of them were just letters which said, "I know where a piece of debris is," or something like that.

About half of them were serious, analytical suggestions on things that we want to follow up on; and about half of those, or 778 of the 3,150, we actually pursued that matter, actually handed that matter out for someone to take action on and report back as to whether or not this was significant or not. So you might say, in rough order of magnitude, about 25 percent of the inputs we got were serious, were valuable, were things that we actually followed up on to see whether or not it was right or not or whether or not it added anything to the investigation. So I consider that to be a pretty successful enterprise to do that.

Our goal for the report-writing remains to have our report done before the Congressional August recess. That’s not a deadline. If we don’t make it, I’m not going to worry about it. It would be convenient if we could get it done before the Congressional August recess, which is currently scheduled for the 25th of July. We’ve laid out a work program which will allow us to meet that deadline. If in the process of developing the report – and you’re going to hear from my colleagues here in few minutes on some of the issues that we need to close out in order for us to write this report – if in the process it turns out to be too difficult, we’ll take more time. We’d rather get it right than get it in a hurry.

That concludes my opening remarks. I’ll turn it over to General Duane Deal.

GEN. DEAL: Good morning. Let me give you a real quick update on what the maintenance and materiel group has been up to. As the Admiral said, we’re heavily into the writing phase. Today marks Day 117 of this odyssey of examining the tragedy.

Our team’s been out monitoring some of the final stages of testing and evaluation. Today we have people up at Marshall Space Flight Center as we’re looking at the SRB boat-catcher test to eliminate that from the fault tree. We have others up at Marshall Space Flight Center observing the vacuum chamber test with the foam and cryopumping to see what we find there. We’ve wrapped up all of our Wright Patterson Air Force Base visits for the radar cross-section test for that second-day debris that Dr. Widnall will discuss in a few minutes. We’ve also finished up at Michoud regarding the external tank foam dissection test; and we’re also working with Dr. Widnall’s group for the upcoming foam test at the Southwest Research Institute.

We’ve found, as we’ve been through all of our studies, something we talked about before, very strong industrial safety type programs that are out there that the Admiral has talked about. Very strong security programs. Quality assurance remains a key area that we’re examining and focusing upon as we’re doing more writing. We’ve got a lot of interviews and a lot of documentation out there that reflects that we need to update the maintenance and production steps that are examined out there, particularly at Kennedy Space Center. We’ve interviewed many, many people, from line technicians all the way up through management; and none of them out there agree that we’re at the 100 percent point. It’s time for a re-look. At Kennedy, for example, they don’t even have any regular review of what they look at. It’s only on a case-by-case look, and we believe it’s time for that.

We’re also examining the extent of what we call the fly-as-is dispositions, when you find a problem and they say, okay, let’s fly as is. We’re looking at those and whether or not those dispositions of a maintenance problem, if they seem out of sync with a manned space flight program. So we’re examining a number of those different types of reports.

We’re also looking at how closely the ISO 9000 and 9001 is applied to a system like the space shuttle. I mean, you can look at a process where you do the sampling and the great processes and principles of ISO 9000 when you’re in a manufacturing business or when you’re in an airline industry that may have a technician that does something dozens of times a week, but we believe it’s kind of a stretch to say that some of those principles apply to a space shuttle technician that’s doing something four and five times a year. So that’s something that we’re looking at heavily.

Finally, we’ve also been doing some further analysis into the past foam losses. For example, just last week, after the Admiral was talking to Congress, it’s come to our attention, as more people have closely watched past footage, that STS 51F has suffered some substantial external tank flange and inner tank area foam loss. It also appears that STS 51F may possibly add yet another bipod loss from this analysis. If so, this would be the third past bipod foam loss that’s discovered since the tragic Columbia loss and could be an indication that it’s become accepted – something that General Hess’ group is looking into – maybe not focused upon in the post-flight analysis or maybe not even watched for before, just as those others that have been found since the accident.

To you, it may seem, like Yogi Berra would say, deja vu all over again, that we’ve come before you every couple of weeks and said, hey, we’ve found another bipod foam loss. Well, upon further watching of these films, we’ve found another one here; and it’s just as perplexing to us as it is to you. It reminds me of another Yogi Berra quote, that you can observe a lot just by watching. We need to go back and watch these films, and that’s what we’ve been doing since the Columbia loss.

Sir, that’s all I’ve got.

ADM. GEHMAN: Thank you very much.

General Hess.

GEN. HESS: Group 2 continues to take a look at its responsibilities in writing findings and recommendations with regards to mission management and safety and life sciences. Dr. Sally Ride is leading our effort to try to fold in the analysis that we’re going to receive from NASA’s in-flight options report into her overall perspective on decisions that have been made as far as running shuttle missions. Steve Wallace is our lead person on setting the disposition of foam events and doing the final analysis with that. I’m following up with safety and risk management and overall hazard reporting to see if we can put balance and contrast between that and decisions that management has been making.

With regards to the foam itself, I think it would be safe for to us conclude at this point that of all the foam events that have been covered, to include the large acreage losses as well as bipod pieces, there are a couple of points we’d like to make. None were ever viewed as being a constraint to flight for the next mission. They were all considered to be in-flight anomalies, with the exception of STS 112. In our reading of all the decisions and the study in the FRR process, there appears to be kind of a blurred distinction between categorizing these foam losses as a safety-of-flight issue or an accepted risk issue; and the blurring of the terminology there is pretty important in terms of how you look at flying the next mission after you’ve had a sizeable loss of foam.

Another case that looks like the analysis that was done, there is an integrated analysis report that was completed but the analysis contained in it doesn’t necessarily support the conclusions to continued flight in how it was done. There is kind of a lack of appreciation of the total risk involved. They keep the risk segmented in pretty small pieces and don’t take a look at it from an overall perspective to the orbiter and other pieces that are with it. Over time, basically you’ve heard NASA use the terminology "in family" and "out of family." Well, the family of foam loss just kept getting bigger and bigger. So we never really got to a part where you could make a real hard distinction that something was unusual or out of family.

In-flight options, as we mentioned before, Dr. Ride is going to be taking that and putting it in context for all the decisions that were made with regards to STS 107 because, one, that’s what the report has to do, but we are taking a look at four other missions out there where there were significant engineering difficulties that NASA did overcome because I also think it’s our responsibility to provide balance to the type of decision-making that NASA does make and there are many excellent examples when they’ve performed to the level that we expect them to.

In the safety realm, we’ve just finished our review of all the documentation and the safety policy guidance regulations and stuff. We’re now looking specifically at organizations and resources as well as lines of communication. We’re going to take a look at S&MA support to decision-makers in the flight review process. The last piece programmatically we’re going to be looking at is the shuttle safety upgrade program as it’s leading into what is currently called the SLUP program to see the level of effort and planning behind safety upgrades and improvements to the shuttle that will tie into the work that Group 1 has been doing.

That concludes this. Thank you very much.

ADM. GEHMAN: Thank you, General Hess.

Doctor Secretary Widnall.

DR. WIDNALL: Okay. I’m a member of Group 3, and I will report on some of the activities of members of Group 3, interspersed with some visuals. Then I’ll talk about what we as a group together are doing.

First of all, Scott Hubbard has been working obviously on setting up the foam tests, and I’ve got some slides to show you a little bit about what the test setup looks like, to give you some appreciation of what kind of test it is. My understanding is that there was a one-day slip; and instead of shooting today, they’re going to shoot tomorrow. That’s kind of a normal sort of thing when you’re doing something for the first time. Let’s get the next slide.

Okay. So they’re about to begin the second phase of testing. The first phase was basically on tiles on a flat surface. Now, they’re moving to a much more complex structure that models the leading edges; and there are issues of attachments and panels, T-seals, all of that. I think some of their early tests are going to be on fiberglass because we don’t have that many RCC panels that we can go smashing. So we really need to sneak up on this problem.

So let’s see the next page. It just sort of shows you really what’s involved, sort of the size of the model. It’s full scale, of course, and it’s obviously representative of a section of the leading edge with all the attachment pieces.

Then the next slides basically shows the gun, which will shoot a fairly large piece of foam at something like 700, 800 miles an hour, which is pretty impressive. You know, engineers really do have a lot of fun. So tell your kids.

Next slide. This gives you sort of a sketch of what the impact will look like. The issue of rotation of this thing is a controllable variable. So the question of where it hits on the RCC panels is somewhat variable within that range. So that’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to impact this. They’ve done some rather careful analysis to model the effects of rotation which they’ve got from the video; and obviously when you actually get down to testing the RCC, we won’t get that many shots. It has to be set up very carefully. So I think that’s probably the last on the RCC.

Now, let’s go on to the next slide, which is something that I’ve really been curious about and, of course, many people have been curious about. That’s the whole question of this second-day piece that left the orbiter and was discovered obviously after the accident, going back and looking to see whether we could discover anything associated with the shuttle that would be probative.

Let me show the next slide. Now we’re starting to get into some of the analytical work that was done. The piece was identified, the orbit of the piece. It was slowed down by the atmosphere and obviously came into the atmosphere, you know, sort of leaving the shuttle. So we have good data on its reentry. Of course, that tells you what the ballistic coefficient is. It was picked up by several radars – radars at Beale, Cape Cod, Eglin, and the Navy.

Next slide. This shows you some of the track, and what has always intrigued me about this data – and I just wouldn’t let it go – is the oscillation. As this thing came in, it had a period of oscillation in the signature; and as it came into lower levels of the atmosphere, the frequency increased. If you’re an aerodynamicist what do you say? You say, oh, that’s an aerodynamic effect. So I searched to find what was the experience base of why objects oscillated, tumbled, spun, whatever it was they were doing, and who knows about this. So I kept asking these questions and finally ended up at Lincoln Lab, an FFRDC that reports to the Department of Defense and more specifically to the Air Force. They were involved in analyzing this, but I took specifically the question of this period to Lincoln and I asked them to do a first principles analysis of this piece.

The next slide basically shows what one really needs to think about. One needs to think about shape and size, which controls the signature. Shape controls the signature also. They looked at every single radar signature that was available. They recalibrated radars. They extracted every single bit of data they could possibly get, and so they tried to put this whole thing together to explain every observation that we had. This, of course, was a joint effort between the Air Force and NASA – and Lincoln, of course, working with the Air Force.

The next slide. You know, I know enough about these press conferences. You know, you say, "Well, it’s going to be the T-seal," and then after the press conference is over, you find the T-seal. So I’m not going to do that, but what I am going to say is that we’re looking at various candidate pieces. We’re looking for a piece which is stable in its aerodynamic behavior and also has a reason to spin. One candidate is a T-seal, a half a T-seal, which has an inherent built-in twist because it has to fit a curved leading edge. That particular candidate, when analyzed aerodynamically and with radar cross-section, seems to explain the observed behavior of the frequency as this thing reenters the atmosphere.

The next slide shows that. It shows the frequency as a function of time, fit with two different atmospheric models. Of course, you have to have an atmospheric model in order to carry this out. So I feel very pleased that we have got the analysis to this part. We will probably do a couple of more cases with other potential candidate pieces – again, not to hang your hat on any one piece and say, oh, that’s it. But I think the whole question of the second-day piece and how it fits in is now becoming clearer. So that’s all I’m going to say on that.

Let me talk just a little bit about what else is going on. Roger Tetrault, of course, is working on debris, including chemical and physical and damage analysis. Jim Hallock is closing fault trees and is also working with NASA to develop this joint scenario, and that’s what I really want to focus on.

About two or three weeks ago, we presented this joint scenario to you about what we thought had happened. It was a very high-level scenario, didn’t connect everything up. We told you what we felt comfortable saying about this fact and that fact and that fact.

Now, what Group 3 needs to do is to go back and just focus in on the part that would be specific to engineering analysis and just try to put more facts on the table that are consistent. This problem is very interdisciplinary. It involves materials and chemistry and analysis of heat damage. It involves aerodynamics and thermodynamics. It involves structures and aeroelasticity. So we need to sit down and put together a detailed level scenario, and then we need to ask questions like do we have all the analytical work, all the experimental work that will fill in and validate these pieces. You know, when you’ve got to write a report, it really concentrates the mind, as you can probably tell. So my mind is concentrated now on forming an interdisciplinary detailed joint scenario from Group 3 and then making sure that we have the analytical results that we need to validate this scenario. So that’s my main focus at this point.

ADM. GEHMAN: Thank you very much.

LT. COL. WOODYARD: All right. We’ll start here in Houston with questions. We’ll begin on your right, my left.

A REPORTER: Houston Chronicle. My question’s for General Deal. I’d like to go back to the remarks you made earlier in the press conference about processing at the Kennedy Space Center and inspection procedures. It sounded like I was hearing, from what you said, that there might be either more personnel or more time needed to process a space shuttle to make sure that everything was correct and inspected. I’m wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that. What are you talking about? Can you flush that out a little bit?

GEN. DEAL: Sure. We’ve talked before and you’re well aware when they went to the SFOC contract, they went from a lot of NASA inspectors down to a few NASA inspectors and shifted a lot over to USA, down to from 40,000 plus to around 8500 of what we called the Government Mandatory Inspection Points or the GMIPs. What we’ve come to in talking of the different interviews that we’ve had and the different documentation that we’ve reviewed, there’s a few things that NASA’s not letting their eyes on that are Critical 1 type items and we believe they should be letting their eyes upon all those Crit 1 items. We’ve also found a number of them, not a great number, but some that aren’t value added. You know, looking at something two steps later that they didn’t need to look at twice; they could have waited until the second step in there. So it needs refining.

You know, they go through a process, if someone wants to add a GMIP, where they have to bring it up and then justify it all the way through the system, through engineers, all the way up through the management, versus a periodic review. We believe it’s time for a periodic review because they have admitted they do not have one. So we need to look at that and further refine those. Does that answer your question?

A REPORTER: I’d like a little more amplification. Is it your sense, then, that more time may be necessary to process a space shuttle when they fly again or more people will be needed, or how would you balance that off in sort of a practical response to your concerns?

GEN. DEAL: I think our response is it’s not the board’s business to tell them, "You need to take more time." I think our very recommendation would be, "You need to reevaluate your inspection points." If that requires more people to do those, it will require more people; but it shouldn’t expand the time period they do it because it will just be an extra set of eyes in the processing as they go along. Now, of course, if they found things that were incorrect, of course, that would add some more time to it; but we’re not here to tell them to go add these people or go make the time period longer. We are saying you need to reevaluate this, and you may end up adding those GMIPs, which could add people and add a little bit of time, but not significantly.

A REPORTER: USA Today. For General Deal again. What were some of the Criticality 1 items that NASA was not laying eyes on, as you say? Do you have any indication that this kind of situation created any kind of safety risk that they shouldn’t have been taking?

GEN. DEAL: Not in these particular ones. I mean, there’s always the potential that they could. We found some things where they check a rope and a line that’s used for an alignment when they’re doing some mating of tanks, the SRBs, but they’re not necessarily looking at the alignment itself, you know, which may rise to level of criticality a little bit higher. We’re looking at a hydraulic pump installation. They’ll check out a pump but not necessarily the installation itself, which is a Critical 1 Item. Then there’s a lot of other smaller things that you look at – you know, wires chafing that they have found when they have done some of this type of stuff, to one that’s semi-provocative that was a big investigation after STS 96 when they found something that was stamped for ground test only that had flown. They went through a big NASA investigation after that and determined that it was okay to fly and it was really more of a communication problem in this particular instance between Canoga Park, Stennis Test Center, and also Kennedy Space Center, that they had changed how they marked things and not everyone knew about it. So that indicates more of a communication problem than actually looking at the hardware, but those other examples are some that we’re looking at.

A REPORTER: CBS News. For Admiral Gehman. In your report – you’ve addressed this at some point in the past but not in detail – do you see any need to recommend something like a qualification flight versus just a go-back-up-to-the-station flight right off the bat – in other words, instrument this thing, test things out or whatever?

ADM. GEHMAN: In our terminology, the subject of requalification has a different meaning than what you said; and the board is considering but has not yet ruled on whether or not a recertification or requalification of either part or all of the STS system should be necessary for another 20 years of flight. Certainly the analogy in the commercial and military aviation regime in which a vehicle, an airplane is approaching its design service life and you want to fly it some more, there’s a requalification or recertification process, pretty extensive. We have that on our plate. We have not reached a conclusion about that.

A REPORTER: Just a follow-up. Have you even discussed or thought about whether or not they should actually launch what I would call a demonstration mission, as opposed to launching STS 114 or whatever?

ADM. GEHMAN: It’s a matter under consideration, yes.

A REPORTER: ABC News. For General Hess. Would you elaborate a little more on how the "family" gets larger and why they continue to view issues as "in family" as opposed to "out of family"?

GEN. HESS: Sure. I think that the best way to approach that is to kind of understand, as you’ve learned from us before, they’ve been losing foam off of the external tank ever since STS 1. In almost every case when they get back and take a look at the shuttle upon return, it has turned into a maintenance kind of issue; they have to repair tile and stuff like that before the next mission. Over time they have in their study, I think, just come to appreciate foam as being a maintenance issue as opposed to a safety-of-flight issue; and as a consequence they’re building body of experience is that the shuttle always comes back and we always do maintenance on it. So over time it quits being a focus of something that might be dangerous as opposed to something that’s going to cause them to turn around and work when they get the shuttle back.

A REPORTER: You talked about STS 51F. Does that now make eight instances of bipod ramp foam coming off, out of 70 flights?

GEN. DEAL: I don’t think we’re willing to say that yet. We have one good still photo and it appears like it, but we’re having to go back. Before we come to you and say for sure we’ve got this, we want to be able to come to you and say we’ve looked at the frames before and the frames after and that divot has stayed, it’s not a piece of ice floating by or another piece of foam falling off and floating by. We’re in the middle of that right now. I was hoping to get an E-mail before I came here to tell you, but unfortunately not. I’ve got the still picture; however, the still picture’s inconclusive.