Transcript of CAIB Press Conference 22 Apr 2003 (Part 2)
Part 1|2
A REPORTER: ABC News. Two questions. One for Admiral Gehman. If I understood you right, you said you had an interesting piece of debris. Then I have a question for Dr. Hallock. What data do you have from the OEX recorder on ascent that you’ve been able to analyze, and what does that analysis show?
ADM. GEHMAN: Well, I was attempting to reinforce the point that the debris collection continues to be important and will continue to be important right up until the end. We have continued to pick up left wing tiles and left wing leading edge component systems west of Interstate 45, which is an area which had not previously been searched; and it all helps. It all helps. That’s all I want to say about any individual piece at this time. I’ll make a comment about the last question that Kathy asked, and that is that for 11 weeks we have been saying that we don’t have any particular scenarios, any favorite scenarios. We used to call them the scenario du jour and everything like that.
As I indicated before and as Jim Hallock indicated, we are involved in a series of meetings right now in which we are going to attempt to arrive at a working hypothesis. So it’s a little premature to answer the previous question because we are going to meet with lots of people, and the board’s going to deliberate over this. We have a meeting on Thursday, as a matter of fact, in which both some of the NASA team and us are going to meet together, in which we’re going to begin the process of trying to come up with a working scenario, which is a change from what our process has been up until recently. But I think 11 weeks into this, it’s time that we attempted to see where the evidence was pointing us. We haven’t done that yet, but that indicates that we are moving more toward a deliberative end of this investigation and moving away from the evidence-gathering piece. So I wanted to make that comment about Jim’s comment. And I’ll let Jim comment on ascent data.
DR. HALLOCK: Well, obviously since we have the data on ascent as well as on the re-entry, we’d look at it. And obviously we’ve been looking right around 81, 82 seconds to see if there was anything there, that being the time when it looks like the foam struck the leading edge of the shuttle. Frankly, I don’t see anything convincing there. I mean, yes, you see some very small type temperature changes; but they’re almost within the noise, if you will, of the data. So I don’t really see anything there. There are some other temperature changes many minutes later; but how I tie that back to an event at 82 seconds, I’m not quite sure.
A REPORTER: Newsday. For Dr. Hallock. On the T seal scenario, in terms of how you would lose that bottom end of a panel. I’m just trying to understand where that plume – I mean, would it be redirected back towards the panel by impinging on the spar, or how would that work? Secondly, is it too soon yet to say whether or not there might need to be a redesign of the T seal?
DR. HALLOCK: I don’t know if I can comment too much on the latter part of it, but the former part – remember, what we’re talking about here, if it is a T seal here, you have basically a very narrow slit into which the heat can be building up and building up and building up. Remember, at the same time the RCCs, the way they were designed, was to be able to withstand temperatures like around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit but part of the way they withstand that is being able to pass on that heat and one of the ways they pass it on would be by re-radiating the heat area. And if you have a chamber in here, this very narrow air where all of this very superheated air is coming and collecting, if you cannot re-radiate some of that heat, that heat is going to get so high and collect so much that I think one of the things it could do is then cause part of an RCC panel to basically break off and just separate. At least that’s one of the modes that I’m considering.
A REPORTER: Would this have to be a panel that is weakened, or even a regular panel might succumb to that sort of pressure?
DR. HALLOCK: That I can’t answer. Obviously if it’s weakened, one would tend to think it would break easier. Whether a fresh panel would go through the same thing at this point, I don’t know.
A REPORTER: Houston Chronicle. I have a question for Admiral Turcotte. It has to do with the external tank dissection. You showed us in your charts some flaws and voids that you’ve encountered. Could you characterize for sure if that work was in the bipod area, and how would you characterize the workmanship and the quality control that you’ve seen from the work so far? Is this troubling? Is this something that you would expect the design to tolerate? I guess I’m asking what you think it might say about Tank 93 on Columbia and any conclusions about the prospect for shedding foam in that area.
ADM. TURCOTTE: Well, the first part of your question. That was from the bipod. It was from the right bipod, which is the positive Y side. Again, as I said, it was ET 94 – the sister of ET 93, which was on Columbia. So we assess that they were very close. They were machined about the same time, made about the same time. So that’s why we’re very curious to look at that.
The second part of that. That is part of what we’re looking at is inherent in the design of that and actually filling the void of that bipod assembly. Is there a better way to do it? Is there no way to do it? Were the appropriate procedures at that time employed or the known procedures employed at that time? All those things we’re looking at. Right now that’s not known, and that’s not really for us also to direct. Part of that, NASA is looking very closely at another design; and they’re looking at all of those processes. So it’s really inappropriate for me to comment now at this point on the future direction of that. But I can say that it’s anomalous, we think, because it was very close to about the same time of manufacture. So one could make that presumption that what we found in ET 94 could have been reasonably found in ET 93, which was flown on Columbia.
A REPORTER: Associated Press. Two questions. The first for Admiral Turcotte, following up on that. Besides voids, did you find anything else? Because we heard about a piece of tape that ended up on another bipod on another tank. So did you find anything else besides voids all over the place?
For Dr. Hallock, the question is the T seal. If the only gap was the T seal and all the panels around remained intact, would just a missing T seal alone be enough to contribute to what happened? So it’s two separate questions.
ADM. TURCOTTE: The first part. There were some voids. There were also what were called rollovers. When you spray something like paint, you go back and forth across. The bond was not what it should have been. In other words, it did not adhere as it should have. So as I said, there were 74 observations found last week. Many of them were voids, and some of them were what we call rollovers, where two layers of foam come together and also where a layer of foam is bonded to an ablator or something else that was inside there. So there’s other things besides that we did not find on this particular dissection, like we did on ET 120, any foreign objects, to my knowledge.
DR. HALLOCK: The second part you were asking about – are you asking to suppose it was just the T seal and nothing else ever?
A REPORTER: Exactly. Suppose it was just a T seal that floated away and everything around that gap remained intact. Would that be enough to cause such penetration and destruction?
DR. HALLOCK: Interesting question because I have not thought about that, I must admit. Off the top of my head – and please remember this is off the top of my head – I would think you would have to somehow get it to get more of the superheated air to be in. So I think you’re going to have to get some other way, whether it’s a broken RCC panel or something like that, to get a larger hole there in order to be able to get enough heat to wreak the damage that it did. But, once again, I haven’t thought about it but I’m going to make a note about it and think about that some more.
MS. BROWN: Now, I’d also like to remind everybody that just because we’re giving you the opportunity to ask a question each, that doesn’t give you the license to pile six questions on at once.
A REPORTER: A single question going to two panelists, Admiral Turcotte and Dr. Hallock. There are voids – there are presumed to be voids in this foam that flew. What is the volume of voids collectively, what was in the voids when they broke off, and how does that affect the testing at Southwest Research Institute? Will you be shooting foam with voids in it? Shooting foam with voids fill with air? Shooting foam with voids filled with water? Ice? With liquid oxygen? Solid oxygen? You two have to work together here.
ADM. TURCOTTE: Absolutely. And we do. Let’s see. That was six questions?
The first part I’ll cover. What were in the voids? Essentially air. They were – whatever was in the room at the time when that was sprayed, they were clear. That was air. But, you’re right, at the time there are many assumptions – and I will turn this over to Dr. Hallock here – but there are various assumptions about the cryopumping theory, about the expansion of – you know, when you supercool air – nitrogen turns to gas and then it returns back to – excuse me – to liquid and then to gas. And that causes an expansion. And that is one of the theories of why the cumulative effect of that would cause the bipod to separate from the ET at that point.
Now, over to the testing.
DR. HALLOCK: Well, actually I think you answered my part of the question, too, in the sense that the reason we’re interested in the voids is that it does give you the cause that will make the foam break and break off. So it’s not that the void is something that we need to officially recreate – at least, I wouldn’t think so – for the testing that we’re going to do; but it just is the mechanism that allows the foam to break off.
A REPORTER: NBC News. First a question from several weeks ago that we hadn’t found resolution to. In testing the candidates for the object on Day 2, you’ve used the radar cross-section and you’ve used the decay characteristics. General Hess also mentioned a third observed characteristic of the object, which was its re-entry. He certainly suggested from his discussion that the actual entry was observed by some U.S. asset that provided data perhaps on brightness or on spectrum of the actual atmospheric entry. Was that a misstatement, or is there additional data that you can use to characterize this mystery object?
ADM. TURCOTTE: To my knowledge – I can speak that it was observed, and that’s part of where we got the area-to-mass ratio or the ballistic coefficient.
A REPORTER: But the actual entry, the flare, the actual fireball when it re-enters the atmosphere, was that observed by any U.S. asset?
ADM. TURCOTTE: Not to my knowledge at this point.
A REPORTER: My question today involves the debris search.
MS. BROWN: That was the question you get. That was the question you get for today.
A REPORTER: My question from two weeks ago, then, is on the issue of western debris. Is the end of the search, April 30th, all debris search?
ADM. GEHMAN: No.
A REPORTER: What is your thought with the debris search in Utah and Nevada and New Mexico?
ADM. GEHMAN: No, the April 30th is the end of the search for the thousands and thousands of firefighters out there. Individual searches will go on. There will still be a search headquarters. It will be moved from Lufkin, Texas, to JSC. Individual sightings will be followed upon by a debris team and individual areas, high probability areas, will be searched, but those search teams will have to be organized when we’re ready to go out there.
A REPORTER: Los Angeles Times. I have a question for Mr. Wallace. I understand you were careful not to overstate this, but can you tell us a little bit more about the recertification process and maybe give us a couple of examples of things you have discovered where someone at Mission Control had not completed the recertification that you would have liked them to have before the mission started.
MR. WALLACE: Well, they have a lot of training requirements and a number of simulations; and again, there were 7 out of 77 where some of the recertification requirements were not complete. Now, this, I would characterize it as being maybe something that I would characterize as perhaps more serious than a recordkeeping error but not serious to the point that it would call into question their qualifications to control the mission but that certain sort of required drills or exercises were not done. That’s about as detailed an answer as I can give you because I don’t remember exactly which sort of exercise it was.
A REPORTER: Dallas Morning News. Did I understand you to say, Dr. Hallock, that there were interesting temperatures later in ascent, data from the OEX? You said you didn’t think that at 81 or 82 seconds you saw anything really that you could have confidence in; but you said there was interesting stuff later in ascent, right?
DR. HALLOCK: I believe I said there were some temperatures much later where there was some temperature rise. I don’t remember what it was – 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-degree temperature changes; but that was like five minutes into the launch.
A REPORTER: What would that mean?
DR. HALLOCK: I don’t know.
A REPORTER: Why is it interesting?
DR. HALLOCK: I just said that there were other temperature things; but how that correlates with the situation at 81, 82 seconds, I don’t know. And I don’t know if it does.
A REPORTER: USA Today. We’ve seen several reports this week which apparently indicate that at least some folks at NASA are prepared to say now that the breach occurred as a result of the foam in the area of RCC Panel 8 or 9. I just wanted to see if you could help me out, Mr. Hallock, or perhaps Admiral Gehman, and assess – I know you have more work to do on analyzing this – but based on what you know now, is the board in concurrence with that, or can you give us any guidance about how far along you are in making such an assessment?
ADM. GEHMAN: We are not in a position to concur or not concur, because our first meeting on this subject is Thursday. I read the press report that somebody at NASA has a theory; but we are just at the beginning of that stage, as I indicated earlier, of developing a working hypothesis. So I certainly wouldn’t comment on that scenario because we’re at the beginning of that process.
MS. BROWN: We have some people on the phone bridge. I believe we had a few problems with that early on. Thanks for bearing with us.
A REPORTER: NBC. Admiral Gehman, you made a couple of recommendations last week, one using the spy satellite system; and I can foresee possibly a future shuttle marooned in orbit. Is the board taking a position or will they recommend to NASA that they come up with some rescue scenario that they have on the books, ready to go in case a shuttle should be left in orbit and they can go up and rescue the astronauts, something like we could have had that situation here, had they used the photographs and seen the problem that they had on the left wing?
ADM. GEHMAN: I wouldn’t want to predict what recommendations the board may make in the future. I can tell you that the board is going to look at issues such as on-orbit repair, various crew survival escape modes and mechanisms. We’re going to look at the relationship of the International Space Station to see whether or not the presence of the International Space Station changes any of the assumptions that were made with respect to crew survival, but to me it seems it’s too early to be declarative about what we may or may not recommend. I would say that all those subjects are going to get looked at in an effort to make shuttle travel safer and more reliable.
A REPORTER: Discovery Channel. For Admiral Gehman. Have you caught a whiff of any other ongoing technical issues in the shuttle program that you’d like to see NASA follow further and look at from a bigger and more integrated perspective?
ADM. GEHMAN: Did you say any more tactical issues?
A REPORTER: Technical.
ADM. GEHMAN: Technical issues. Oh. There have been a number of technical issues that the board was curious about that we directed that someone in the investigation take a look at. Every time we’ve brought one of these – I mean, the number of times this has happened, I could count on one hand, I think. Every time we’ve brought it up, they’ve instituted an inquiry into it. So nothing comes to mind. There are none outstanding right now. I don’t think there are any outstanding.
You can’t see here, but I’m looking at my colleagues up and down the row here. I can’t think of any technical review – I know there are a lot of technical issues in which the work is not finished. Dr. Osheroff, Dr. Widnall, Dr. Hallock, Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Tetrault all have ongoing technical reviews and technical analysis in which more work has got to be done, but I can’t think of anything in which we wish that NASA – if we wished NASA were looking at something, NASA would be looking at something and it wouldn’t be a wish. So I don’t think that I can answer that any better than that.
A REPORTER: Times Picayune. I have a question regarding the external tank dissection. I wonder if someone could provide more detail about how that testing of the external tank and the foam will proceed over the next month or so and what the presence of voids in ET 94 might bode for the production of tanks that is under way currently.
ADM. TURCOTTE: Well, two parts. The first part, we’re going to continue obviously the dissection, I believe starting next week, of the minus Y bipod and –
ADM. GEHMAN: Better known as the left bipod.
ADM. TURCOTTE: Better known as the left side. Then after that, the plan is to put it all kind of together to make an assessment of how many voids there were and what were the possible implications of having that many voids and could it have perhaps caused the bipod to depart. That’s really the direction.
Now, the next part, that NASA is currently looking at, is refining its procedure for encapsulating that bipod. There are several proposals that are under study right now to either encapsulate that – different design, different way of coating it. There are a number of proposals on the street and they’re all pretty preliminary at this point, but that’s going on as a parallel effort. But the main purpose of our dissection is to confirm that, in fact there were some voids and there was a problem and could it have been the precipitator of the bipod departing the ET.
A REPORTER: NASA Watch. A question for Admiral Gehman. A press release yesterday stated that you’re going to be having a safety seminar for the 27th or 28th of April but the event is closed to the media and the public. Now, I’ve got to wonder why you put out a press release about something if nobody can go cover it. What’s going to be discussed there? Why shouldn’t the public see this? Isn’t it kind of contradictory that NASA’s safety process is being examined in intricate detail in public and yet yours is not going to be shown to the folks? I think this would be relevant.
ADM. GEHMAN: Well, we are going to cover much of the safety and risk-management and risk-assessment issues in public hearings; but on the other hand, I think for the good functioning of the board, for an open and deep and rich analysis of what we have to wrestle with here, the board needs to be able to deliberate privately, deliberate with just the board present. We need a mix of both, is the way I see it.
You’re right, we want to be as open as we possibly can. We have attempted to do that by holding public hearings, by being available to the press; but we also need to balance that with some amount of time in which we deliberate matters amongst ourselves. It’s a fine balance. I’m not sure that I’m going to get it 100 percent right, but I’m going to try to get it 95 percent right and we will report on this process.
I will say that a lot of what’s going to go on in this safety seminar is educational and, you’re right, there’s no reason why the press couldn’t be there. It’s just that if a member of the board wants to demonstrate his ignorance by asking a question, I don’t want him to be intimidated or in any way reluctant to say whatever he wants or ask anything that he wants, by fear that it’s going to get reported someway. So we have to balance our requirement to do some things amongst ourselves and most of what we do in public. We’ve attempted very hard to strike that balance and I probably can’t please everybody all the time, but that’s about the best I can do.
MS. BROWN: Did I miss anybody on the phone bridge? Okay. That’s the conclusion of the briefing for today. As usual, the board members will take a few questions afterwards. Thanks.
(End of conference, 2:03 p.m.)
