No Important Documents Missing, Shuttle Inquiry Members Indicate

Four days after receiving allegations that space shuttle documents had been destroyed at the Marshall Space Flight Center, the presidential commission investigating the loss of the shuttle Challenger said Monday that it has received the documents it needs to do its job.

In a brief statement, commission spokesman Mark Weinberg said that the space agency’s inspector general is continuing an investigation and that “the commission is assisting by providing information recently gathered by the commission staff.”

Although the commission did not close the door on the documents controversy, the statement suggested that investigators had turned up no evidence that material important to the investigation had been destroyed or discarded.

NASA sources acknowledged that some notes and routine memoranda had been discarded since NASA headquarters ordered the impoundment of all materials related to the Jan. 28 launching of the space shuttle Challenger, which ended in an explosion and the deaths of all seven crew members. But they said personnel at the Marshall center had routinely discarded office notes rather than intentionally keeping evidence from investigators.

Presidential commission chairman William P. Rogers dispatched an FBI agent to the Marshall center last week, after he received an anonymous letter charging that management officials at the center had ordered materials destroyed.

The commission is completing its lengthy report on the tragedy and plans to send it to the White House by June 6.

Meanwhile, Sens. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) and Donald W. Riegle Jr. (D-Mich.), the chairman and ranking Democrat on the Senate’s science, technology and space subcommittee, were to meet today with an official of Morton Thiokol Inc. to discuss allegations that two of the company’s engineers were demoted because of their roles in the accident investigation.

On the night before the shuttle disaster, several working-level engineers at the company recommended against launching because of freezing temperatures at the Kennedy Space Center.

After the accident, Morton Thiokol engineers Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly gave the commission a detailed account of the intense pre-launching debate that took place between NASA officials and engineers and managers at the company, which built the shuttle’s solid rocket booster.

At the presidential commission’s final hearing, McDonald and Boisjoly disclosed that they had been put into new jobs at the company, and both said they felt they had been demoted.