NASA Will Accept Columbia Shuttle Disaster Probe’s Findings

NASA will follow recommendations by the independent board investigating the shuttle Columbia disaster to the letter and will make no effort to defend itself against findings that are expected to be harsh, a top space official said Tuesday.

“There will be no effort whatsoever to argue or defend,” Frederick Gregory, NASA’s deputy administrator, told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center. “We will respond to each of the findings and recommendations. In fact, I would expect we would go farther than that.”

Gregory said little to indicate when the next shuttle mission would fly. Several weeks ago, NASA said the date could be as early as December but officials have shifted that to mid-March at the earliest.

NASA had once hoped the work of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board might be confined to the technical problems that led to the Feb. 1 crash of the Columbia and the death of its seven crew members, allowing for a relatively quick return to flight.

But members of the board headed by retired Adm. Harold Gehman have sharply criticized the culture under which life-and-death decisions have been made at NASA and have delved deeply into the program’s history, sometimes characterizing it as a series of compromises dating back to the 1960s.

Another NASA official said the agency may shift shuttle landings to Edwards Air Force Base near Palmdale instead of flying over millions of people en route to Florida.

“One of the things we are looking at is reentry risk and the footprint for reentry,” said Bill Readdy, associate administrator for space flight. “Clearly we can land in California and have, several times.”

While NASA has tried to land shuttles at its coastal Florida launch base on every mission to speed up the maintenance turnaround on the reusable spacecraft, Columbia’s destruction pointed up the dangers to people and structures on the ground from the cross-country route needed to reach Kennedy.

No one on the ground was killed when Columbia shattered and fell into thinly populated sections of eastern Texas and western Louisiana.

But tens of thousands of pieces of the craft tumbled into fields, streets, forests and wetlands, and a car-sized chunk plunged into a reservoir. At least eight people in the day after the accident went to hospitals for burns and breathing problems after handling wreckage, some of which had toxic chemical residue.

Readdy, a veteran of three shuttle flights, also was program manager for the modified Boeing 747 aircraft that carries the craft back to Florida when it lands at Edwards.

Reporters repeatedly asked Gregory about potential changes in the culture that decides whether a shuttle is safe to fly and whether its crew can survive the mission, but Gregory, a former astronaut himself, said it would be difficult to respond until the report had been delivered.

He said the time to address those changes was as the agency began to make the transition to flying again.

Gregory and other administrators from Washington were in Florida because a new task force charged with overseeing flight readiness issues was beginning its work with a quick course in shuttle operations.

Once the Gehman board has issued its report, the 27-member task force, headed by retired astronauts Tom Stafford and Richard Covey, will begin overseeing NASA’s efforts to implement the new recommendations.

“We will not fly until we are ready, until we have some assurance from the task group that we are headed down the right road,” said Gregory.