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Pastimes : Shuttle Columbia STS-107 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (476)	2/9/2003 8:24:25 PM
From: Larry S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 627

Report: Cutbacks might have endangered shuttle NASA chief: Board will investigate points in newspaper article WASHINGTON (CNN) --NASA's chief said Sunday that the independent board probing the Columbia disaster will look into reports that cost cuts during the past decade might have endangered the space program and its astronauts. An article in Sunday's editions of The New York Times chronicles years of deep budget cuts and layoffs of skilled NASA employees that could have compromised space endeavors. "Whether I think it is or not is irrelevant," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said when questioned on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." "I think the accident investigation board will certainly be examining all the past history, in terms of the safety record" as well as other contributing factors, O'Keefe said. "We'll be guided by their findings and proceed accordingly." The independent Accident Investigation Board is led by retired Adm. Harold Gehman, who headed the probe into the attack on the USS Cole. The board includes experts from the Air Force, Transportation Department and Federal Aviation Administration. According to the Times report, space experts wrote a series of reports after the Columbia experienced several malfunctions on its July 1999 mission to deploy a powerful X-ray telescope. Meanwhile, pieces of Columbia -- some 20 feet long, others measured in inches -- are being taken to a hangar at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for study, O'Keefe said. "How much we're actually going to be able to reconstruct is something we'll know once we get all the pieces together," he said. "There's certainly no way we're going to be able to [totally] reconstruct it. The pieces are just absolutely mangled." Columbia broke apart February 1 as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, killing the seven astronauts aboard and blasting debris over a large swath of Texas and Louisiana. The disaster occurred shortly after shuttle sensors indicated high heat and air resistance on its left side and wing. The possibility that a piece of external fuel tank foam struck and damaged heat-insulation tiles on the left wing during launch was an early suspect. O'Keefe said no explanation has been ruled out and the foam debris would be studied closely, along with any recovered tiles and photographs of the shuttle taken in flight. More than 1,000 bits of debris recovered by an army of volunteers and government workers have been sitting at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the regional command center in Lufkin, Texas, and the Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, Texas. Search teams headed out again Sunday in Louisiana and Texas, where it was rainy and wet, said James Shebl, a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman in Lufkin. Shebl said the weather continued to prevent divers from searching the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas-Louisiana state line for a car-sized chunk that witnesses said they saw fall there. On Saturday, searchers in Nacogdoches County in eastern Texas found a door that could be from one of the spacecraft's wheel wells -- which, authorities say, could be a big step toward explaining the disaster. Shuttle Program Manager Ron Dittemore has said the first occurrence of a "significant thermal event" took place in the wheel well of Columbia's left wing. Three temperature measurements in the left brake line displayed an "unusual temperature rise," he said. NASA learned Saturday that a small object traveling at 5 miles per second separated from the shuttle January 17, the second day of Columbia's flight, an agency spokesman said. An Air Force tracking station made that observation, and NASA is looking at the data.