Be Patient, This May Take Awhile

When the board looking into why the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry February 1st releases its final report Tuesday, good luck getting a hard copy. Space.com reports, in spite of the global interest in the investigative bodies findings, only 100 copies of the report will be printed in the first publishing run.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which promised upon its formation that the report would be made available to the White House, Congress and all of America, apparently forgot to check with the printer. With copies already promised to the White House and several lawmakers on Capitol Hill, as well as NASA, a mere 100 copies won't go far at all.

Seems there have been some last-minute production problems in the print run itself, producing fewer copies than hoped for and producing them late. CAIB spokeswoman Laura Brown says, "I’m only going to have 100 [copies] and I’m concerned that’s not going to be enough. We are literally carrying it back on an airplane."

One NASA source tells Space.com the multi-volume document is being printed at a government facility in Seattle. It'll be flown to Washington on board a NASA flight. But Brown says the space agency has no intentions of duping the public. "That’s not to keep it secure," Brown says. "We needed a facility to do a quick turnaround at a reasonable price to the government. That piece of it has nothing to do with security, but we are going to great lengths to keep it secure. My pledge to the press was to keep it as secure as possible so everyone is on a level playing field."

But what about getting more than 100 copies?

Brown says, if you want to see the report in its entirety, go to the Internet. The CAIB final report will be available on the board's website upon its release Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m. EDT.

FMI: www.caib.gov, www.nasa.gov