But Sean O'Keefe Admits He Doesn't Know What Could Have Been Done

You've heard NASA chiefs say it all month long: There was probably nothing that could have been done to save the seven astronauts aboard the ill-fated shuttle, Columbia. Now, the chief of NASA chiefs begs to differ.

Raising his voice to reporters during a news conference in Washington Friday, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said it isn't so.

"I completely reject the proposition that nothing could have been done," O'Keefe said. "To suggest that we would have done nothing is fallacious. If there had been a clear indication, there would have been no end to the efforts."

But O'Keefe later admitted, there is no formal process, no real way to assess whether a shuttle's vital heat tiles had suffered damage - not while the shuttle is still in orbit.

O'Keefe's angry remarks come on the same day NASA released a videotape, found near Lufkin, Texas, Feb. 6th, showing some of the Columbia crew's final moments. The 13-minute long tape shows the seven making ready for landing, working on checklists and watching "quite a light show" outside. The tape ends about ten minutes before Columbia and its blissfully unaware crew disintegrated over Texas while traveling at Mach 18, 38-miles above the Earth.

Dittemore, Feb. 1: Once You're In Orbit, That's It.

On that terrible day, Feb. 1, Shuttle Director Ron Dittemore morosely told reporters at a Houston Space Center news conference that, even had flight controllers known some of the delicate thermal tiles protecting Columbia from the extreme heat of re-entry had been damaged, there was nothing that could have been done to save the crew.

"Once you get to orbit, you're there, and you have your tile insulation, and that's all you have for protection on the way home from the extreme thermal heat heating during re-entry," Dittemore said.

"I reject the premise that there was nothing that could have been done on orbit," said the administrator.

Engineers On Both Sides Of The Issue

But there was a debate. A lot of debate. NASA and Boeing engineers argued about as many as three separate impacts on the underside of the shuttle's left wing by chunks of insulating foam that separated from the orbiter's external fuel tank approximately 82 seconds after launch. Investigators have focused their attention on Columbia's left wing, theorizing super-heated plasma may have gotten inside the hollow lifting structure and began a process of "burn-through" that ended with the space plane's destruction.

As ANN reported last week ( ANN: Is Columbia Investigation Plagued By Inexperience?), unnamed senior engineers at Boeing's Huntington Beach (CA) facility have started their own assessment of damage to the wing, saying the Houston-based thermal team monitoring the flight made massive, possibly tragic mistakes. Boeing internal emails from the unnamed engineers indicated the on-duty thermal team had never worked an actual mission. Worse, the emails suggested the senior engineers at Huntington Beach were never even asked to take a look at the data until after the disaster.

"An absence of any debate would have been disconcerting," said NASA's chief of space flight, William Readdy at Friday's news conference.

But the debate over debris-related damage to the wing never reached the very top at NASA.

Had he been told of the debate, Readdy said Friday, "I don't think that it would have affected the outcome." He said he would have consulted with Shuttle Director Dittemore, would have learned of the prevailing opinions among the engineers that there was no significant tile damage as a result of the debris impact, and would have allowed flight controllers to carry on as usual.

O'Keefe told reporters Friday that he was pleased at the vigorous level of debate among engineers. Now that some of the dire predictions from the dissenters have come to light, however, O'Keefe worried that internal NASA emails bearing on critical safety issues might be more carefully worried, more politically correct and much less precise.

"That is a concern," he said.

Another Concern

Meantime, the accident board investigating this second shuttle disaster since 1986 complained to O'Keefe that NASA employees working on the investigation were also heavily involved in the STS-107 mission. In other words, the very NASA employees whose decisions are being investigated are, at least in part, conducting the investigation.

In the letter, Adm. Harold Gehman (USN, ret.) asked O'Keefe to reassign some of the NASA principles in the investigation. Among them: Shuttle Program Director Dittemore.

Some members of Congress are leary of the investigation's independence from NASA as well. So, more than once, NASA has changed the rules governing the investigation. Where the board was first to have taken only 60 days to investigate the tragedy and then submit its findings directly to NASA, O'Keefe has now told the team to take all the time it needs and release its findings publicly at the same time it turns over the report to him.

FMI: NASA Briefing, http://www.caib.us