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Leader of Columbia Probe Says Fly Away -- He Backs NASA's Shuttle Safety Work

Posted on: Friday, 1 July 2005, 12:00 CDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The chief investigator of the Columbia disaster said Wednesday he's fine with NASA resuming shuttle launches in just two weeks, even though the space agency falls short of making three safety improvements he called for in 2003.

"It sounds to me like they're ready to go," retired Navy admiral Harold Gehman Jr. said. "As far as what I know, they have taken all the steps necessary to be ready to fly in July."

Gehman said the accident investigators never meant NASA had to carry out to the letter the changes recommended for the shuttle. "We didn't want it to be a poison pill," he said of one of the especially vexing improvements.

Like the astronauts and others at NASA, Gehman seems to accept that not all risk can be removed. "I would not use the word 'safe' " to describe spaceflight, he said, even with all the shuttle improvements of the past 2 1/2 years.

"I think the American people and I think most of Congress do not realize how risky these flights are," said Gehman, who oversaw nearly seven months of investigation and debate about why Columbia fell from the sky on Feb. 1, 2003.

It was the first public comment on the subject by the chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board since an advisory group concluded Monday that NASA had not fulfilled three of the board's most critical recommendations.

The return-to-flight oversight group found that despite considerable progress by NASA, three of 15 recommendations had not been fully met. The external fuel tank is still not immune from falling foam and ice at liftoff, the shuttle itself is still not hardened enough against launch damage, and the astronauts still lack the means of reliably fixing gashes in their orbiting ship.

A hole in Columbia's left wing, put there by a 1.67-pound chunk of fuel-tank foam insulation during launch, led to the spacecraft's destruction on its return and the deaths of all seven astronauts.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said Tuesday the space agency has done the best it can to remedy all the problems that existed when Columbia went down. Unless something new comes up, NASA is pressing toward a launch as early as July 13, he said.

"At this point, we must say that we have reduced the level of risk due to debris damage to an acceptable level ... or we must say that we don't want to fly the shuttle again because we do not have a better technical approach to dealing with it," Griffin told the House Science Committee.

Griffin and top shuttle managers gathered at Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday to assess Discovery's flight status. They hope to set an official launch date today at the conclusion of the two-day review.

Source: Commercial Appeal, The

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