Columbia Contractors Under Scrutiny

An engineer whose team of experts found flaws in the safety and operations of the space shuttle program was among four witnesses called to testify at the first public hearing of the Columbia accident investigation board.

Henry McDonald, the former head of the Ames Research Center, was expected to speak Thursday about his team's 2000 report conclusions that budget and staffing cuts had forced NASA to turn over too much of its safety oversight to outside contractors — and that safety was being superseded by schedule and cost-cutting.
In the report by McDonald and his team, the experts said far more than half of the jobs in preparing shuttles for launch and monitoring the missions are performed by contractors.

The hearing is the first of a series called by retired Adm. Harold Gehman, the accident investigation board chairman. Gehman said the board would have public hearings twice a week for two out of every three weeks until the probe is concluded.

Shuttle program Ron Dittemore also has been called as witness before the board. Dittemore became a well-known figure while giving daily televised news conferences during the first week following the Feb. 1 Columbia accident. His appearances stopped when the Gehman board took control of the investigation.

Jefferson Davis Howell Jr., a combat pilot in Vietnam who retired as a Marine lieutenant general and is now the director of the Johnson Space Center, also was to testify.

The board also was to hear from Keith Chong, an engineer for Boeing in Huntington Beach, Calif., one of the major space shuttle contractors. Chong is an expert on foam insulation used on the external fuel tank of the space shuttle.

"We're going to get a little bit of the theory of foam before we start going into who did what to whom and whether it was done correctly," Gehman said.

One theory of the accident is that Columbia's left wing was damaged during its Jan. 16 launch when pieces of foam insulation peeled off the external tank as the shuttle streaked toward orbit.

A group of Boeing engineers later evaluated the possible damage to Columbia's thermal protection from the insulation and concluded, while the spacecraft was still in orbit, any tile damage caused by the insulation did not endanger the shuttle.

Columbia broke apart during re-entry, killing its seven-member crew. Experts say it appears likely that searing plasma — air heated to more than 2,500 degrees by the friction of re-entry — somehow penetrated the wing's interior and caused aluminum supports to soften and fail.

In theory, broken thermal tiles could allow re-entry heat to get inside the wing. Board officials said some recovered tiles bear sooty deposits of melted aluminum.

The investigation faces the challenge of determining what happened to the shuttle without being able to examine most of it. According to CBS News Space Consultant William Harwood, more than 32,000 pounds of wreckage have bee recovered. But those 22,563 pieces represent only 13.7 percent of the shuttle's total weight when intact.

It was not clear if, or when, the panel would take up the issue of email messages traded among NASA engineers contemplating possible trouble for the shuttle during re-entry. Those emails were not shared with agency brass.

NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe has recently disputed the notion that NASA could have done nothing to try to save the astronauts if the engineers found them to be in danger.

O'Keefe told CBS's "Early Show' the agency "would have spared nothing" to try to save the crew, had any problems been detected with shuttle Columbia.
But he said Tuesday that NASA's internal review of the Columbia accident will not examine that matter until after it learns the conclusions of the independent board.

"We're not sure what it is that caused this," O'Keefe said, citing the investigation by the board. "When they have decided that, that's when that question gets an answer, with clarity rather than someone's opinion."

CBS News Space Consultant William Harwood has covered America's space program full time for more than 15 years, focusing on space shuttle operations, planetary exploration and astronomy. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood provides up-to-the-minute space reports for CBS News and regularly contributes to Spaceflight Now and The Washington Post.