HOUSTON — In a seeming rebuke to one of his own top administrators, NASA chief Sean O’Keefe on Thursday kept open the possibility that falling debris on liftoff may have doomed the space shuttle Columbia.
On Wednesday, shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore all but dismissed foam debris impact as the probable cause for the shuttle disaster. But on Thursday, O’Keefe said only an independent panel has the authority to draw any definitive conclusions.
“We will not have competing positions on this,” O’Keefe said without making specific reference to debris or other theories about the catastrophe. “We will be guided by the board’s findings. The intention is that they will reach conclusions, and the conclusions will come from them and only them.”
O’Keefe said the independent Space Shuttle Mishap Interagency Investigation Board, which was created a day after Saturday’s disaster, would be the final arbiter of what happened to Columbia. He said the board would likely add members and change its charter to further assure its independence.
O’Keefe made his brief declaration from Washington only moments before Dittemore announced from Houston that the agency had turned over leadership of the probe to the interagency panel.
Dittemore said members of the panel, which is chaired by retired U.S. Navy Admiral Harold W. Gehman, received a daylong briefing Thursday from NASA officials in Houston. “We will follow (Gehman’s) leadership,” Dittemore said.
Dittemore also appeared to step away from his earlier comments regarding the loss of foam debris 80 seconds after liftoff. That debris fell from the vehicle’s external fuel tank and struck the orbiter’s left wing, leading to speculation that it could have caused the disaster.
Dittemore said Wednesday that an earlier analysis by NASA technicians would seem to discount the debris impact as a likely cause. On Thursday, he stressed that investigators had not ruled out any possibility.
“It’s had to understand how a piece of foam falling off the tank could have been the root cause, but that is not stopping us from investigating that particular event,” said Dittemore.
Also Thursday, Dittemore raised more doubts that technicians would glean useful information from 32 seconds of corrupted data transmitted from Columbia moments before it disintegrated over North Texas, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
He said that technicians continue reviewing the transmission, but may end up reconstructing just two or three seconds of it.
He also said the crew received an alarm message related to the loss of sensor data related to their left wheel well. He said the crew members were aware of the sensor reading — a crew member pushed a button that sent an electronic acknowledgment to mission control.
“We were in the process of calling them (back) when we received loss of (communication),” said Dittemore. He said investigators may never know what happened to the wheel well.