Ex-Air Force secretary joins shuttle board

By Ray Henry, Globe Correspondent, 2/17/2002

n MIT professor and former Air Force secretary confirmed yesterday that she will soon join the NASA commission investigating the space shuttle Columbia accident along with two other new members.

Commission leader Harold W. Gehman Jr. asked Sheila E. Widnall, the first woman to head an armed service, to join the panel last week, Widnall said. She will leave for Houston on Wednesday.

Widnall holds degrees from MIT in aeronautics and astronautics. During her career at the Pentagon, she investigated several military crashes, including the 1995 crash of an Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS, electronic plane in Alaska that killed 24 servicemen and the fatal 1996 crash of a T-43 jet carrying Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others near Dubrovnik, Croatia.

''These things stay with you. While I was [Air Force] secretary, I had to preside over a fairly large number of high-profile accident investigations,'' said the Lexington resident. ''An independent accident investigation must meet the needs of the families, the public, and the Congress. It has to be credible, and it has to be right.''

Finding the cause of an accident may also help the astronauts' families cope with their loss, Widnall said. ''You really want to be able to give a rational explanation so that people, in some sense, can come to closure,'' she said.

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The first goal is to collect as much of the wreckage as possible from the debris field, which spans from California to Louisiana. The second goal is to construct a timeline from the information NASA mission controllers received from sensors aboard the Columbia during its final moments.

The shuttle is outfitted with far more sensors than a commercial aircraft and they transmit information continuously, Widnall said. Some of the data may explain what caused the Columbia to disintegrate 200,000 feet over Texas.

''People have asked whether the shuttle has a black box. My answer is that it has something better than a black box,'' she said.

Widnall wouldn't speculate yesterday on what she believed may have caused the accident. But she said any structural failure during reentry, when the friction from atmospheric gases heats the shuttle more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, could trigger a disaster. ''The first breach, the first danger, is thermal. If, for some reason, the shuttle is not protected from the thermal environment, then other forces can come into play,'' she said.

This story ran on page A2 of the Boston Globe on 2/17/2002.
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