Outside members to join shuttle probe

NASA's reversal follows criticism

By Scott Gold and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Los Angeles Times, 2/7/2003

OUSTON - The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will add people to an ostensibly independent panel investigating the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia, its administrator said yesterday, amid concerns that the panel's members are too close to the agency and that the probe will be a whitewash.

As originally envisioned by NASA, the panel consists of nine current or former government officials, many with close ties to the space agency and five of them in the military.

As the panel members were arriving in Houston, Sean O'Keefe, NASA administrator, told reporters that the government planned to revise the charter of the board to allow for additional members. The new members, he said, will probably be people without any ''specific association or involvement with NASA'' and will add new expertise and a new ''voice.''

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''This is to absolutely guarantee that we eliminated any ambiguity as to the independence of this board,'' O'Keefe said. ''We want to be sure that we are not eliminating any sort of possibilities of what could have contributed to this accident.''

O'Keefe's announcement was made after 16 House Democrats sent a letter to President Bush urging him to expand the panel and its charter, which calls for it to answer to NASA, not to the president or Congress. The Democrats' letter said the panel had the ''appearance of a nonindependent board controlled by NASA.''

Representative Bart Gordon, Democrat of Tennessee, said he fears that the board's conclusions will not be credible unless it is clearly perceived as independent. Gordon is the ranking Democrat on the House space subcommittee.

''The so-called external review commission is appointed by NASA, staffed by NASA, and reports back to the NASA administrator,'' he said.''As able as these individuals are, I'm afraid there will be a credibility problem with their report.''

Gordon said the board needs to look broadly at NASA itself, to see if organizational problems contributed to the loss of Columbia, as was the case in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. A commission appointed by then-President Reagan found NASA's flawed decision-making process to be a contributing factor.

It was not immediately clear whether the changes promised by O'Keefe would satisfy Gordon and other critics.

Also yesterday, NASA officials said they have sent a former astronaut to Northern California to look into the origin of a photograph that purportedly shows Columbia being struck by lightning or some other sort of atmospheric electric event.

The former astronaut, Tamara E. ''Tammy'' Jernigan, was headed to the San Francisco Bay area to determine whether the photo, taken by a witness on the ground, is legitimate. If it is, it could open a new area for investigation, but authorities said they do not have great hopes that the evidence will mark a breakthrough.

NASA has received dozens of photographs and videos taken by witnesses. Investigators say that several have turned out to be bogus, others merely useless.

''We are examining it carefully,'' said Ron Dittemore, NASA's space shuttle program manager. ''This particular [photo] is no different than the rest. We are trying to determine whether it is a valid representation of an event.''

Dittemore said he was pleased that the investigative panel had arrived at Johnson Space Center. He spent much of the day yesterday briefing the panel.

Dittemore added that he made it clear to the panel members that NASA investigators have not ruled out any causes for the destruction of Columbia, ''even though we scratch our heads from time to time and wonder if we're going down the right path.''

For instance, though engineers are fairly certain that the piece of foam insulation that struck the shuttle on liftoff did not cause enough damage to ultimately destroy the craft, Dittemore said NASA will continue to test the impact of the insulation on the shuttle's heat-resistant tiles.

This story ran on page A2 of the Boston Globe on 2/7/2003.
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