spacetoday.net: Columbia investigators hold first public hearing

Posted: Fri, Mar 7, 2003, 10:25 AM ET (1525 GMT)
STS-107 patch (NASA)

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) held its first public hearing Thursday, taking testimony from both current and former NASA officials. During the hearing, held in Houston, both shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore and Johnson Space Center director Jefferson Howell said that safety has always been of paramount importance to the agency and that upper-level managers have been willing to listen to concerns from engineers regarding shuttle safety. However, Henry McDonald, the former director of NASA's Ames Research Center and chair of a 1999 independent panel on shuttle safety, said the agency failed to enact all of the recommendations the panel put forward. In particular, he said NASA relies on "archaic database technology" that makes it difficult for engineers to look for data from past shuttle flights and tests. He also said that there were fundamental problems regarding how the agency assessed risk. Although the meeting was open to the public, no more than 100 people showed up in an auditorium at the University of Houston that could hold 500 people. More public hearings are scheduled later this month both in Houston and at the Kennedy Space Center.