GEHMAN: First of all, I'd like to thank our hosts here at the Center for Advanced Space Studies and the Lunar and Planetary Institute for allowing us to use their facility for our press conference, and we appreciate it very much. It looks like it's a little more cozy than what we're used to, so I like it better.

The board remains completely determined and energized of finding the answer to this problem. We are still working seven days a week. Our energy and our seriousness have not flagged. We still have confidence that we're going to find the cause--the direct cause and determine the contributing causes. We are dedicated to that end, and we have no slacking off. We're not getting discouraged just because we haven't found it so far.

As usual, we'll follow the same procedures we've done before. I'll introduce three members of the board, one representing each group. I'll make a few introductory comments as to what the board's been doing and what we've been doing. Each one of them will lead off with a short introduction of what their groups are working on. And then we will allow you to dialogue with the board.

As you know and as I have repeated in previous press conferences, we don't save up the news until Tuesday and then let it all out. We let the news out as it comes out. This is more of a chance to dialogue with the board. This is more of a chance to ask in depth questions. But if you find something newsworthy, that's fine too. So after each of them makes a short opening statement, we'll open it up to questions.

To my left, starting at my left is Admiral Steve Turcotte, who is the commander of the Navy Safety Center. He is on the group number two, as we call it, the group that's looking at operational issues.

To his left is Mr. Roger Tetrault. Mr. Tetrault is the ex-president of Electric Boat and chairman and CEO of McDermott. As the president of Electric Boat, he built nuclear submarines so he knows contracting, government contracting and he knows specifications and he knows how government contractors operate with the government. Since this program is about 80 percent contracted out, we thought he would be able to help us a lot.

And to his left is Mr. Steve Wallace, chief of the Aviation Safety Division of the FAA. He's in group number one, as we call it--no, number two as we call it. The group that's looking at flight issues and all those kinds of things. Roger is in the group that's looking at technical and engineering analysis kinds of things, the telemetry, what the debris tells us, independent analysis and all those kinds of things.

So let me start by summarizing a couple of matters, and then each of them will get a chance to speak.

First of all, let me talk about my letter to Mr. O'Keefe. I asked Mr. O'Keefe, because of the way that this investigation has been progressing and as we have been kind of opening the aperture of the investigation now into management issues--management issues include all kinds of boards and committees and oversight actions and things like that--it has become apparent that some of the chief managers of the investigation which NASA and this board share are also members of these boards that we're going to be looking at.

We are then put into place of having the investigators investigate themselves. That's not exactly true because NASA is not investigating management issues. Only we are investigating management issues. But it really does put us in the position of some of my chief lieutenants, who are conducting the technical part of the investigation, are also going to become subject to this part of the investigation that's going to look at oversight and management, and I found it to be not compatible.

So without any suggestion that anybody's done anything wrong or any suggestion that they're under suspicion of anything like that, it's more of a process issue that I can't possibly have key investigatory managers also be the people whose performance we're looking at in other areas. It seemed to be incompatible with that.

Mr. O'Keefe has agreed to make these changes, and you'll notice in my letter, which has been released, that I didn't put any time limits on it, nor did I name any particular people. Its top level space shuttle program managers cannot be also in the investigation. That's as far as I want to get on that. I'm satisfied with his response. I happen to know for a fact that this process is ongoing, so you can color me satisfied and I view this not to be an issue any more, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Public hearings start this Thursday. The purpose of the public hearings is twofold: The first is they will allow us to read into the public record matters that we are investigating more privately. It will allow us to make, as a matter of public record, things that we've discovered and people that we've talked to. It will also allow a formal process by which non-NASA people, non-NASA experts, who may have theories or opinions or hypotheses or may have contrary views, can make those views known in kind of an official kind of way.

We're going to start our public hearings at the beginning. By that I mean, things which may not be very exciting and newsworthy, but you have to start at the beginning, so we're going to start in logical sequence. We'll start off with the organization; who works for who, who reports to whom, what are your responsibilities, what are your authorities.

And so, we're going to call on Mr. Dittemore, the project manager of the space shuttle program, and we're going to call the JSC center director, who, I believe, is going to be represented by his deputy center director because I believe that General Howell has a funeral to go to. So we're going to start with the center director and the project manager and examine the lines of responsibility and who's responsible for what part of the investigation.

We will also have then two NASA people appear who will give us views which might differ a little bit as to how this program goes. We'll see how it goes--I don't know what they're going to say. We have Mr. Harry McDonald, who was the chairman of the last really big review of the space shuttle program. It's called the SIAP; I think it was called the Shuttle Independent Analysis Panel, or something like that. I'm not doing Mr. McDonald much justice here. It's a review that we have studied some some degree, and he's agreed to appear. He's retired. He used to be the director of the Ames Research Center.

The other person we're going to hear from escapes my mind right now--oh, yes, other person we're going to hear from is a foam expert, Mr. Keith Chong (ph) from Boeing Corporation. 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.

So that's where we're going to start.

The public hearings will pick up in pace. Pretty soon we'll be doing them probably at the rate of two a week, probably two weeks out of three. So the pace will pick up. The content that we examine in public hearings will get more serious and more controversial as it goes on, but it'll be done in almost a chronologic sequence.

The next thing we'll examine will be the launch and pre-launch preparations. Then probably we'll get to the ascent--that's where foam comes off and that kind of stuff--then we'll get to the discussion of e-mails and all of that. We'll get to it in a chronologic order and kind of logical order so you can follow what's going on, and then each one will build on the previous one. We're not going to jump into the end and go backwards from there.

So that's what's going to happen with the public hearings. They will be mostly here in Houston but not all. We'll hold public hearings in Kennedy and Marshall and Washington, D.C. if we have to, wherever it goes, and I'll be glad to answer any questions on that.

The subject of board expansion is being worked right now. I'm talking to potential board members. I don't have anything to announce. But it is ongoing, and we'll announce that as soon as we have something to tell you. I'll just tell you that I'm looking for people by category. I'm not doing this by personality or a popularity contest. I'm looking at some people to help me with the history and culture and budgets and management of NASA. And I'm looking for a physicist to help me with part of it, and some others.

I'll give you a couple stats. I don't have the exact stats here with me. We can put them on our web site for you, but we mentioned last week that our web page 1-800 number, e-mail address, all of that kind of stuff, we've had I think 3.5 million hits on our web page. We've had a couple of 100 unsolicited letters, some of which have come with analysis and documentation and actual enclosures to them. Some have been handwritten on a piece of paper and a couple of hundred e-mails recommending that we look at this and look at that. It's all very valuable. We're following up on every one of them. Every one of them gets catalogued. And then every one of them gets sent to one of these three panels that you see here to my left and then judged as to whether or not we want to talk to that person some more or follow up on them. So they're all valuable.

That's kind of my introductory report. I'll turn it over to Admiral Turcotte to have him tell you what his group's been working on.

TURCOTTE: Good afternoon. I'm Admiral Steve Turcotte.

My group is the maintenance, material and management. We've looked at basically maintenance and material from--if you go all the way back to design--all the way through the different orbiter maintenance periods and then, more particularly, what we call flow or this maintenance period between the last flight and this flight.

This week along with the two other members of my board, Brigadier General Duane Deal, who is, in his day job, the commander of the space wing at Peterson, and Major General John Barry, who is from the Air Force Materiel Command and also in the past has spent some time inside NASA and worked on the previous accident investigation.

This week we divided our efforts between Utah, looking at Thiokol, looking at the SRB assembly, the plant, the facilities. We're looking at everything from the quality assurance organizations to the flow of paperwork, how that was done. Was it done in a timely process? Good/Bad? All of those things from many different angles. Additionally, Major General Deal spent a lot of time at Michoud this week. I wish I had done that because today is Tuesday and that's probably where we should all be.

But looking specifically at the foam, the process, the entire assembly process, the QA process from beginning to end, in the history of the tanks and some of the sister tanks that flew on this particular flight. General Barry spent some time in Palmdale. This is where all of the shuttles were built. There are still shuttle tooling facilities out there, and some of the shuttle processing and paperwork is still--or some of the maintenance actions done on internal pieces to the shuttle are done out there.

To give you an idea of the complexity and magnitude, if I could show you this. These pictures will be posted on the web site. This is a picture of OPF-I in its Orval Processing facility-I at Kennedy, and this is a picture of an empty one; the other two are full. The next one I'll show you; this is one with the shuttle Discovery inside it. A pretty impressive technical facility. The amount of paperwork just alone that we're looking at, in just this most recent flow between the last flight and this flight, is over a million and a half pieces of paper.

We have a full team of people, seven days a week, looking at the paper, looking at the processes; and, in particular, we're going to focus on some of the critical areas. I'll give you an idea of some of the complexity. And again, this will be posted on the web site. This is a picture of the left wheel well. If you could focus in on that a little better. The complexity of this is huge. There are numerous wires, hydraulic lines, censors that run through there. Huge, complex. And in the process of doing this, we're going to look at every single action that took place throughout the orbiter in some of these sensitive areas, from detailed every single piece of paper. A lot of eyes on; lot of time.

To continue that; after the first part of this is done, the next is to go backwards in time. We're going to look at the major overhaul periods and look at that paper, and I wouldn't even care to estimate. That's probably 20 to 30 to 40 million documents that are out there, if you look at it over the time.

And that's our focus; is going backwards tracing this thing as far back as we can to ensure that nothing was over looked and that all of the processes and the maintenance and the logistic processes were accurate and in place for the safe operation of the shuttle program.

That concludes my presentation.

GEHMAN: Thank you very much.

Roger?

TETRAULT: OK. Our group is group number three, the technical group, and we have subdivided ourselves in order to get much more depth into very specific areas.

Now, Mr. Scott Hubbard, one of our group members, has taken the external tank and he also has the tile systems. He is currently as Southwest Research today, and he is reviewing their test plan to shoot at tile and RCC panels. Jim Hallock has the fault tree analysis and also the sensor investigation, and Sheila Widnall (ph) is following the aerodynamic analysis and the boundary layer analysis.

I am particularly focusing on wing leading edge systems and that includes the RCCs and the stainless steel attachment brackets that go onto the leading edge of the wing. And I also have the control, the release and the testing of debris, and that's after its arrival at Kennedy Space Center.

Now, I spent much of last week at Kennedy Space Center reviewing the debris, and I had with me experts in the shuttle tile system and in the reinforced carbon-carbon systems, and they were Howard Goldstein and Don Regalli (ph). Both of them are retired and experts in their area. We've also placed a temporary debris resident at Kennedy, and he is Dr. Greg Kovacs from Stanford University.

Now I'm going to show you a picture here which will be on the web site. This is a picture taken in the hangar where the majority of debris is being stored and where it's being reconstructed. And as you can see, there are specific full-scale areas which are marked in blue on the floor and these are used in the reconstruction, and they replicate the areas of the orbiter, like the wings, the tail and the fuselage and so on. And if you see a red area, that's would be where a wheel well is. We also have a smaller hangar and in that hangar internal tanks and engine parts are being stored.

This picture is not totally populated. To date we have collected some 22,563 parts. We've identified 16,063 of them. The total weight of the collected debris is about 32,100 pounds and that represents about 13.7 percent of the original weight of the orbiter. This is an important item. The pieces from the right side of the aircraft exhibit extreme temperature excursions, and that's the result of reentry heating. So it's going to take some skill on our part to separate out what is damaged from reentry and what was caused by the super-heated air entering into the breach of the left wing.

Now let me talk about some of the individual pieces, or some of the groups of pieces that have been retrieved and are looking at. And I'm going to start by a short discussion on the tiles.

In the far left-hand side of this picture, on a blue wing, you can see that there are tiles in gray plastic containers, and that's, as I said, on the left side of the photograph. Before I left Kennedy last Thursday evening I counted 105 containers placed on the left wing reconstruction area. Now most are not specifically located on the actual spot that they belong on because the serial numbers have been wiped off the tiles and we are only able to locate them in the patterns in which that specific type of tile and that specific size of tile may have occurred.

Many of the tiles on the left side have a thin black deposit on them, and that deposit has never been seen on any previous flight. We started doing material analysis on these tiles and on other things this weekend, and on the particular tiles we found that that black deposit had a very high concentration of aluminum in the deposit. We also checked the red spot that was on a tile and that checked out as hydraulic fluid.

We've also found a left inboard elevon actuator, and it has a sizable hole that's burned into the actuator tube. The hole's approximately four inches by two inches, and the best guess at this point is that it actually came from reentry damage. Hydraulic fluid which leaked from the hole was tested, and surprisingly, showed no significant overheating in spite of the fact that we have a hole which was burned into the tube.

Let me talk about tires. I'm going to show you this, this will be on our web site. The top tire is one of the right main landing gear tires. The one on the bottom is a left inboard main landing gear tire. There is, obviously, a significant difference between these two tires. We've recovered both of the tires from the left wheel well, and we've been able to identify their exact position inside the wheel well by the amount of patches that there were inside the tire.

The tires on the left side, obviously, have a significant difference in appearance from the ones that are on the right side. And by the way, the fabric has been torn on the left side, we believe it is possible, and I'll say that again, it is possible that the tires on the left side blew very late in this event. And this would have been a late event because we have data that indicates that the orbiter was flying under control until the last few minutes before break-up. The blowing of these tires would likely have been a very catastrophic event, so it couldn't have occurred until late in the event.

Michelin is the maker of these tires. We have contacted Michelin to get some help in our investigation. As I mentioned, we have one tire from the right wheel well at Kennedy. I'm told we have found the other and it is en route. We also have the nose gear tires at Kennedy at the moment.

Let me talk about tanks. We've recovered at least 25 of the approximately 35 tanks that were internal to the fuselage, and these are at Kennedy. There are also a number of tanks that are reported to be en route to Kennedy, and there are also pieces of tanks that are on the shelves where we store components that have yet to be identified.

So before this task is completed, it certainly appears that we will have recovered almost all of the tanks, if not all of them.

We also mentioned the right landing gear door. There will be a picture of this on the web site soon, as well. We have recovered almost all of the right side landing gear door, and in very large size pieces. I think there are actually three pieces which represents a significant portion of the door. We also have three pieces that appear to make up the length of the inboard side of the left landing gear door frame. Now, other than these three pieces, we have not identified any structural components from the left landing gear door. It is possible, however that we have some tiles from the door surface, but we haven't been able to specifically identify them as tiles from the door surface.

I'm going to move to the leading edge of the left wing. We have identified at least one piece from 16 of the 22 leading edge systems. These are either pieces of the reinforced carbon-carbon, the RCCs or of the structural components that attach them to the wing spar, and those are made of stainless steel. In some cases we have pieces of both. We ran some tests this weekend on RCC panel number nine, or at least a portion of it, and there was a slag on the inside of that RCC panel, which we tested and it shows deposits of aluminum and stainless steel.

Let me just say that our job is just beginning. What we will be doing is trying to follow the heat--and I'm going to say that again--what we have to do is follow the heat. We will be doing this in order to back into the location of the original breach in the wing. Now, we're going to be using all the tools at our command, including aerodynamic and thermodynamic computer models, and we'll be using wind tunnel testing to do that. And, of course, we will also use a sizable amount of the telemetry, which is available to us.

With regard to the telemetry, we have some issues. We can be fairly certain of the times when sensors went off-line, but we are a little bit less certain about the timing; that is in the current time line when sensors went off nominal. So we'll have to be a little bit careful about how we read those.

The debris that has been located is mostly from very late in the event, and it came from the breakup of the shuttle or just prior to the breakup. The debris, of course, that would be most helpful would be the ones from the earlier sightings of debris shedding over California, Nevada and Utah. And as you're aware, we haven't confirmed any debris from these areas yet.

So to summarize, I think it'd be fair to say that we have more questions than answers right now, but we're getting smarter fast and I believe that there's a very good chance that we will, in fact, be able to localize the breach that occurred in the left wing. We certainly need to do this in order to determine the cause of the accident, and until we have determined that location of the breach, every postulated cause of the accident is really just a theory.

GEHMAN: Mr. Wallace?

WALLACE: Our group is group two, any way you count us, we're not in order, proof that we're not ourselves rocket scientists on the board.

(LAUGHTER)

We have two board members on group two; Major General Ken Hess, who is the head of the United States Air Force Safety Center.

Last week I traveled to Kennedy Space Center with several of our investigators. General Hess did not join us on that trip. We, with all the groups, began at the reconstruction facility--that's sort of the focal point of the investigation even for those of us who are slightly less involved in the hardware aspects of the investigation. Our group met with the launch readiness review chairman. We're looking, our group, in addition to operations and training, has the certification of flight readiness process, the on-orbit MMT aspects, as well as mission payloads.

So our focus in the trip to Kennedy was, among other things, on the involvement of the Kennedy people in the flight readiness review. There is a launch readiness review, just sort of the typical time line here, which is conducted at Kennedy, deals with the facilities infrastructure and the processing part of the orbiter, and that is typically a few days before the more formal flight readiness review, which is typically a couple of weeks before launch date, with the flight readiness review being the process that ends with the certification, signatures at the associate administrative level at NASA. So we met with the chairman of the launch readiness review and the other people involved in that down at Kennedy.

We also met with the final inspection team. There's a group that goes out to the pad in the early morning, just in the hours before the launch, and they makes a last, final exterior inspection, looking for anything out of the usual. It's a top-to-bottom visual check and also infrared scanning check of the entire stacked assembly looking for ice, debris, anything out of the ordinary.

And we met with the launch director and went through the launch control facility and all the processes they went through down there. Without going into great detail, I can say that everything was nominal through the launch process. An interesting focus of the launch director was that he was particularly concerned with security issues. Obviously, I think a combination of the world situation and an Israeli astronaut, he said, "Well, one thing that was different about this mission was the extreme security precautions."

The same team that does the final inspection also does the launch day video review. And so, they have 19 cameras focused on the shuttle as it lifts off and they immediately grab tapes from 19 cameras and go put them into a composite and write a quick report on what they saw on the first day and we went through all that.

They have different categories of things they look for; categories of major anomalies, anomalies, and another category called funnies, anything that's not quite normal. And then, just observations, and everything on the day of the STS-107 launch was in the observation category. Ice sheds off of the umbilical, which is the lower point, where the fueling from the external tank goes into the orbiter. It's a perfectly normal procedure. They see frost in certain areas. There are light, almost cellophane-like wrappings that protect certain fittings which are expected to just blow off and do, and they expect to see minor scorching of the bottom of the external tank. So all of those. They gave us the report on that, and everything was as they expected.

We also went to the space station processing facility because they have a role in payloads. Most of the missions are to the space station. This one was a science mission and did not go to the station. But they utilize the same facilities for processing of payloads. So we went through to see how that process worked and discuss in some detail the types of payloads and possible connections with the way they were connected to the orbiter. I would say that there are basically payloads in three areas on this mission:

We have the SPACEHAB double module SPACEHAB, which is when you see the astronauts doing the Superman flight up and down and when they send the videos from space, that's in and out of the SPACEHAB. And then there's the FREESTAR platform on the back, which is outside of the SPACEHAB, and not handled by anybody in space. And then up on the mid-deck, where some of the crew lives, there are also some experimental payloads there as well.

So we went through their process, looking at anything that's new, anything that's different in terms of their very detailed approval process for carrying of payloads, with a strong focus on any inner connections to the orbiter, electrical or fluid connections, and that process goes on. I will say that payload issues are not off the table, but I think I could say they're sort of getting close to the edge. In other words, we've done a lot of work and haven't seen anything significant so far.

I would say an intense area of focus for our group is now going to be on the flight readiness view and the mission management team in general. Hess is really leading an effort to focus in on that area and will probably be doing a lot of interviews in the next week or two on that. You've heard lots of discussion about dispositions of prior foam events. To the extent that that enters into the flight readiness review process, we would be involved in that, and then all of the much discussed e-mails and decisions to call in DOD assets. And on again off again, we will be very thoroughly running all of that to ground.

Another area which Admiral Gehman has asked our group to look at is conditions for return to flight, and I would say, we will sort of divide conditions to return to flight into two categories:

There's the big picture of ultimately who should go into space and why, and that is beyond our purview at the moment. I think, as Admiral Gehman has said, we would intend to perhaps frame the debate in that area, but not provide answers. What I think you will see this board do is provide more short-term return to flight recommendations; that is focused on what would be necessary to return to flight sufficiently to at least ensure the continued viability of the international space station. And while we don't have answers on what these recommendations will be at this point, I think here I can draw on my experience in the civil aviation sector, and I would add that the FAA where I come from, we're being strongly assisted in this investigation by the NTSB at many levels.

NTSB is down at the reconstruction, NTSB investigators are on our team and we have some NTSB senior aviation management people who are advising the board. And so, in the civil aviation process, I'm usually on the receiving end of the recommendations from them. In this case, I'll perhaps be on the sending end of the recommendations. But I think you can anticipate a process similar to what you would see in civil aviation in which it would be to focus on both eliminating whatever specific failure you identify, perhaps even without determining that it was causal in the accident, eliminating specific failures, and then either reducing the consequences of those failures or designing in an ability to tolerate those failures.

So I think that sort of approach which we see in civil aviation, if we have short circuit that causes a spark to ignite a fuel tank, where we try to eliminate the short circuit, a worn wire, whatever, we also try to inert the fuel tank ultimately. In other words, you want to eliminate the failure and tolerate the failure. I think that same general approach we'd expect to use in these circumstances.

That's all.

GEHMAN: Thank you very much, gentlemen.

We'll just make one or two closing comments.

Once again, the board is enormously grateful to the thousands of people who are out searching for debris. Debris remains very important to us. Last week we had on an average day, we had over 4,000 people out searching for debris and over a dozen helicopters or fixed-wing airplanes in the search.

The NTSB is integrated into our program. We're very thankful to them. We're very thankful to the states that are continuing to help us by running down reports of sightings. The Navy has been working its way through all of those lakes in east Texas and have found a number of important things under water--Navy divers have. We're very grateful to them.

The specific searches, and particularly around Nevada, have not turned up anything yet, but we do have very, very good radar tracking data that indicates that something fell off the orbiter and fell in the area of this position near Caliente, Nevada and we're going to continue to search in that area.

I apologize for the rather long introduction, but I'll be glad to take your questions now.

QUESTION: Can you clarify the damage to the tires that you talked about? A couple of questions. First of all, are both tires on the left side damaged or are both of them damaged--the ones you found on the left side? And secondly, are you convinced that this damage to the tires did occur in orbit or while the shuttle was returning as opposed to post, after it broke up? And thirdly, one follow-up, also. And if it did, in fact, occur in orbit, what could that have caused--what would that have meant?

TURCOTTE: Well, let me answer the first one. Both tires on the left side look fairly similar, and they have extreme--just visually, they look like they've gone through extreme trauma; whereas, the one on the right side is more typical of what I understand is a more normal aircraft accident where it has a blow-out in one area and the rest of the tire is mostly intact.

Also, we see that the threads are basically pulled apart and then have heat damage to them at some later point, which would indicate that the heat damage was probably coming from the reentry. So we would expect that it would be either as the shuttle broke up or shortly there afterwards that it might have blown. We're not certain. I used the word possibly twice just to make sure that you understood that I wasn't saying that they blew up inside the wheel well. But we don't know for certain exactly what that timing was, but it is possible that they, in fact, did.

GEHMAN: But let me follow up on that and let me ask Roger to--we have telemetry from the wheel well up until the time of loss of signal that indicates that those tires were intact, they had the right air pressure and they had the right temperature. So whatever happened happened after the loss of signal.

QUESTION: Do you mean the loss of the original signal or the additional 30 seconds of data?

GEHMAN: The original loss of signal, as NASA's calling it.

QUESTION: For Mr. Tetrault. Looking at the aluminum you found on the tiles and the other edges there, can you give us any sense of how much aluminum was found on those--sort of a percentage of how that would be different, and if that also is indicative of pre-event or post--during-event or post-event heating?

TETRAULT: The aluminum that we're seeing we're seeing in a variety of different places. We're seeing it as a black deposit, if you will, that's on the tiles, which appears to be aluminum.

It has trace elements that indicate it may be aluminum 2024, which are part of the support structures that we're dealing with. The kind of slag that we're seeing on the inside of some of the RCC panels also includes aluminum. I don't know exactly whether that is coming from the event or whether it's coming from reentry heating, and that's something that we still have to work on yet and try to refine our thinking on how that is. This information was brand new as of last night around 6:00 p.m., so we've got some work to do in trying to refine that.

QUESTION: You said there was a hole on the--I think, it's the elevon actuator. Is that right?

TETRAULT: It's the left elevon actuator, the inboard side.

QUESTION: I'm trying to think if that hole is caused by something coming off while the shuttle's in reentry before breakup; what the position of that actuator would be; how exposed it is to wing and front of it; whether it's the underside or the overside of the wing that it's exposed to, et cetera.

TETRAULT: The appearance of it--we haven't done any metal or graphic examination anywhere near the area of the hull. We just took some samples this weekend. I was on the phone over the weekend with Kennedy just trying to determine what quick samples we might be able to run and get some useful information out of. And where we have an item that we have a concern that by destructively evaluating, we may lose information that we weren't smart enough to think about getting initially. We're going to be very conservative about taking those pieces until we know exactly what we want to find out from the piece, which is one of the reasons why we haven't tested around the area of this hole in the elevon.

There are technical people who speculate that the hole was really part of the reentry process, the result of it. It looks like the way that that might fly--the piece that we have might fly in reentry--that it's entirely possible that it could have occurred there. We don't know for certain, won't know for sometime.

GEHMAN: Let me make a comment here because a saw a couple of you shaking your head at one of the things that Mr. Tetrault said during his statement, and it gets to this question.

Right now, we've got all these random pieces and we're seeing all these marks and chars and destruction. It will be useful to us when we get an identical piece from the right wing and the left wing and we can see if there's a difference for how they looked. For example, if we get a right wing elevon and it has certain marks on it, we might attribute those marks, as Roger has said, to the normal effects of the vehicle breaking up, and then this piece entering the atmosphere. But then we looked at the left elevon and it has all those things plus other marks; it's the plus other ones that lead us toward the investigation.

So until we get a couple of identical pieces--that's why the tires are so important. We have all six tires now and we have two of the landing gears. We have the complete nose landing gear complete, and pieces of the others.

Isn't that right, Roger? We've got a couple of struts.

TETRAULT: We have pieces. That piece that we found of the strut, we are fairly certain now is, in fact, from the left side. We have an upper strut that we have no certainty of exactly which side it came from, and may never have any certainty of which side it came from.

GEHMAN: But as the comparative analysis which will be able to help us answer those questions that you're asking. But right now, we just don't know.

TETRAULT: But let me give you one comparison. As I said, if you look at the debris from the right side, you can see that there is significant damage to the right side from re-entry. We see the black deposits on the right side, not to the extent that we see it on the left side, but it's on the right side as well, which means you had molten aluminum being sprayed or deposited onto those tiles on the right side where the event was not occurring. That's a very hot reentry.

QUESTION: Can you tell us a little bit more about this picture--the picture of debris of tiles that came from the left main landing wheel gear door last week? And what does the damage on that tile tell you about how the heat may have circulated on that part of the v-coil and how temperatures may have evolved?

TETRAULT: Let me talk to two of those things from last week. I think first there was the rubber tile and it looked like there was almost heat coming up underneath that tile. One of the things that we observed when we went down there and started looking at a lot more tile is that a lot of tiles look like that. And in fact, that seems to be a way that they fracture and the way that they remove themselves from the skin of the aircraft. They leave a piece of the RTV and the felt pad behind and a piece of the tile and they kind of break out in a conical section.

You can almost take some of those tiles and go over and replace them over the top of this cone that you see, and I feel certain at some point we'll actually find one that matches. So the rubber tile is a little bit less interesting than we started out.

The other piece which we talked about last week, which was the left inboard wheel well frame on the forward side had an area in the aluminum frame which looked like very hot air was blowing out of the wheel well and laterally across the normal airflow. So it would be 90 degrees perpendicular to the airflow. We've added two subsequent pieces to that which have now given us the entire frame of the inside door well, which I mentioned to you we now have but we have no pieces of the door itself.

I would also like to say that as we look at this and try to analyze what's happening, it's going to be equally as important to recognize what we don't have as to what we do have, because the stuff that started coming off out of California and Nevada and Utah, we're not going to have unless somebody finds it out there. And that, in fact, is going to be some kind of a clue as to where the breach occurred.

QUESTION: Mr. Tetrault, in your list of items that you discovered and analyzed, I'm wondering which offers the most encouragement to you in the pursuit of the heat that you are seeking? Which pieces are particularly tantalizing, and why?

TETRAULT: Well, there are ones that are just interesting, and in one way, we're in a kind of a purely speculative situation; that is the slag on the RCCs and how does it blow forward and how do you get the stainless steel and the aluminum up onto the back edge, if you will, of an RCC when, in fact, that stainless steel was behind the area. So that to me is a little bit intriguing and something that we'll have to spend some time.

I think the question that was asked about that panel where it appears to be blowing out and going laterally, that may be a late event. It may have something to do with the tires. You know, we don't know at this particular point. But as we read these things, eventually, I think we'll get answers for those questions.

QUESTION: A question for Mr. Tetrault or Mr. Wallace. Looking at these e-mails that bounced around at various levels but never seemed to get high enough, this may be a culture issue.

Mr. Tetrault, you have long experience in the nuclear field. There are nuclear near misses where there were lower-level people who did not bounce things up, who may have had cultural reasons not to do it, were afraid of repercussions, were afraid of looking silly, afraid of losing their jobs. Have you gotten to the stage of looking at the culture of NASA or looking at whether there's a written procedural flaw here that prevented this from rising to an appropriate level?

WALLACE: I'll give Roger a brief break. No, we haven't, but I also think that that is something that Admiral Gehman is probably going to charge the players to be named later--group to look at. You know, as I say, we will be running those e-mails to ground, getting the whole sort of factual story. I'm clear and interviewing all the people that were in that decision-making on again, off again process to understand what they decided and why. You know, I think beyond that into the sort of the more root cultural management issues, that's actually a topic which is somewhat shared across the board, and I think also expected to be given to the new group.

TETRAULT: Can I finish that question?

GEHMAN: Go ahead.

TETRAULT: You brought up the nuclear issue and, obviously, I come out of that side of the field. I've seen a number of articles which have asked why are there so many nuclear guys on this in the group, and not only in the board, but underneath, doing this at some of the levels.

My own personal opinion there is that nuclear history has a history, and because of that history, they have had to adopt certain attitudes and qualities over years, and, particularly, a questioning attitude about--prove to me that it's right rather than I assume that it's wrong. And I think to some degree, Sean O'Keefe saw the nuclear Navy as having some of those attributes that he probably wanted on this board to look at those kinds of things. And I know in certain areas that I've looked at, I'm a little bit suspect of that questioning attitude that should be there that I'm not seeing. And it's not in all areas obviously, but in certain select areas.

GEHMAN: Steve Wallace replied exactly the way I would reply. In my calls on the oversight committees last week, I assured them that all of these issues about management and culture and history and oversight and lessons learned from previous studies and Challenger, we're going to get to that. But you've got to remember that at this point in the Challenger investigation, they knew what went wrong. And so, the review of who did what to whom and who did his job well and who didn't do his job well was relatively, fairly focused.

I'm really not interested in casting about NASA to look for everybody who--without any particular focus or without any particular reason for just casting about and casting some big chill over NASA that we're searching for everybody who parked in the wrong parking place when they came to work this morning. So it has to follow either a deduced fault or an actual direct fault that we find, that we will then do a complete review of all the aspects of the history and culture of NASA, getting into all those issues. But it has to follow in logical order.

Now, we're going to review through these management boards and committees and all those kinds of things in nice-do process, but you've got to remember we're not following any particular fault here because we don't know what happened. So with that caveat, yes, we're going to go after all those things.

QUESTION: I think, for you, Mr. Tetrault, two things about what you were telling us. I've never understood the telemetry of wheel well temperature rise rates in the context of an actual burn-through in the wheel well. I've never understood how the plasma, if it was in the wheel well, you wouldn't see more radical telemetry. Have you got a better sense of that or can you tell me how something like that could happen that you wouldn't see more telemetry?

And the other thing is, when you're telling us about the aluminum and the coating on right and left, does any of that tell you anything about the attitude of the vehicle, you know, in that last 25 seconds or, I guess, 27 seconds before the final loss of signal? Do you have any sense--I mean, I'm guessing what you're telling me is you're seeing--this thing could have been going side ways or whatever--and you're seeing the kind of natural flow you would have before it broke up.

TETRAULT: I'm not sure I'm going to answer your question very specifically, but with regard to the attitude and the telemetry, let me say this. I'm having difficulty with some of the off-nominal timings, as I mentioned to you. And one of the reasons I'm doing that, where I'm having trouble is, it's very simple and it's very simple physics.

There was a temperature A, brakeline hydraulic fluid temperature A that went up very early in the event. It was either the second or the third one that went off-nominal. Temperature B, which sits about two inches away from it, did not rise until about a minute and a half later. Whereas, temperature C, which is, you know, probably six feet away, and temperature D, which is four feet away, are all rising off-nominal. That doesn't make a lot of physical sense to me.

What we found as we look at these temperatures is that, it appears to be a straight line up and at some point NASA has called it off-nominal. And it may be some variability in where that call is on where it is off-nominal. And so, what I'm trying to tell you is that if you're trying to put together a time line, I think you can be fairly certain when it went offline. But when it says it's off-nominal, I think you're going to have to take that with a little bit of grain of salt and eventually you may find us redoing that time line and shifting some of these sequences around to some degree. Hopefully that answered your sensor question.

The one with regard to attitude, if you look at the sensors themselves in telemetry, it is interesting to note that all of them were going up off-nominal, but then they went up in a very, very sharp fashion as soon as it rolled into the left wing-down attitude. I won't say anything more, but it's interesting to note that that occurred that way.

QUESTION: As you step back, sort of just to sum up some of these earlier questions and look at the evidence you've accumulated so far, in your opinion, does it seem to be moving you more toward a breach in the leading edge or a breach in the wheel well?

TETRAULT: I think those are both equally alive. Everybody has their own theory. I'm sure each of you has your own theory. Everybody on the board has their own theory. I'm going to be patient and not express my theory at this time.

QUESTION: I wondered if you could bring us up to speed on the foam story; what you're looking at now; if you're any closer to where the foam debris struck the underside of the left wing, whether it was one or more pieces?

TETRAULT: I really don't have a lot more to report other than what you've already heard. I do know that earlier this week that NASA is trying to develop a variety of experiments where they can look at cryopumping and some of those kinds of things in small scale experiments when they can look at how well does this adhere and what is the likelihood that something would come off and so on and so forth.

We reviewed that test plan--that's group three--reviewed that test plan earlier this week and gave them permission to go ahead and run that test plan. They also wanted, as part of that test plan, the authority to chop into a bipod--starting with the right bipod on external tank number 120, which is very lightweight but has the same configuration that you would find on the 93 that was on the OV-102. We have not given them permission to do that and cut into it until they come back to us and tell us the results that they get on the initial test plan.

TURCOTTE: And to walk that backward, there is another tank there, ET-92, I believe it is. It's a sister tank. 94, I'm sorry.

We're looking backwards at the processes; when that was put together, what were some of the process flows that went into that where some of the propellant was changed. At a certain process point some of the epoxies were changed. We're looking at all of those to figure out, in many ways, if it did separate, how much did separate, and why did it separate, what lot number of the paint was used, and what lot number, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just much more than just looking at the photos. We're trying to what-if; if there were some failure modes present, how much would come off and when?

QUESTION: This is kind of an accounting question, so I don't know which one of you wants to tackle it. But could you clarify the most recent significant debris finds in the last week or so, what have been the most significant pieces? And also, can you just re-clarify your western-most find, what it was and where it was, again?

GEHMAN: The western-most find is still a fraction of a piece of tile. It's not a whole tile. It was found in the area of Littlefield, Texas, which is well west of Fort Worth, as you know. We don't have a picture of that piece of tile. It's only a fraction of a tile. It's just now being inducted into the system. And I think Mr. Tetrault has already gone over his favorite pieces several times. Certainly the landing gear, the wheels are very significant, but we're not--you're never sure what the most--you know, when the golden nugget is going to show up. So it's hard to say what's significant.

TETRAULT: A lot of times it's a very overlooked piece initially.

QUESTION: I guess I was just trying to get a timetable. I'm sorry. Were those found within the last week, is what I was trying to get at?

TETRAULT: Not necessarily. The stuff that we're beginning to find or are continuing to find is mostly fairly small things. My understanding is what's happening in the field is most of the big stuff has been found. And we are finding lots of screws and bolts and tile and tile pieces and those kinds of things which continue to come in. But we're not finding many of the really large things. Just hearsay, if you will, about what they're finding in the field.

QUESTION: I'm still interested in this aluminum spray. I'm wondering whether this flow that you mentioned that was 90 degrees to the flow of the air, was that flowing from the left wheel well toward the right inside of the craft? And is it conceivable that could have been some aluminum in there?

TETRAULT: No, it actually appears to be opposite of that. It appears to go from the inboard left wheel well frame toward the left wing tip.

QUESTION: Can you say anything about what the mechanism might be to get that spraying across...

TETRAULT: None whatsoever at this point.

GEHMAN: I don't think it's molten aluminum. Yes, it's not aluminum, it's a discoloration which seems to indicate the heat flow and it seems to flow from the left forward inboard side of the wheel well toward the fuselage.

TETRAULT: I'm going to agree with the admiral, because that's the side that the tiles are on.

TURCOTTE: That's correct.

GEHMAN: Now, what does that mean? Stay tuned.

QUESTION: Can you give us any progress report on the two or three or four different analyses going on with regard to trying to locate the breach, the thermal analysis, the aerodynamic analysis and whatnot?

GEHMAN: I can tell you that the studies that we mentioned last week, which were kind of thumbnail studies, are now getting to be a little bit more sophisticated. Some of the things that we thought they would show us are now being challenged by experts. But we are still trying to do what we call a back-fit. And Mr. Tetrault--Roger mentioned this two or three times.

We're trying to find a scenario which fits the temperature readings, and we are inducing holes, and we are inducing heat flow into the vehicle at various places, and we are more sophisticatedly modeling how the heat flows in through...

(AUDIO GAP)

GEHMAN: ... getting more sophisticated and we're doing more of it.

Same with the aerodynamic analysis that Dr. Widnall is working on. We're trying to get smarter about that. The only thing I can tell you about the aerodynamic analysis is that, even at the time of the final two seconds in the extra 32 seconds after the loss of signal, the vehicle's attitude and position was correct. We do believe that the vehicle was fighting forces more strongly than we had--the fight was getting a little more vigorous at that point. And we also believe that the beginning of some of control measures that the vehicle was taking to maintain its attitude started earlier than we previously thought.

So you know, we're down now to a little bit more refined, and so it looks like the vehicle was fighting aerodynamic flow forces a little earlier than--I'm talking seconds now, I mean, not minutes, you know--a minute or two earlier than we previously thought. Little, tiny deflections that we hadn't actually noticed before. But I can't tell you anything more about localizing it or anything else.

QUESTION: For Mr. Tetrault. On the debris issues, we were told last week that the cassette that was shown last week was recovered near Palestine, and press reports I've seen on the other crew module structure and contents being found further east. Was the debris spread from the crew module indicating that this cassette was unusually up stream or were crew module materials spread out among a much wider area?

TETRAULT: All the crew module debris is kept in a separate location that's in the same hangar, and I haven't spent a huge amount of time there because I've been concentrating on the left wing. I don't know exactly at this point where any piece of debris has landed. We have asked for that information; we have not received it.

For us to analyze and go backwards and try to say, "Where did the heat come from?" we have to subtract out all of the reentry heat, if you will, and in order to do that what we need to do is find out where the debris landed, then try to get a ballistic coefficient for that and back it into the sky and say it left the aircraft here. And that's part of the all the analysis we have to do yet. So my realistic answer to your question is, I don't know.

GEHMAN: And I'm the spokesman on crew issues and because of the sensitivities to the families and things like that, we are conducting that examination pretty circumspectly. And anything that we learn--if we learn anything that's unique or special from the crew debris, the crew module, the cabin or anything like that, we take it over the curtain and put it out on the floor. And so far nothing remarkable has come out of it.

The cassette was located kind of in the primary debris field. I mean, it was, you know, it was kind of in the same area where lots of stuff was found, so nothing remarkable about where it was found.

QUESTION: Has one side of the vehicle--have we found more of one side of the vehicle, and do we know a percentage of which side we found, a 60-40 percentage? And the tiles that we haven't identified, are we going to be able to identify what part of the vehicle those are from? And how is that process going to happen?

TURCOTTE: I just left there yesterday. I'll jump into this one. I spent about five, six hours yesterday and the day before. It's pretty evenly split. And not all of what we have is there.

For example, we don't have the hydrogene tanks and some of the other vessels that are in. They are in a separate location. So not all of what we have is there. But as a broad brush scope, most of what you see, it's kind of a scatter-gram. If you were to take a shotgun, it would be a good analogy to that. Again, not a lot of what you see there is also stored on the left-hand side there, and those are still for further processing. So as those come out and they're identified, it could begin to come to take shape a little better, but right now it's pretty much of a general scatter-gram.

QUESTION: Mr. Tetrault, you mentioned an interesting point, that it's important to recognize what you don't have as well as what you do have and the importance of that. Given that you have most of the frame of the landing gear door but not the door itself, does that support the notion that the door might have been damaged or even been dislodged fairly early in the dissent? And also, if so, might that have anything to do directly with the trauma that has now been recognized in the tires that have been there?

TETRAULT: At this point I would say it's just an interesting observation, and I wouldn't want to jump to any conclusions about what might have caused us not to find the landing gear door. I think at some point we'll be able to answer that question, but I think it's way premature at this point to speculate on it.

GEHMAN: Our job is to fit six or seven of these investigatory themes together into a pattern that fits. And if, for example, the thermodynamic investigation indicates that the loss of a tile would not have induced enough heat to show these kinds of things--that the heat had to be introduced directly into the wheel well, then the door becomes very interesting. So these things all have to fit together before we can answer any of those questions, and right now they don't fit together, not that we can see.

TETRAULT: But we do have some interesting tools. I mean, we know when various metals melt, so when we find deposits, we can get an idea of heat. We know that the core bond used on the aluminum skin begins to degrade at about 400 degrees. The RTV degrades at 500 degrees. All of these things we can put into a pattern as we look at this debris and try to figure out what was the cause, where was the heat coming from and how do we back into it.

QUESTION: Just listening to the general conversation here, it sounds like you people are dramatically farther along this week than you have been in the past. Would you characterize it that way? And does it mean anything for the speed with which you might reach a conclusion?

GEHMAN: I would characterize this week as a very good week because we have so many independent investigations going on, which are beginning to lead to little tidbits of information. The problem is that since we don't know where we're going, we don't know how far along the road we are.

I think Yogi Berra had a saying, something about: If you don't know where you're going, any road will do.

(LAUGHTER)

That's kind of where we are. We're investigating everything right now because we don't want to leave any stone unturned. But, yes, I would characterize this a very, very good week because of the travel and the investigations that you've heard reported by these officers, plus you multiply every one of these guys by six or seven and you realize how many things we've got going on at the same time.

QUESTION: Has the work in the last week on the photography--ground-base photography shown anything provocative beyond last week? And secondly, as you look for debris in the coming two weeks or so, in the world of black box-type retaining data or cameras retaining imagery, what are some top priorities there?

GEHMAN: The photo imagery continues, but there's nothing new since I reported last week.

What the photo imagery shows, debris shedding over California, which surprised me how early it showed debris shedding, tiny little pieces which probably never made it to the ground, or if they did we aren't likely to find. The larger pieces of debris that shed early, thanks to the NTSB and the FAA and the military, we've tracked several of them all the way to the ground. And those are the ones where we are asking the local sheriff to go out and look in this spot. We're pretty sure there's a piece of debris out there. Unfortunately, the weather's been bad. It's covered with snow and things like that. But we're not going to give up. We can't give up on that. So the answer to your question is, no. The analysis of the photography continues, but nothing remarkable to report there.

We continue to put a high emphasis on the recovery of anything that has data, anything that stores data. It turns out that there are literally dozens and dozens of pieces of equipment on the shuttle that store data of one part or another.

As we come across them, just like we did with the crew tape, after we finish and we're pretty sure that we've analyzed them and we've taken anything sensitive out of them, then we make it public as soon as we have it. And there are no black boxes on the shuttle.

TURCOTTE: Right. There are no black boxes in the flight data recorders. And, of course, with the telemetry they're actually in many respects way ahead of the civil aviation sector in that area.

But I would, as far as cameras, there are three cameras which photograph the external tank separation right in the umbilical, two moving cameras and one still. You may have seen on past missions extremely high resolution photographs of the external tanks separating, and, unfortunately, that requires the return to Earth of the film. So it'd be something we'd love to see, but I don't think we're optimistic.

GEHMAN: Thank might possibly show the famous left bipod ramp, so that's why we'd like to see that.

Thank you.