Harold Gehman, chairman of the CAIB: "I think that we've had a good week here. We are moving along methodically in our understanding of what happened to the orbiter. Let me rephrase that: We're moving along nicely in our understanding of the forces that were at work on the orbiter as it failed to properly enter the Earth's atmosphere. I would not want to say that we're moving along rapidly at finding the cause, because it remains to be elusive. But we are doing a considerable amount of good hard engineering and science work at understanding the environment and the forces that the orbiter was subjected to and also narrowing down the part of the geography on the orbiter where the assault seems to have taken place. 
          The board this week spent many hours testing, proposing and discarding scenarios. The purpose of these hours was not necessarily to find the scenario that caused the orbiter to fail -- we're not smart enough to do that yet -- but we did want to determine what tests would be necessary in order to either prove or disprove a scenario. 
          Let me throw some some facts and figures here. As of close of business last night [Monday, 11 March], we had collected 28,286 pieces total that are at Kennedy. We collected thousands more than that. Now, when you see pictures of the grid on the floor, that represents only 1,038 pieces of the 25,000. Because you got to remember that we are laying the orbiter out in two dimensions, not three dimensions, upside down. So, what we're interested is the bottom surface. So, those are the 1,000 pieces that we have out there, the landing gear, the landing gear door, the tiles, elevons and things like that. All the rest of the pieces are catalogued and stored, and they're available for us to use for analysis. The 28,286 pieces represents 39,300 pounds [17 800 kg], it works out to something like 18 or 19 percent [of the orbiter weight]. Among the 1,038 pieces laid out in the grid, are 233 that are from the left wing which, of course, is what we're most interested in. 
          We’re working hard many, many hours a day, seven days a week for finding out what went wrong with this thing."

John Barry: "We have [found] what I would characterize as an interesting aspect on [the Space Shuttle] ascent. At 62 seconds into launch, we saw one of the larger transients we've seen on the solid rocket motor. It was well within parameters but, interestingly enough, the two largest ones we've seen on ascent both happen to be Columbia, both happen to be going on 39 degree inclinations, both have lightweight tanks. So we're trying to identify if there's any commonality there as an additional stress load on the left-hand side of the orbiter, because it was on the left solid rocket motor that had this input. Again, well within parameters, but just one more as we follow the foam, as we follow the transient stresses on the orbiter that might have been able to contribute to one more issue as we trace down this detective story." 

About possible damage resulting from the "foam" that hit Columbia 80 second into its launch, one expert comments: "What we're really looking at is a complex failure of a complex system. One of the scenarios we're looking at is that it's possible that the foam striking a healthy orbiter would not have done enough damage to cause the loss of this orbiter. But it's possible that foam striking an unhealthy orbiter that had problems in it, either due to stresses on launch -- we talked about the wind sheer, too much heating and recoveries of too much heating and transition of the years before, aging of the orbiter like the RCC faults we see, or a whole number of other complex issues -- it's possible that you could do some damage to this orbiter that would have been as a result of a normal event which she could have survived at age 10, maybe she couldn't survive it at age 21."

"Was it foam or ice combination ?", asked a reporter, "Has NASA told you that in their belief that debris contained no ice?"  Harold Gehman answered: "I don't know that anybody's been that firm about it yet. I think that that's still an open question as to whether or not there might be ice in there or not." 

On the piece floating out of Columbia on the second day of the flight, John Barry comments: "It is not unusual, by the way, to have this happen. Ice has come off. We have had reports from astronauts that screws and washers, even parts of blankets when the orbiter doors are opened, for some things to fly out in there. The question now is, with all the seriousness and obviously with the mishap, was that something that was off the left wing that subsequently was damaged on ascent. So it obviously has a heightened awareness. And it wasn't cited by any of the astronauts reported by in communications. So we have to go back to the detective story of trying to figure out what it is on radar signatures that might help us find out what that is." 

A reporter asks how long will it take to know what went wrong: “I mean, he added, the space station is up there and the clock is ticking on getting the shuttles back in flight.” Harold Gehman answered: "But if we don't know anything, we can't say anything. So, we can't possibly work any harder than we are; we're already working seven days a week. Now, the energy level's still very high, both among the debris pickers, the debris analysts and this board, and I would not want to put any kind of time frame on it." 
          “So you think it'll be at least several more months?”, asked the reporter. “It'll be a lot of weeks”, answered the chariman of the CAIB. 

Voir les photos (techniques) accompagnant la présentation du CAIB

Steve Wallace, operations and management panel : I want to talk a little bit about the decision-making issue. We've heard an awful lot about E-mails and particularly as regards requests for DOD imaging assets; on again, off again. I think an important thing to say about the E-mail trail is that's certainly not the story. That's maybe a fraction of it. So while we read and organize and storyboard and try to figure out the whole story of what happened specifically and what it says sort of culturally in terms of communication practices and relationships among different parts of the organization, we're heavily involved in witness interviews. We're doing typically several every day and will be for some time. I would also like to say we are trying to be fair about all this and not view this with perfect 20/20 hindsight. Obviously there are a lot of people who, in retrospect, may have wished they had done something differently, whether or not it might have affected the ultimate outcome. We are trying to sort out in all these communications, E-mails, phone calls, whatever, what really constitutes normal banter, normal what-ifing versus something that's keep that in context.

General Deal Radar signature testing. I mentioned it's happening right now at the Air Force research lab at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. We're doing testing for two purposes. One is for that mysterious object that we talked about that was seen from Day 2 to Day 4 on orbit of the orbiter, to try to see what type of radar characteristics we may be able to get out of this testing if we could perhaps determine what it was that separated from the shuttle and then reentered a few days later.  [...] about this mysterious object. To remind you, this was discovered after the accident versus while it was on orbit. This was not something being tracked while it was on orbit. This was a result of about six days later of what we like to call the most laborious examination in space command history. If you think about the orbiter as it's going around the globe, there are 3180 different observations of the shuttle. Now, this was more keeping track of the shuttle versus tracking the shuttle, 'cause that's not the mission; we're not tasked to do that in space command. We do track for it and we do de-conflict it with any known objects in space, but they weren't doing this fine-tooth examination while it was on orbit. So I just want to make that point that this was after the accident.