GLENN MAHONE, NASA ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS: Good morning, and welcome to NASA headquarters for this briefing on the space shuttle Columbia accident. I'm Glenn Mahone, assistant administrator for public affairs.

Before we began, I want to take a moment to go over the guidelines of today's press conference. When you get the mike, please state your name and affiliation. We'll take questions from here at headquarters first, and then we'll go around to the NASA centers and hear from reporters there.

And with that, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce Bill Readdy, administrator of space flight, and Michael Kostelnik, deputy associate administrator for the space shuttle and International Space Station programs. Because we're a little busy today, after they do their opening comments and after we start here at headquarters, Doc Mirelson, the NASA news chief, will stand here and will actually take your questions for Mr. Readdy and Mr. Kostelnik, and then he will go around to the centers.

And with that, Mr. Readdy?

READDY: Good morning. It's been a little over 48 hours since Columbia did not land at the Kennedy Space Center. We all grieve along with the families for their loss and for the loss of the valiant crew of the space shuttle Columbia.

Details are sketchy at this point, as you know, but we're rapidly starting to fill in some of the elements in the time line. We're leaving no stone unturned, following every single lead that we possibly can find in order to get to the bottom of this, identify the root cause, fix it and return to flying safely again.

To this end, we have a mishap investigation team that's already on site and headquartered at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana; and external independent Columbia accident investigation board, chaired by Admiral Hal Gehman, on site also at Barksdale Air Force Base.

We urge anyone--NASA, contractor, member of the pubic--anyone who has any information, any documentation, to turn it over to either the mishap investigation team, the Columbia accident investigation board, which is independent and external to us, the NASA safety reporting system, which is confidential, or the inspector general.

I want to emphasize the point that we want to get every last shred of evidence, whether it be documentation, whether it be witness statements, whether it be physical evidence that may have fallen to the ground, and put that into the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that we will start to assemble so that we can identify the root cause.

I would also urge members of the public, as they find debris, to alert the first responder, members of the law enforcement community, or to call the various hotlines around, so that we can go collect the evidence and make that a part of our investigation.

Please, please do not disturb it, touch it. Some of those materials may be sharp, some of them are made out of exotic metals, some of the materials might actually still be toxic. Some of the propellants that we use are.

But at this point, we have no evidence at all that materials that fell would be hazardous from a radioactivity standpoint.

General Mike Kostelnik, to my left, is the deputy associate administrator for International Space Station and space shuttle, and has just concluded his daily headquarters contingency action team briefing.

As you may know, we are constantly updating the body of knowledge that we have. And as we acquire new knowledge, we will brief that to you. This is our first attempt to do that here from headquarters, and we intend to do this daily at 11:30 Eastern time. And we will have another briefing emanating from the Johnson Space Center at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time, so that we can continue to keep you updated on the status.

And as I said, General Mike Kostelnik will get into the details of what we've learned from this morning's teleconference, which includes all the field teams that are deployed, as well as our other field centers.

I started with the families, and that Saturday morning when I had a chance to visit with them and be with them when the president of the United States called to share his thoughts and prayers with them. They have issued a statement which we will make available to you, but with your indulgence I'd like to read that now.

READDY: A statement from the families of Columbia: "On January 16 we saw our loved ones launch into a brilliant cloud-free sky. Their hearts were full of enthusiasm, pride in country, faith in their God and a willingness to accept the risks in pursuit of knowledge, knowledge that might improve the quality of life for all mankind.

"Columbia's 16-day mission of scientific discovery, which was a great success, was cut short by mere minutes. Yet, it will live on forever in our memories.

"We want to thank the NASA family and people from around the world for their incredible outpouring of love and support. And although we grieve deeply, as do the families of Apollo 1 and Challenger before us, the bold exploration of space must go on.

"Once the root cause of this tragedy is found and corrected, the legacy of Columbia must carry on for the benefit of our children and yours."

At this point I'd like to turn the briefing over to General Mike Kostelnik, who will bring you up to date.

KOSTELNIK: Well, thanks, Mr. Readdy.

And good morning, everyone.

There's been a lot of activity behind the scene, much of which you have seen and much of which you have not. I'd like to kind of bring you up to speed on some of the behind the scenes activity that's been ongoing, and then lay out for you a process by how we will be forthcoming in providing you as much data and as much factual information as we know when we know it.

And as Mr. Readdy mentioned, we're planning on two briefings. One centered here in Washington covering an agency perspective and a longer range view on the issues of how they will relate to the overall programs.

Because recall, in this, not only do we have a shuttle effort, but this year having combined the shuttle with the International Space Station, we also have astronauts on orbit that are part of our operation and part of our mission concern as well. So it's a very complex operation in human space flight area.

I would like to start by saying, our focus is painfully clear. NASA is not really about the things you think it is, it really isn't about the vehicles or the rocket ships or a lot of the ground infrastructures. It's all about the people who fly and fix and maintain and design these operating vehicles. And I can tell you, being fairly new to NASA, that I see throughout this infrastructure a total dedication to the people and to the mission of this agency.

So in this I will ask you to recall and to realize that our primary focus right now is on the families, much of which has been talked about. We are certainly supporting them at the Johnson Space Center as we speak. And one of our primary responsibilities out in the field--and I know there's been many questions and some reporting (inaudible)--we are trying to recover the remains of these national heroes and get them back to their families as soon as possible. So much of our activity in the field as we speak is oriented towards this effect, and I will give you some more information on that briefly.

But I'd like to start back to the entry of our current administrator into NASA. Having come from a DOD background, having worked a lot around high-risk, high-tech, stressful mission, Mr. O'Keefe had many concerns about the safety and the activities associated with human space flight. One of the first activities he did was to ask to see the contingency plans, obviously being familiar with the Challenger history and the early days of the space program, wanted to see precisely where the agency was in terms of contingency planning.

Not only was there a contingency plan based on our experience with Challenger and how we handled that, either successfully or unsuccessfully, he took that contingency action plan and vetted it with the armed forces in the area of nuclear safety and nuclear contingency, which is one of the most stressful side in the Department of Defense, to benchmark our own contingency action plans against the naval nuclear action plans for contingencies in that regard.

The best of those benchmarking products were then incorporated into the current contingency action plan that we have and are operating on today. And I will lay out for you some of that infrastructure and how you will see shortly the benefits of that planning.

The most recent copy of that was signed on the 10th of January of this year. That was the complete addition of incorporating the International Space Station into our consideration, into our planning. So not only did we capitalize on our experience with the Challenger program, we incorporated the lessons learned from Challenger into potential contingencies that we could have on the International Space Station.

So what I'm offering to you is, one, NASA has a people focus; two, it is very concerned with the safety not only for those that go in space, but those that launch and work around the vehicles that orient to that. And I've been very impressed from the individuals in the approach and the products that I have seen to date.

Now, to point of the contingency plan. There is in this headquarters a Headquarters Contingency Action Team. It is a coordinating body working throughout the infrastructure to handle just such emergencies as we are experiencing now. It is normally not in place, but assembled quickly when a disaster happens.

This is a unique disaster that is not comparable. And it really would have few case studies that one could benefit, given the long flight path we have, the large amount of material, the issue of hazardous materials with fuels and propellants that we carry on--the wide dispersion. There are few things to compare with.

I am proud to say, as an American, that there is extremely close cooperation with a wide variety of federal, state and local officials, all who are pulling together as one team to accomplish this tough job.

Part of the HCAT, if you'll accept this acronym for the Headquarters Contingency Action Team, part of our responsibility here in Washington behind the scenes is very close cooperation. Obviously, you'll see--and you've seen that Mr. O'Keefe is over talking to the president, as we speak--very close cooperation with the White House and the supporting staff, very close cooperation with the Hill, very close cooperation with national federal agencies that can help in this regard, and are helping--FEMA, the FBI.

In fact, recently you saw yesterday the National Guard has been called out, thanks to the generous support of the governors of both of the states of Texas and Louisiana have been forthcoming with whatever needs are available. So there has been a lot of cooperation that is required.

That activity is ongoing here. And is working very closely with Mr. Dittemore and his team down at the Johnson Space Center. And you've been getting the reports from the Mission Response Team headed by Ms. Linda Ham , who works for Ron Dittemore. And Ron Dittemore will continue in the afternoons giving you the latest factual information as we have it of where we are in the actual investigation.

There are other teams I know that have been introduced. And I want to be very specific about this concept of how this accident is going to be investigated, explored and presented not only within the agency, but with out.

As Mr. Readdy pointed out, from the lessons of Challenger, we determine (inaudible) we would need a standing, independent team to take an independent look at this accident investigation.

That team has been assembled. Admiral Gehman, who has very unique experiences in the military, but other members of the team are very senior officials representing the Department of Defense and others, trained in accident investigation at some point in their past. And this team will have responsibility, unencumbered but fully supported by NASA, to explore the cause and ultimately help us find a fix for this problem.

That team, as pointed out, was in place yesterday at Barksdale Air Force Base. And in the area across Texas and Louisiana we are being supported by both of the states completely, by state and local law enforcement. We have a headquarters with our initial NASA team. This is a team that is chaired by Dave Whittle. It includes emergency response teams from across NASA dealing with the materials, dealing with recovery, securing the site. It provides us our first on-the-ground capability to deal with what is a very complex problem. That team is headquartered out of Barksdale and in the process of deployment.

We are increasing augmenting these teams. Yesterday we had about 100 NASA people, NASA support people on the ground on the site. Today we're augmenting with another 55 or 60. We'll continue to augment with those resources, both people and IT support, to provide the on-scene capability necessary to augment the existing federal and state support that we're already getting.

I think you know a lot of this activity is centered around the area of Lufkin, Texas, and Nacogdoches. That is a significant part of the debris field, but it is scattered across the states, covering a wide range and depth of area. We're still trying to control, identify, find and beginning now to collect these products. We're focusing on trying early on to recover the human remains. That's been a big part of our operations. We have a second group centered in the area of Lufkin.

Our senior NASA management official on site in charge of coordinating with all the activities and all the agencies is the deputy director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, is Mr. Dave King. He is running a small operation augmented by representatives from Johnson, from the astronaut corps.

Recall what I said about this being about people. Our first concern is to take care of this responsibility. And obviously the astronauts are a lead part of this activity. Jim Wetherbee is there augmenting Mr. King and participating with the FBI groups that are activly trying to take care of this responsibility as we speak.

It turns out that the debris field is quite large and still really being determined. Today we find there's more things further west than we anticipated. We're establishing a second NASA command post in the area of Carswell Air Force Base to facilitate those things nearer the Fort Worth area.

Ultimately, the pieces that we recover from the field, the parts of the orbiter, will ultimately go to either our collection site at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana or a second collection site now at Carswell Air Force Base in Texas, in Forth Worth.

We will then over time, as the material is collected, we will make a decision in the near term.

We're discussing these options now as to where the material will be taken for reassembly as determined necessary by the Accident Board or the engineers. And those will be announced at a later time. Those are in discussion as we speak, and no decision where that material will ultimately go.

To the specific teams down at Johnson, under the program office, the Mission Response Team, these are the engineers, this is the shuttle program proper. They are busily working behind the scene conducting the engineering analysis, preserving the data as called for from the contingency action plan. Those activities are undergoing as we speak.

And each day at our 16:30 or 4:30 Eastern time from the Johnson Space Center, Mr. Dittemore will give you the facts as we know them each day. And that will be our primary focus for our output on the technical issues.

Shortly we'll open up for questions and we will deal with some of those as we know the facts here. But the questions that need to be answered, we will relay those and mostly the technical updates on the actual accident will come to you from the 16:30 session.

The mission response team has the program office, all of the experts they're working at Johnson, and those experts will augment the two teams that we have out in the field. First the internal team, this is the initial mission investigation team handled by Mr. Whittle. They headquartered out of Barksdale. Those teams are rapidly deploying to the field sites in Lufkin, and further west supported by the other agencies that are supporting us in the area with FEMA, with EPA, with the FBI, the local and state law enforcements and now augmented by the National Guard.

This team will be responsible for locating, preserving, and ultimately tagging the physical evidence from the crash site. And these will be the responsibilities of the external investigation activity, now the Columbia Accident Investigation Team under Admiral Gehman to determine the ultimate disposition and the analysis that they want to conduct the operation.

So the MIT, the mission--the mishap investigation team is a NASA team with NASA personnel and contract support as necessary. They will be responding and working directly to the guidance and direction from the external team. And ultimately, the ultimate analysis will be determined through NASA experts for the team at their request, and the independent team will provide their assessment and their conclusion at the end of the activity.

We have a lot of activity ongoing today. There is, again, the focus on recovery of the human remains mostly in the Lufkin area, mostly with the FBI and EPA teams in concert with the NASA representatives.

These will be augmented in terms of protecting the physical sites for material as located by the Texas National Guard. We expect that number could be as high ultimately as about 500 individuals over the next day, and the NASA footprint today and tomorrow will ultimately grow to about 150 or so individuals.

It'll be our plan then, as Mr. Readdy pointed out, to have two press conference with you, one here every morning. The HCAT team that I chair upstairs will be getting the latest information we have overnight from the ongoing analysis. We will update you with any significant changes that have happened from the night before.

We're receptive to your questions or needs for information in the local area, for physical products or explanations on the shuttle or the impacts to the International Space Station.

Here in the morning session we will try to focus on the bigger scheme, the activities that are happening out in the field, as best we can tell, the coordination with the agencies that are facilitating us downstream.

And also this would be a good forum, if there are questions around the long-term impacts--what does this mean for the rest of the shuttle fleet, what does this mean for the future of human space flight, what are the impacts to the International Space Station--as the program executive officer for both of those programs, we feel very comfortable that we would be the right ones to address those issues with you.

And although we're still now in the very early stages of thinking about how to react and how to deal with this situation, the good news is, as has already been reported, for the crew we have on orbit and the International Space Station as an engineering assembly, we are OK for the near term. We have sufficient propellant. We have sufficient supplies. We have sufficient life support capability to support the International Space Station without the help of the space shuttle for several months; in fact, up until the May or June time period.

And recall that it is the International Space Station. We have partners, 16 partners around the world with assets that could be brought to bear if we need help.

So although the International Space Station is not a near-term issue, in the same way NASA plans for long-term contingencies, certainly you can trust that we are behind the scenes looking very hard, both within our shuttle work force and also in the International Space Station work force, to start thinking about if and when we find the fix and when we decide what the correction will be and when we get things ready to go, we will go back to try in a timely fashion to support the International Space Station. All those things will happen. This will be the primary focal point for this longer-term view.

So as I've laid this out, we will be coordinating with the field activities. We will try to have the best and the latest on information as to where we are. You can get that through our local public affairs contacts here at headquarters, NASA.

We will cover the broad and offer perspectives as we know them on what we see our future and where we're trying to go on both the shuttle fleet that remains and the International Space Station. And then, each day in the afternoon we will cover as much as we know, the factual information that we understand as to how this accident happened.

Recall that Mr. Dittemore has asked for patience. I would do the same. The shuttle infrastructure is a very complex one. There are a lot of hints. There are a lot of ideas as to what has really happened. It would be speculative to make a judgment now, but there are a lot of clues. And we are working with the best and brightest minds in this country to ferret that out. And you will be able to watch this process live play out over the next weeks and months as necessary to get to the decision. This will be probably the most open accident investigation on a magnitude of this scale that people have experienced in this time.

With that, I will set the stage that we are behind the scenes doing the things that are necessary. We are trying to meet our administrator's focus taking care of people first. The human space flight program is about people. We have some responsibilities to do that.

I think you know there will be a memorial at Johnson Space Center tomorrow. We may shift some of our briefings down there, some of our information to you around that.

I think you have noticed the emotion and the people that are close to this operation. This is a family thing. And this is a tragedy of epic proportions for the people that will make up the NASA community, and that is a very large, widespread community. And trust me, the experts behind the scene have done the right things to get this mission done in a very tough and challenging situation.

We are doing the right things now to find and we will fix the problem ultimately. And we're going to be incredibly open so you can see exactly what we're doing and why we're doing it.

With that, I'll leave it to Mr. Readdy or to any questions.

READDY: Well, thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me reiterate one more time, if you would wait for the microphone, I'll call on you. Please state your name and your affiliation and then ask the question. I'll take questions from headquarters first. I think we'll pretty much cover the first round in the group, and then move out to the Johnson Space Center.

Let me say one thing, follow-up what General Kostelnik said. The memorial ceremony will probably be a presidential tomorrow at approximately 1:00 p.m. at the Johnson Space Center, so we will not have our 11:30 press conference tomorrow. There will be a 4:30 press conference at Johnson tomorrow.

So let me start with this gentleman back here, I believe had his hand up here. Please go ahead, sir.

QUESTION: A question for both of you. Could you elaborate on the data processing aspects of the investigation analysis such as the geographic information system analysis of the debris and drilling down into the so called ratty data, and if you're going to build a database to help you analyze the evidence you're collecting?

KOSTELNIK: OK. Well, first of all, we have a database already in process. We're collecting all evidence that we can. Some of it's photographic, some of it's data from the computers in Mission Control.

As you know, as soon as we executed our contingency plan at 29 minutes after 9 on Saturday morning, we locked down all the data in the Mission Control center in Houston and at the other facilities, at Kennedy and the contractors as well.

So we'll be going through that. All the information that we have will be going into databases so that we can have rapid access to that and then correlate it.

Much of the information that we have comes from telemetry from the vehicle itself that is derived from relays through satellites, and also straight to the ground, and then it goes in this process to the Mission Control center.

What you may have heard in yesterday's briefing is apparently we may have some 30 or more seconds of data that was corrupted perhaps--not clean data, as they would call it, but corrupted. Similar to any accident investigation, we may be able to, after the fact, resynchronize the data and get something from it. So we'll certainly be doing that.

We're correlating that with photography that we have from the ground, with debris analyses based on the trajectory of the vehicle at the time and the likely mass and size of the pieces that were observed. And that's how we're focusing our ground search.

QUESTION: General, as a program manager and Mr. Readdy is an astronaut, give us your long-term perspective--I know you may not have benefit of time, General--but your overall perspective of the support for NASA budgetarily either from the administration or from Congress. Where have you found over time the pressure points and have you felt yourselves wanting more money but not being able to get it from the appropriators?

READDY: Well, let me start out with the NASA budget. I think it's going to be released today publicly on the web. That's the fiscal year '04 budget.

I'd like to back up, though, to decision made back through the summer as we were formulating our budget request. The administrator, with director of OMB Mr. Daniels, actually put forth a plan to amend our fiscal year '03 budget. That was signed by the president himself on November 13th. And what that did was adjust the NASA budget to include more money for upgrading the space shuttle, with the recognition that it would have to continue flying for longer, as part of our integrated space transportation plan, with a focus on reaping the scientific and research harvest of International Space Station.

READDY: So with that, we reprioritized within the NASA budget that was endorsed by the president and the administration back in November and sent to the Congress.

KOSTELNIK: I guess I would echo Bill's comments. In fact, you know, I joined NASA in May, right when we were in the process of restructuring the International Space Station and with this new administrator laying in the budgetary plans for what that would be.

And as Mr. Readdy pointed out, the budget amendment is a very comfortable margin that now includes sufficient funds to get the program down to meet his new vision of this integrated space transportation plan, but sufficient reserves to deal with the king of unknowns and contingencies that you end up getting in this program.

In fact, we briefed the NASA Advisory Committee in November, right about the same time that the budget amendment was released, and their view was similarly stated that they thought they were quite comfortable now with the budgetary resources that had been embedded to the program. This budgetary resources not only go to completing the assembly of the International Space Station, which still has some work to be done, but funding it throughout its life cycle.

Also, in my job title, notice that the shuttle and the International Space Station in this new transportation plan and in the administrator's approach to dealing with how we're going to manage these program were tied coherently together. So the space shuttle becomes the primary assembly support, because it's the only heavy lift vehicle that can take these large structures up to space and it's the only vehicle we have to bring things down from space, both of which, upmass and downmass, are required to do this. So fundamentally, I have been looking not only at the International Space Station and the programmatic issues associated with that, but the program issues associated with the space shuttle program, as well.

And I can tell you, I am quite comfortable with the posture that we found ourselves in for this vehicle and quite comfortable with the posture of our other vehicles despite what you may be reading about or hearing about from people in the press.

There are clearly some important investments that have been made in the area, not only of upgrades but service life extensions, as we're talking about the program now. There are ongoing upgrades to all the vehicles as we speak, and there have been throughout the time period that we've been flying. In fact, if you looked at the cockpit photos today and look at the early ones, they're not very similar to what we have done. So we have a long track record of making upgrades.

In fact, last year, after the ASAP report, we conducted a study called 20/20, which is looking at all the kind of things conceivably one could in some way to prioritize those. And this was before we had a true vision as to what the needs for the shuttle would be. Because to understand what type of things you should be doing, you have to have a sense for what's the mission, how long you're going to fly it, or some business decisions ultimately on paybacks and things. This is a very complex environment. And we were still working our way through these things, through the budget process. But with the administrator's introduction of the FY amendment to the president's budget, we offered a clear and unambiguous vision for the space transportation plan.

It called for continuing to fly the space shuttle for the long term to support the International Space Station. It called for development of a new transportation vehicle with a slightly different mission for (inaudible) return for the International Space Station, and later transport in the out-years when perhaps we might determine that the shuttle might become unsafe to fly.

Within that, and once that plan was laid out, we started this year a new initiative which was funded in and proposed in the FY' 03 amended budget, and when our '04 presentation is presented, is contained in there, a coherent plan to move ahead and to do those things that ultimately that would be required, not only to improve or to maintain safety, as the mission might be, but to improve, maintain ability to improve sustainability for the longer term, in some cases to improve performance as dictated by the oncoming mission.

But I can tell you as a matter of fact that the issue of safety in NASA has always been number one. It is the top goal in the shuttle program: fly safe, meet the mission, improve the orbiter. And I can guarantee you, and you'll get the same sense from Mr. Dittemore, that is precisely what (inaudible) team has been doing for more than 20 years. And in our posture today, if there was something that anybody in this effort--and this effort, you know, contains almost all of NASA--if there was one person internal to NASA that thought we were doing something unsafe, we would certainly not do that.

In the area of the capabilities and the performance for this aircraft, we launched this aircraft into space thinking it was fully safe and counting on that, and that's the things that we always do.

But, for the long term, it's clear this fleet is going to take some investment. We understand that. It's embedded into the plan. It's embedded into the budget. And as you will see, investments were put in, and in fact we were supposed to check off a new concept called the service life extension summit, which would deal proactively with not only the privatization of which of those important things to do, but the time period in when those should be laid in.

So we were in the process of creating the long-term visions starting with a baseline from 20/20, taking that complete list of all the kind of things one could do, but not necessarily of the things one should do, and incorporate the most important things in the near term.

Safety has always been a separate carve-out. Safety in this system has not been driven by investments or funds, trust me.

READDY: Thank you. Let me make two notes on budget before I come down to Kathy down here. The budget documents will be available right outside the auditorium at 3 p.m., and the press conference we had scheduled at 3 p.m. about the budget has been postponed, and it will be probably rescheduled sometime after the memorial ceremonies. So the budget documents will be available at 3 p.m., right outside the front door.

Kathy?

QUESTION: General, there's a memo that surfaced this morning that goes to your statements about concern about the astronauts and the people.

It suggests that somebody in your operation knew about extensive tile damage, wrote a memo two days before the accident. And my question is, can you give us a chronology of how that memo was handled and how high in the organization did it reach?

KOSTELNIK: That's actually the first I have heard of that memo.

Throughout the process leading up, once the launch occurs, the team looks at every piece of data every day that the vehicle is on orbit. And this is the mission evaluation team there in mission evaluation room. And every day, every single thing, every scrap of evidence, every piece of information is analyzed by the best and brightest technical engineers around this system.

And has been previously reported, there was debris that was noticed from a long-range camera and that analysis was complete. And throughout the system, there were products that were produced--these are a matter of record and have been provided. If you don't already have some, we can provide those to you from the Johnson Space Center. And it shows you clearly and unambiguously what the engineers were thinking.

They noticed on the day after launch there was some debris coming off the external tank. We had seen this in past launches. This is not a new phenomena as been previously reported.

In the case, although there has been some evidence of minor tile damage, there has not been any other case what we would call out of family of a major incident resulting from this material. The best and brightest engineers we have who helped design and build this system looked carefully at all the analysis and the information we had at this time and made a determination this was not a safety-of-flight issue. They did feel there could have been some damage to the heat protection system, you know, the RCC or the tiles, but they did not consider this was a safety of flight.

Those words were the only words that anybody in the program management chain ever saw. This new report is a new one to me. If we can get the details on it, we'll run it to ground and I will have the program this afternoon present what we know.

But as far as I am aware, throughout the senior leadership chain and the program management chain, the factual reports from this mission evaluation room, those are the definitive documents that show what we were thinking and what we knew at the time.

And the bottom line from the program is, we saw an anomaly on flight. We thought it was in-family in terms of the damage that it would produce. We thought we could get some minor structural, perhaps, damage from that. We did not feel it would be sufficient to be a safety-of-flight issue.

QUESTION: Along the same lines, do you know how many tiles it would take before the shuttle would suffer a catastrophic loss? And is NASA modeling exactly that: lose two, three, four, five, six tiles under certain dynamic conditions, then you get a catastrophic loss?

READDY: As you know, the shuttle flies in an extremely demanding environment returning from orbit, with temperatures in some places that get 2,500 to 3,000 degrees during reentry.

Before the shuttle Columbia flew the first time in 1981, tremendous work was done over the previous decade in the design and development of the thermal protection system, the tiles, if you will. NASA's done extensive analysis on loss of tile, and, in fact, over time improved the tiles so it would be more damage-tolerant.

Thus far in our history, every single time the shuttle returns, we do an analysis of tile damage right there on the runway, as soon as we stop. Then we go into tile replacement or tile repair to prep for the next mission, which typically takes three to four months.

Regarding the debris hit, we did see that on the film. We saw it at about 80 seconds. We did photometric analysis of the trajectory, and on the 12th day of the mission the mission evaluation was that, "these thermal analyses indicate possible localized structural damage, but no burn-through and no safety-of-flight issue," and I quote.

We have extensive thermal modeling, structural modeling of the vehicle, and in some places it may be a small number of tile, in other places we actually replace tile with quartz blankets because the thermal environment was so benign; some places like the reinforced carbon-carbon. That gray material that you see in the nose and the leading edges of the orbiter, that has to take much higher temperatures.

But we have analyzed all of those as part of the accident investigation. We will go back and we'll review those data and we'll make sure that we understand the situation.

But during the flight, we did assess it and came to the conclusion that, whereas there may be localized structural damage or a turnaround issue for the next flight, that it was no safety-of-flight issue.

QUESTION: During Columbia's first flight in 1981, I believe that NASA requested that the DOD use its reconnaissance satellites to take a look at possible tile damage.

Has that request been repeated since then, and was there ever a thought of maybe having a program to have that regularly done when the shuttle was flying?

READDY: Yes. In fact, during STS-1, we did ask for ground cameras, telescopes, if you will, and also other support to look at the Columbia.

That is available to us, and, in fact, I think Ron Dittemore mentioned yesterday, during STS-95 there was evidence during launch of the door to the drag chute came dislodged and fell off and we saw that in our film review, we requested support from the Department of Defense, and they provided us with images.

We did assess whether we should request assistance in this particular instance, as well. Based on our previous experience, and the engineering analyses, we didn't feel that the results would be conclusive one way or another, and so we elected not to request them.

QUESTION: For General Kostelnik, could you give us a little bit more detail on what you have done to date and what you're doing in the weeks ahead to support the space station, what milestones you may have identified?

KOSTELNIK: Well, actually, the International Space Station is pretty solid right now. Obviously, it's going be some demands on the crew because we're going to have to extend their time on orbit.

I think you know Progress was launched successfully. It should dock, I believe, tomorrow, and that will provide the resupply that they need. So in terms of food and consumables and life support, sufficient on the station.

Obviously, the engineering assembly will quit since we're not going to be taking up things for a while. But the operation and the architecture that we have on orbit now is sustainable. It's not really an issue.

The other issue that gets to be a consideration is reboosting. I think you all know that at the altitude of roughly 250 miles that the station is there are sufficient air molecules and a large structure does have drag and it's slowly decaying, so we do have the responsibilities to reboost the station at various periods. This can be done with Progress or Soyuz-type vehicles or the space shuttle.

It turns out we're in good shape with our altitude and with the decay rate. We should not require a reboost during this calendar year.

So actually the station is in good shape. We have a Soyuz vehicle on board. There is already a planned Soyuz launch from Baikonur in April, will be the normal exchange. So we'll have a good crew-return vehicle on orbit, so should we have to take people off the station for some reason, that crew, we do have that opportunity.

So for the next month, until at least the late-May/early-June time frame, there really aren't issues on sustainability or supportability of the International Space Station.

The real issues around the station are when will we find the problem, when we will we get it fixed, when will we return to flight, what will be the manifest capability with the vehicles that we have. What would be the prudent assembly to First U.S. Core complete and then accommodate the other international modules.

I think you all know that on the original manifest plan we had envisioned seven launches of the space station fleet between now and 19 of February, when we had hoped to complete the U.S. Core configuration.

That flight manifest required three flights of the 105 vehicle, three flights of the 104 vehicle, and one flight of the Columbia, which was taking some resupply on a small part, I believe the S-5 part, on orbit in January of next year.

So clearly without Columbia that is a loss in terms of the manifest capability that will need to be dealt with.

Of course, I think you know we typically have one vehicle down in the OMM being refurbished and repaired. And it's a very, I think, important point to make on this subject because I know there's a lot of issues now about aging and what these kind of things mean in service life. And it's an important part, but it's not always intuitive to real-life examples the ordinary citizen might think about.

You know, an orbiter that's 20 years old that has just been through this 18 months program to refurbish, repair, refix, upgrade and modernize is not the same vehicle that went in and is clearly not something that's 20 years old. And I know it has been previously reported, 102 just recently came out of this process and was in that sense a very new vehicle. In fact, this was only the second flight since it had completed that refurbishment.

So in this regard, there is a lot of capability in these vehicles, irrespective of their age and that is precisely why the new proposed integration space transportation plan proposes, you know, capitalizing on the capabilities of this fleet.

So there will be many issues to be concerned with. And although our primary focus is just what I said, we're taking care of the people, responsibilities associated with this incident, we're trying to understand and be prudent and be good community leaders and neighbors with the environmental considerations impacting Central and Eastern Louisiana, we're trying to understand what this problem is, but at the same time, there are different parts of my program and different parts of NASA that are already looking at the long term for the International Space Station and how we will cope with this tragedy and what will be our plan ahead and also looking very aggressively at the remaining shuttle fleet, what we will need to do in light of this recent event.

READDY: Let me just piggyback on what General Kostelnik said, in terms of focusing back on the crew.

Immediately after we found out about Columbia, we did send some word up to the crew, communicated with them, let them know what the situation was. And, of course, they were obviously concerned for the families and sent their condolences. And, obviously, they also mourn the loss of the crew, friends and colleagues.

Yesterday afternoon, the administrator and I talked to the Expedition 6 crew, Captain Bowersox and Dr. Don Pettit and Nikolai Budarin, and their emphasis was on finding what the cause was, fixing it and getting back to flying. They committed themselves to stay up there for however long we needed in order to get the job done.

We assured them that that was job one, is to get back to flying safely and to support them. And as General Kostelnik said, we have sufficient logistics to go through the early summer at this point.

QUESTION: I understand that Columbia was uniquely configured in certain ways, including the ability to support the Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. What modifications would be necessary to other orbiters so that it could perform that mission?

READDY: Columbia, in fact, did the most recent servicing mission. But the Hubble Space Telescope was actually launched by the Discovery and has been serviced by other orbiters. So we have the capability to do servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope with the rest of the fleet. That's not an issue.

Of course, we just recently got back from servicing the telescope and we don't think that the future servicing mission is really time sensitive.

QUESTION: When the Challenger accident happened, it was three years of delays for the shuttle launch. Do you anticipate this investigation will go on for that long?

READDY: Well, let me assure you we're going to take however long it takes to get to the bottom of it, identify the root cause and fix it, and then get back to flying.

So, whether it takes three months or three years so be it. You know, our primary objective is to get back to flying safely.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) on the day 12, I believe, and then also the FRR material from the previous--after the previous incident of the foam insulation, which I believe was back in autumn of winter of last year. That would help us immensely.

My question is, after Challenger, the president, President Reagan, and then the Congress got on board with the idea of a replacement vehicle for Challenger, which came pretty quickly. Has the agency approached the president and/or Congress this time around to replace Columbia?

READDY: Well, first of all I assure you we'll work with Public Affairs to release whatever we can as soon as we can. So thank you for that.

With respect to the orbiter fleet, we have three high-performance vehicles remaining in the inventory, and with the existing flight rate, when the Discovery comes out of its major maintenance and we return to flight, we have sufficient orbiters to assemble, operate, maintain and conduct research on International Space Station.

So to my knowledge none of us have approached the administration with a request for a replacement for the Columbia.

QUESTION: Yes. I'm wondering were either of you gentlemen directly involved in any of the real-time analyses or discussions about the launch debris incident?

I'm just wondering whether this issue reached headquarters level and who was the top person that signed-off on not only the conclusion that the damage was believed to be minor but there was no need for a telescope of satellite imagery?

READDY: Well, I'll answer first and then turn it over to Mike for his comment.

Yes, in fact, we do see the mission evaluation room summaries every single day. We're involved in the mission management team telecons, and so all those issues, as they're known, are bubbled up to the headquarters. We typically try and get technical resolution at the lowest possible level, at the most knowledgeable person, and if it means that we have to expand that to a broader community to get the best expert we can on the planet we'll do that.

KOSTELNIK: That's exactly right. I see the same products and our staff is routinely participating in those mission evaluation room results, providing headquarters analysis in terms of perspectives on top.

KOSTELNIK: And throughout this kind of thing, as I've laid out, we're very aware of the anomaly observed and the data and the analysis that was ongoing. We trust implicitly Ralph Roe, the chief engineer for the orbiter, and Ron Dittemore's program peoples to make these calls.

But certainly this information was presented and reviewed by the headquarters. And we were in complete concurrence with not only their assessment, but their plan ahead.

QUESTION: First, if I could piggyback on the request for data, if you could add the in-flight anomaly list going back to STS-1 for us, too. I believe that's electronic. If we can get that as part of your openness.

And that leads to the question, as part of your openness, are you prepared to announce full whistleblower status for anyone in the agency or in the contracting world who has issues and problems going to the decision-making process involving the clearing of the foam issue and the hit? And are you looking into the decision-making process as an issue, sort of like Challenger looked into overall management problems of decision-making?

READDY: Well, first of all, let me assure you that we will make every attempt to gather every scrap of evidence that we can.

I'm really not qualified to comment on the whistleblower act or any of that, and so I won't. But I assure you we'll get our legal department out and have them assess that.

As I said earlier in my opening remarks, whether it's the mishap investigation team, whether it's the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which is external and independent from NASA, whether it's the NASA safety reporting system, which is confidential, or the IG, we fully expect people to come forward with whatever information they have. And I think we have confidential sources there, not only with the inspector general's office, but also with the NASA safety reporting system.

So I think there are ample opportunities for people to come forward with whatever information they may have.

With respect to the decision-making process, I keep the Rogers Commission Report in my office, and the summary, as close to me at all times. We reviewed, as soon as the new administrator, Mr. O'Keefe, came on board, everything we did in the certification of flight readiness process to be consistent with the Rogers Commission Report.

The flight readiness reviews and the products that are generated that support those reviews are all archived at this point. Those proceedings were taped as a matter of record. And so, I'm sure that the decision-making process and all the documentation supporting that will be reviewed by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

QUESTION: For Mr. Readdy, I do understand that safety is your highest priority. But perhaps you can give us some insight on why people were remove from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel after issuing a report last year critical of shuttle safety?

READDY: First of all, let me say that the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel was a panel that was put in place by the Congress following the Apollo 1 fire. And since that time, we have continued to rely on them on outside expert advice. They're an independent panel. It's not populated with NASA people. They provide us with expert advice. And we value the reports that they generate.

In fact, I have the annual report for 2001 in front of me right now. Dr. Blomberg, I guess, you may be referring to, was the chair of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. He served with distinction and was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal for his 15 years of distinguished service.

I consider him a friend and a valued adviser. But, quite frankly, the inspector general ruled in 1997 that we had panel members whose expertise maybe was not germane to the new modern systems that we were operating. And following that, in 2001, we also had an independent review which suggested that we needed to infuse the panel with new expertise.

To that end, the terms were limited to six years, and Dr. Blomberg had served three years as a consultant and two six-year terms, including four as the chairman, and we valued his expertise and his leadership of that panel. And as a result the administrator, Sean O'Keefe, presented him with the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, which is NASA's highest award.

QUESTION: Could you explain why Dave King was selected to be part of the team from Marshall down there, and what his responsibility in the team he's involved with?

KOSTELNIK: Yes, I'll be happy to. Obviously Mr. Readdy is in charge of all the human space flight centers, and when you have accidents like this there are a lot of new roles and missions that arise up.

Dave King was selected to be the deputy center director this past year at Marshall because of his leadership and management talents that were demonstrated adequately at Kennedy, and we needed a senior NASA-level manager on-site because of the large impact area, the relationships between the various federal agencies, as well as local and state agencies that would require, we needed a senior NASA executive who could represent Mr. Readdy and the administrator at the on-site area to make sure that we did our job there as expeditiously and effectively and as safely as possible.

And, in fact, on this note we are continuing to augment this team with representatives from across NASA. This is a one-NASA family. We take our talents from where they are located and put them where the job to be done. We have a lot of people who are in leadership or engineers who are in some other activity in their normal day-to-day job who are doing a different role today.

So Dave King was selected because we trust him, we needed a senior executive who could speak for the agency on the on-site and Dave is doing a great job working very closely with the National Guard, with FEMA, with the EPA, again, to focus on the most important thing for us trying to recover the human remains and get them dealt with appropriately.

QUESTION: This is for General Kostelnik.

General, you mentioned that the international partners had offered assistance. I was wondering if you had asked them, and if the Russians or ESA or anyone has decided to boost their participation in the International Space Station or given you any indication that that was the case in terms of Progress launches or the ESA's ATV role.

KOSTELNIK: No, it's really, you know, way too early for those kind of considerations. They are a part of a team, and there is a larger extended family dedicated to furthering the goals of science in space and human exploration of space. And the first things we did, as a courtesy to our international partners, because obviously the shuttle is a big part of the international station team, you know, we notified them worldwide early on of the tragedy as it was unfolding just so they would be aware.

We received, as one would expect, sympathies from across the country, and I would say we are continuing to get letters, e-mails, offers of help from a wide spectrum, not only in the United States, but across the globe, offering whatever help would be required.

It is very premature as to what other specific helps we might need on the International Space Station. The Progress launch that I mentioned was already scheduled. That was the normal launch.

We did take time over the weekend to look at the manifest on that particular vehicle, given that we would not have a shuttle in the short term, to ensure that we were having the right mix of material to support an extended stay of the crew. And, obviously, the Russians were very happy to accommodate that and would have made any adjustments to that Progress launch per our request.

But the international station program manager, Bill Gerstenmeier, in concert with RSI, the representatives in Russia, agreed that the manifest was appropriate and we launched the Progress on time.

Likewise the Soyuz vehicle that we'll launch in April is part of the normal plan. The Soyuz vehicles have a life expectancy on orbit of six months, so every six months we're launching Soyuz to replace the vehicles, they'll bring the old one back, which is still functional, and leave a fresh one for the crew.

We have not made our request for additional help because we are now in concert with the international partners through our multilateral coordination board to look at the impact, not only on assembly, but resupply, on the plans.

So you can suspect that over the next weeks and months there will be formal discussions with this team to determine what needs to be done to keep the International Space Station safe, healthy and still oriented toward our goal of a science-based city on orbit.

QUESTION: What sort of capabilities do the research centers have that could help in the investigation?

READDY: Well, first of all, Mike Kostelnik said this is a one-NASA effort.

We're going to use whatever laboratories that we have within the NASA, whatever expertise that we have. As you may know, Langley has expertise in the structural area and composite materials and things, and we'll certainly avail ourselves to that, as we will of all the NASA centers and contractor facilities and government laboratories.

KOSTELNIK: In fact, on that same subject, this morning the mishap response team is continuing to grow the small subgroups that are continuing to do the engineering analysis on the various subsets and issues. So we will be augmenting those teams at the request of Johnson and from any of the NASA centers that have particular capabilities or resources that are critical to understanding this particular analysis.

QUESTION: At this point does NASA/Langley fit into any of the investigation plans, or is it still too early?

READDY: You know, we're only 48 hours into this. I'm sure we've considered Langley because of the areas of expertise I just mentioned. I can't comment specifically on that, that might be a good question for the 4:30 briefing this afternoon.

QUESTION: I've heard that on the main tank you can sometimes get condensation because it contains very cold rocket fuel. Is there any possibility that what flew off was not foam but, in fact, ice, especially given the cold snap we had in mid-January?

READDY: That's a very good question, and the external tank that we have that has the supercooled propellants, liquid oxygen in the nose and liquid hydrogen in the main tank, that kind of familiar burnt orange color, is basically a thermos bottle to keep those propellants at their cryogenic temperatures. So the liquid oxygen, I think, is minus 270-some degrees, and the liquid hydrogen is minus 400. So it's a big thermos bottle.

And when we do get condensation and when we do have cold temperatures on top of the cold that's already resident in the tank itself--sometimes we do get frost; sometimes we do get ice--and to that end, we have an ice inspection team that is out there on the launch pad, and they are the only people, other than the crew and the technicians that are strapping the crew in, that are allowed anywhere near the vehicle once it's fueled. And, of course, it's only once it's fueled with those cryogenic materials that it actually starts to cool off.

We look at that very, very closely with cameras, with infrared sensors that the members of the team have, and we assure ourselves each and every time that we don't have any ice formation. If we do that's a constraint to launch and we would not launch. We had no such indication here on this last launch on STS-107.

QUESTION: Can you clarify whether or not there was a data recorder system on the shuttle? It was my understanding that there was not, but I'm hearing reports that parts of some sort of data recorder has been found.

READDY: The shuttle avionics system includes all kinds of computers. There are five computers that fly the space shuttle, and resident in the memories of those computers may very well be the information that you're talking about. But unlike commercial aircraft that have crash recorders, the space shuttle has telemetry of thousands of parameters that affect the flight and every subsystem of the vehicle that are sent via radio link to a satellite or directly to the ground into the mission control, and they are archive those. So, if you will, our black box is actually the computers in the ship itself or resident on the ground in the mission control center.

QUESTION: So, just to follow up, do (OFF-MIKE) the crash?

MAHONE: I think the question was could it sustain the crash if there was such a system on board?

READDY: Could the computers have survived the crash? We don't know at this point. We're certainly out there looking for the computers and all the other avionics equipment, because many of those things have--because they're now computerized, have memory resident in them. And so, that's what we're looking for. That's why we urge the public, anybody that finds any debris potentially from the shuttle, please contact the authorities, don't disturb it, and we'll make that part of the body of evidence. But we're looking very closely.

QUESTION: Thank you.

It's been reported that NASA would oppose a presidentially appointed independent review board to look at this crash, as with the Challenger disaster, and I wanted to see if that is correct and just get your--if you can elaborate on that?

READDY: Well, let me say that we learned a tremendous amount in the wake of Challenger, and directly as a result of the investigations that followed. To that end, NASA implemented those recommendations and one of them was to have a contingency action plan that called out explicitly the members of an external, independent board that would conduct the investigation to find the cause of the accident. So we executed that and the administrator contacted Admiral Gehman, who accepted the challenge to chair the accident investigation board.

QUESTION: We have seen photographs out of Israel that appear to show two cracks in the left wing of the shuttle in a picture that was taken while it was up on this last trip. Have you seen this? Are they significant? Are you looking into it? What's the deal?

READDY: Well, we'd urge whoever has any information to turn it over to the accident investigation team. I'm not aware of any of those pictures that you're referring to.

QUESTION: General, you'd mentioned that the ISS was brought into the NASA contingency plan when Administrator O'Keefe came on board. Does that contingency plan include abandoning the space station, and would you elaborate on that?

KOSTELNIK: No. The contingency plan really doesn't talk to specific actions to be taken. It argues for processes like we're living through; setting up the teams and relationships to help make those decisions. So the program office is always looking as a matter of safety for a lot of reasons. I know this issue came up earlier in the year when there was some press that perhaps Rosaviakosmos would not get the funding in Russia they needed to adequately support the progress and Soyuz activities. It turned out not to be the case. Their budgets were actually plused-up in a way, and we do have firm support from Russia. But it's a fair thing for the program to be considering all types of ongoing contingencies.

So in terms of what Bill Gerstenmaier is doing down in the program office, not only is he working a very tough an challenging engineering assembly, he is prudently planning for a lot of what-ifs. And this is another one that he probably does have a good sense in what he can do. In fact, very quickly, over the weekend we knew what our ability was to survive on-station with the crew and whether or not we would have to de-orbit.

But it goes back to what I said; space is about people in space for our part of the business, that is our first and primary concern. So we are always planning for contingencies. But the planning structure itself is what you would find in the regulation, and it just makes this process part of the formal thing.

Had we had some incident in space on the international space station, we would be right here today with the same type of people. There would be the same organization upstairs doing the same coordination with perhaps different people external. So that contingency really isn't a plan that doesn't list all the potentials but sets the stage and responsibilities for how one would deal with it. At the program office there is always contingency planning for alternative futures.

QUESTION: I'm just wondering if Israel's participating at all in the search and recovery, especially given the Israeli expertise in recovering and identifying human remains?

READDY: We've had reports that the Israeli NTSB has offered their assistance, and we're certainly evaluating that at this point.

QUESTION: It's been asked before but I don't think it's been answered. Can you give any estimate on the size of the piece of foam that broke off and its mass, and also the velocity of the shuttle at 80 seconds when that occurred?

READDY: I'm sure we can get you those data, but--let's see...

KOSTELNIK: I think that question came up, and I think we can have the engineering guys in the 16:30 meeting address that specifically. The question came up yesterday.

READDY: Let's see, it says missing over an area of approximately 7 inches by 30 inches.

QUESTION: About the question of, are you going to create a computer model of the descent of the shuttle to help you analyze the elevon characteristics and other flight characteristics, and potentially pinpoint the cause of the crash? And what software or contractor are you going to have to do this?

READDY: We already have computer models of the trajectory. We use that in the control room each and every flight. We also use them to support engineering analyses for flight planning, mission planning. So those already exist. Quite frankly, I don't know who the contractor is that supplied those graphic products and mission analysis computer programs, but we already have those available.

QUESTION: This was a real science-heavy mission, and that science is lost. The shuttle is one way to get science up into orbit, and it takes years for these projects to get going. What would you say to folks who are wondering about what kind of impact this holds for the shuttles, and then when they get that going, they're going to have to work on construction. Where's the science going to go and how is that going to work?

READDY: Well, the focus has been on the research. Once we get the international space station built, the focus is on the research and the scientific harvest from that orbiting laboratory.

The space shuttle, obviously, flies experiments up and down, and this particular flight, of course, was not destined for station at all. It was a dedicated research mission for 16 days. Fortunately, with the down link--the satellite down link that we have from the orbiter, we were able to get tremendous data from the mission in real-time, which is really very valuable; to work collaboratively with the researchers on the ground during the mission to get them their scientific data real-time.

So there will be, I think, still a tremendous science harvest from this mission, which I think is very fitting, that this crew provided that to the body of knowledge.

With respect to the international space station, the shuttle is, of course, the primary means of getting science racks to and from the MPLM, or multi purpose logistics module, which is what we use to get racks up there. But we also are developing, in partnership with the European Space Agency, the autonomous transfer vehicle, ATV, which is being developed by them. It has a similar capability to the MPLM, that logistics module, to be able to transport racks to the international space station.

I think the first flight of that was planned for September or October of--we'll get the exact data, but some time in the next year or so was planned to be the first flight of ATV. So that would provide us yet another redundant leg to get science up there so that we could continue our operations.

QUESTION: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm starting to detect some inconsistencies in what you all are saying about when you decided that the debris was not a safety issue. I think yesterday Mr. Dittemore said at the third day, and then today something was said about a briefing on the 12th day. When did you actually--how many times did this come up during the flight? How serious was the discussion? And when did you actually sign-off for the last time before reentry on saying it was OK?

READDY: Well, it was observed on launch. And in the analysis that was done in the ensuing days, they looked at the trajectory of the debris and the likely mass of it and the area that might possibly be affected. And I guess I'd have to go back and say that that is one of the things that we're looking at, and everybody seems to have leaped to the conclusion that that was the cause, and I'm not sure that we're ready to say that. In accident-incident investigation you start out by ruling out things rather ruling them in.

And although that may, in fact, wind up being the cause--it may certainly be the leading candidate right now--we have to go through all the evidence and then rule things out very methodically in order to arrive at the cause. But, in fact, on the 12th day mission report--that's the one I quoted to you that talked about the thermal analysis--indicated localized structural damage but no burn-through and no safety flight issue, but it was assessed continuously during the flight by expert panels.

QUESTION: I wanted to follow up on that last question and see if at the 4:30 briefing you could give us a lot more detail about that engineering review. If you could tell us how you estimated the size of the piece of insulation that came off, the timetable in which the engineering panel met, and how many days it took and when the conclusion finally came, any dissension within the panel, and what options were considered as far as repairing tiles or reviewing tiles and whatever. I know some of that was discussed yesterday, but if we could get a very thorough timetable and a very complete report of what happened that would be very helpful.

READDY: I assure you we'll try and get you what information we have and General Kostelnik will work with the program office to see what materials we can prepare for the 4:30 briefing.

QUESTION: What is meant by "localized structural damage?" What structure; a tile, the internal structure of the wing, the landing gear door, a hinge--what structure?

READDY: Well, I think that's a better question to ask this afternoon of the expert panel. I'm reading from their report. And so, I couldn't give you any more detail than that.

The structure of the wing is made up primarily of aluminum and, of course, there are various subsystems that are in the wing and close thereto. But I really think that that's a detailed enough question--that's the reason why, in trying to get you the most information the soonest, we've elected to do two briefings each day; one from here, where we'll try to get you as much detail as we can; and then your follow-up opportunity is going to be at 4:30 in the afternoon with the detailed experts.

QUESTION: Everybody came back to work today here at Kennedy. Can you tell us exactly what they are doing? In other words, what's continuing on schedule? You've got an orbiter ready for supposedly a March mission. What are they doing? Is there anything that they have changed in terms of putting something more on a maintenance issue than a preparation issue? What exactly is going on here at the center?

READDY: Once again, we can get you more detail here at the 4:30 briefing, but just at the top level. Because the next vehicle in process, STS-114, was already stacked in the vertical assembly building, they won't be working on that vehicle, and we will not be rolling out on Wednesday to the launch pad. The other vehicles; some processing will continue to be done in the orbiter processing facilities on the major maintenance for the Discovery and the other vehicle.

For the most part, though, it's obvious that the Kennedy Space Center family is also grieving the loss of Columbia and her crew. We're trying to make sure that they're taken care of with grief counseling. We're trying to make sure that we take care of the entire family.

KOSTELNIK: I guess I would just to add to that that for those employees who are really overcome by this, and many people in NASA take this very personal, there are some amount of people who will not be working for that particular reason.

QUESTION: I'm just wondering, I noticed there were a lot of military and ex-military personnel on the independent panel. Is there a particular reason for that?

READDY: Well, first of all, the expertise in aerospace seems to be mostly resident in the services. They have standing safety organizations. We try and get the senior and most expert people from those organizations as part of our standing body. Yes, there were members from the military, but also from the NTSB, from the FAA and Department of Transportation. And so, we're using other federal agencies to support us, but independent of the NASA.

QUESTION: We're getting a budget this afternoon that has been overtaken by events, basically. Have you and the administrator had a chance to discuss how this budget might be impacted by this accident, and how should we regard the numbers that come out in this budget at this date?

READDY: Well, quite frankly, the last 48 hours we've been extremely busy organizing our effort here and focusing on the Columbia and loss of her crew and working through this with the people of NASA. We really haven't had much of a chance to look downstream at the implications for the FY '04 budget, quite frankly.

READDY: The '03 budget amendment, I think, set exactly the right tone in terms of commitment to continue upgrading the space shuttle, and perform service life extension. So I think I'd just stop right there and not comment any further.

QUESTION: Along these same lines, is it fair to assume that as long as there's a freeze on work--what does that mean for the design work and the preparatory work for all the upgrades? Where do you want to stop the clock and be able to integrate any information that you get out of the investigation to the upgrades?

READDY: Well, first of all, let me make it very clear, although the manifest is on hold, although we have stepped down, that doesn't mean that we are not working. We're continuing to work on the vehicles in some areas. We're certainly working on design. Many of those same experts, of course, are also involved in the forensic effort now to find out exactly what happened and establish the root cause; support the mishap investigation team, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, and what other bodies may be in panel to go do that. So believe me, we're working this extremely hard right now.

In terms of upgrades, General Kostelnik had laid out a shuttle summit. I think that will have to go on. Certainly, there's recognition that the shuttle system is necessary to continue to assemble, operate, maintain and reap the science harvest of International Space Station.

Mike?

KOSTELNIK: That's exactly right. In fact, we have ongoing upgrades as we speak. The cockpit avionics mod, the advanced engineering health system. There are other things ongoing. And all those programs will continue and, obviously, the evaluation and analysis may lead to new areas to focus in. And clearly, if there are other upgrades that are required, those will be put on an accelerated path. But for the new integrated space transportation plan, we're working a fairly aggressive and formal plan, as I mentioned earlier, not only to prioritize, but lay out the programs. And these will be our inputs into the summer budget process for the out-years.

QUESTION: I'm curious what role the contractors are playing in your investigation, and if NASA is going to rethink its relationship with its current contractors.

READDY: Well, the contractors are an integral part of all the mishap investigation teams. As you know, NASA, for years--going back to the dawn of the space program, certainly from Apollo on--has relied very heavily on aerospace contractors to do the actual work; wherein NASA provides the management expertise and deals with the contractors.

We have excellent contractors working on the space shuttle program; Boeing, Lockheed Martin, ATK. The United Space Alliance do the work on our vehicles routinely. They're an integral part of the engineering support that we have, and they're part of the mishap investigation team.

QUESTION: General, one quick question. How long does this incident delay completion of the international space station?

KOSTELNIK: I think it's really premature to really have a good answer for that. Clearly, it'll be dependent and a function of when we can get back to safe flight. And as Mr. Readdy mentioned, we will go through this process; we'll determine what the problem is; we'll put a fix in place; and when that fix is in place and we're comfortable in moving forward, then we will begin the shuttle assembly flights. Right now it's an uncertain as to when that can be.

The administrator is very clear on this constraint. You know, we need to focus on the business at hand, whatever it takes. And again, going back to what I said, it is an international partnership. If, in the long-term it took longer than a few months to get the shuttle fleet back up, there would be other options we have. We're in close partnership with the Russians. We have continuing access to space through Soyuz and Progress resupplies. They are part of this team and like us and the other partners have a vested interest in the future of this assembly.

So as we learn more about this, the International Space Station and the international community as part of the multilateral coordination board will be dealing with these issues and putting in contingency plans as we move into the spring about what we can do for not only science in the long duration space flight, but for the good of all the partners associated with this large enterprise.

QUESTION: Have you built a geographic information system to track the location of each part of debris that has fallen on the two states where it did fall?

READDY: Well, I know we're using products from FEMA and from NIMA, two agencies--NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency--in order to get all the maps that we need. We're also relying on the Department of Defense to do trajectory analysis of debris.

QUESTION: I'm just curious, in the last contract renewal, NASA opted for a two-year instead of a five-year. Is there hope that more contractors will come in? Or what was the rationale behind that? And does this accident change your thinking at all?

READDY: Well, the initial period of performance for the space flight operations contract was six years, with two two-year options at the end of it. And we elected to exercise the first and we have the option to exercise the second, if required. And I think that goes through the end of September 2004 at the current time.

We've, obviously, been very pleased with the quality of the work performed by our contractors. And, in fact, in the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel report of 2001, and I quote, "NASA and its contractors maintain excellent safety practices and processes, as well as an appropriate level of safety consciousness. This has contributed to significant flight achievements. The defined requirements for operating at an acceptable level of risk are always met."

MAHONE: Thank you.

General Kostelnik and Mr. Readdy, thank you.