ADMIRAL HAROLD GEHMAN: Good morning. Can you all hear me all right? Is this on? It's on? All right; good. Obviously I'm Admiral Hal Gehman -- what? Go ahead? All right.

Good morning. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board is here to begin two days at KSC. This is part of our education process. We are not going to be doing a whole lot of real serious investigating while we're here. We've got four things we want to look at: One is prelaunch procedures; we want to look at launch procedures; we want to look at the Shuttle refurbishment program in-between flights; and we also are going to take a quick look at the Columbia mishap reconstruction site and be sure in our own minds that the process that here for Columbia reconstruction meets our investigatory needs.

A lot of people at NASA are telling us a lot of things and we felt as a Board it's critical that we have a first-hand knowledge of what they're talking about. We need to be able to see the things they're talking about, and many of the things they're talking about are here at KSC.

So this is kind of an orientation visit. We will return multiple times to -- as we bore into our investigation. We'll be here two days. We're going to go on to Huntsville and then to New Orleans, getting back into Houston on Saturday night. And we will work on Sunday. We are going to be essentially working either seven-day weeks or six-day weeks from now on. I'll take one or two questions, but I'll tell you right now, as I said in yesterday's press conference, I will not comment on any particular theory or any particular piece of debris or any particular -- any particular area in the investigation which seems to be hotter or more interesting, more interesting than yesterday's. So I'll take a couple questions.

NEWS MEDIA: (Inaudible) The Congress is asking questions about whether your Board is, in fact, independent enough. Can you comment on that?

ADMIRAL HAROLD GEHMAN: All right. That's a good legitimate public policy question. I believe that the issue is not is the Board independent enough or is the Board capable of doing this investigation. I have spoken to several members of Congress and they all have great confidence in the Board. The issue is who do we report to. And the various branches of the U.S. Government can work out who we report to; it won't have anything to do with our investigation.

We fully realize that the Congress of the United States is a constituent of ours, the families of the astronauts are constituents of ours, as is the Administrator of NASA, who happened to be the person who signed the charter. So we're going to report to the White House, we're going to report to the Congress. How the Executive Branch and Legislative Branch work out who's going to be reporting to whom has no bearing in my mind on the energy and the depth that we conduct this investigation.

NEWS MEDIA: Admiral Gehman (inaudible) will any of them be stationed permanently here at KSC since I know a lot of your data is coming out of JSC.

ADMIRAL HAROLD GEHMAN: Right. Certain -- as you may be aware from our discussion yesterday, the Board has broken itself into subboards and one or more of the subboards will be here at Kennedy not permanently, that's not the right term, but I expect that a large portion of the investigation will be done here at Kennedy and they will be here as often as they -- and as long as they need.

We have asked KSC to provide us a separate set of offices and things like that so that when we come here, we can go right to work and work in private. But I wouldn't use the word permanent.

NEWS MEDIA: Who's on those subboards? Who's the chairman of each of them?

ADMIRAL HAROLD GEHMAN: I -- that is available through our press office. It's essentially -- we've broken the Board into three subboards and there's three members on each one, and that's available through our press office.

NEWS MEDIA: Any major developments overnight?

ADMIRAL HAROLD GEHMAN: Go ahead.

NEW MEDIA: Can you determine that the cause of Columbia's adapter is related directly or indirectly to senior managers at NASA with the long-term NASA policies? Will you address those issues?

ADMIRAL HAROLD GEHMAN: Yes, absolutely. Everything is on the table in this investigation, not just -- we're not just here looking at metallurgic projects here, this is a broad investigation, not only to the direct cause but also to the contributing causes. And there may be more than one direct cause and there may be more than one contributing causes. And if it -- if it turns out to be a flaw in a piece of material or processing that we can easily pinpoint and fix with some assurity so that we can have a safe flying program, that will be just the beginning. We're going to want to know why and how did that flaw occur and whether or not this safe -- the safety projects, the safety programs, and the oversight programs that were in place, why didn't they fix that, why didn't they catch it. And then that leads to management and budget and organizational matters, absolutely, all those are on the table.

One additional question right here.

NEWS MEDIA: Based on your experience, would you expect to find a single root cause of this or do you expect to find multiple contributing factors?

ADMIRAL HAROLD GEHMAN: Our mindset is to look for everything. I mean, the way we're approaching this mentally is to not miss anything. I would not want to be predicting whether there's one single aircraft kind of an accident or whether there are multiple, multiple causes here. Our mindset is to be broad.

As I said yesterday at the press conference, we feel an obligation to -- to be just as rigorous when we rule something out as we are when we rule something in. If somebody's going to say this could not have possibly have caused the accident, we will put some rigor into having that proved to us and justified to us. So that -- you could call that wasted energy because it leads to nothing, but it's critical to us that we not overlook anything and so we will put a lot of energy into that.

Okay. Thank you very much and thanks for your interest, and we will -- we will periodically meet with you to keep you apprised of what's going on, but right now I've got to get to work. Thanks a lot.