NASA - single cause for shuttle disaster may never be found

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- Investigators may never find a single definitive cause for the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe said Wednesday.

Contributing factors could include hardware failure, failures of processes and procedures during the flight or bad judgment calls, O'Keefe told the NASA Advisory Council at Stennis Space Flight Center. He did not elaborate on those factors.

"I bet it's going to be a combination of all three," O'Keefe said during an address to the council, which is comprised of private professionals who advise NASA on various issues.

"We're six weeks into this and there's not going to be an 'ah-hah'," he said.

However, O'Keefe said he does expect answers that will enable NASA to return the shuttle to flight.

"My personal sense is that the problem is definable and the problem is fixable," O'Keefe said.

In New Orleans, NASA's deputy associate administrator for spaceflight Michael Kostelnik led a meeting to discuss how to keep the shuttle program active through 2015. The two-day meeting was billed as the beginning of the space agency's process of determining how to extend the lifespan of the orbiters.

NASA's three remaining space shuttles, which were built to fly no more than 100 missions, could be needed far longer than expected, Kostelnik said. Columbia was on its 28th mission when it was destroyed.

Kostelnik and O'Keefe, who was also in New Orleans, likened the shuttles to the military's B-52 bombers, most of which were built in the 1950s but have been repeatedly updated and remain in use.

On Tuesday, the head of an independent board that is investigating what caused the Feb. 1 loss of Columbia said the group already is preparing to make some suggestions on how NASA can improve its operations.

"There are a couple of (recommendations) that are percolating up to where we think they are benign enough, obvious enough that we don't need any further research," retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., the board's chairman, said Tuesday after the group's weekly news conference. "We're as anxious as everybody else is to get everything on the table so they can make the (return to flight) as quickly as they can."

Gehman said one of the first recommendations the board could make in the next week or so is that NASA needs to improve its communications with other governmental intelligence agencies. He wants the space agency to better coordinate how resources such as spy satellites and telescopes can be used to photograph the shuttle during orbit to detect problems.

"It's not a security issue. It's a bureaucratic issue," Gehman said. "This is a system that broke."

The board suspects the heat-shielding tiles on Columbia's left wing were breached, possibly by insulating foam or other material falling from the external fuel tank, during the Jan. 16 launch. As it aimed for a Florida landing on Feb. 1, the shuttle broke apart over Texas, killing all seven astronauts.

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Associated Press reporter Doug Simpson in New Orleans contributed to this report.

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