Posted on 02/02/2003 3:16:42 PM PST by blam
Pentagon's top investigator will lead inquiry into accident
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
03 February 2003
NASA turned yesterday to a retired four-star admiral who led the inquiry into the October 2000 terrorist attack on the destroyer USS Cole at Aden to head an independent commis-sion examining the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
Harold Gehman, with 35 years of active duty in the navy, is regarded as one of the Pentagon's wisest and most experienced investigators. He has a career of high military appointments behind him – the most recent as Nato's supreme allied commander for the Atlantic, in charge of US joint forces command, one of the country's five unified geographic commands.
Previously, he had been a member of the joint chiefs of staff, and commanded the Nato peace-keeping force in Bosnia in 1996-97.
Three months after the attack on the Cole, Admiral Gehman and his co-chairman on the investigation, William Crouch a retired army general, produced a report whose unclassified version contained 30 specific findings and 53 recommendations to prevent future terrorist strikes against American military facilities. Those recommendations of January 2001 are being "aggressively" implemented, say Pentagon officials.
But the tragedy of Columbia, though less deadly than the attack on the Cole in which 17 sailors died, promises to be far tougher. Though severely damaged, the Cole was taken back to America for repairs and a complete investigation.
In contrast, the oldest shuttle in the US space programme disintegrated into thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of fragments. Some with potentially vital clues may have been incinerated as the craft came apart while travelling at 12,500mph, or may never be found in the huge wreckage area in East Texas and western Louisiana.
In the Cole case, Admiral Gehman said he found a "seam in the fabric" of the Navy's system of self-protection. This time the physical seam that might indicate exactly what went wrong on Saturday morning may never be traced.
The admiral's job, at the head of a team of military and civilian experts, was to sift all the facts to determine what went wrong on the shuttle, Sean O'Keefe, Nasa's administrator said. There would be no emphasis on any "pet theory or other approach", he said. Every aspect of the fatal flight would be examined.
The commission's chief, who was due to arrive in Shreveport, Louisiana, yesterday to start organising the investigation, was "well versed in understanding exactly how to look about the forensics in these cases and coming up with the causal effects of what could occur", Mr O'Keefe said.
The Columbia investigation will review all the information Nasa collected as the spaceship began its descent, then started breaking up more than 200,000 feet over Texas. This includes transmissions from the crew, as well as records from the shuttle's sensors, analysis of the debris and data from government and commercial satellites. In addition to the Gehman commission, Nasa will conduct its own investigation, as will the House Science Committee, which oversees Nasa.
The results of those experiments may not have been able to be transmitted; hope that is not the case or that info would be lost.
Of course, I could have cart before horse, but I do not think so.
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