CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Dissenting opinion, proposed recommendations that were not adopted and substantial background information about the shuttle program is expected to fill five new volumes of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report to be released Tuesday.
Volume 1 of the CAIB final report was released Aug. 26 and is considered the official, final report that includes the 29 conclusions and recommendations NASA must implement either before the next shuttle flies or soon after.
The final report blamed a chunk of external tank insulation foam striking shuttle Columbia's left wing as the technical cause of the Feb. 1 tragedy, while blaming in equal measure a NASA "culture" that missed the potential problem in the first place.
Volumes 2 through 6 collects all the supporting material referenced in the first volume and are considered working documents that include a number of conclusions and proposed recommendations, not all of which were adopted and presented in Volume 1, the CAIB said in a statement Friday."The other conclusions and proposed recommendations drawn in Volumes 2-6 do not necessarily reflect the views of the CAIB but are included for the record. When there is conflict, Volume 1 takes precedence. It alone is the CAIB's official statement," the CAIB statement said.
One week after the final report was released, Air Force Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, a CAIB member, provided insight into what the later volumes would include, including some dissenting opinion.
Deal said he was concerned that some of the "other significant observations" detailed in the final report would be ignored by NASA in their rush to complete the official recommendations. Those observations mostly deal with shuttle hardware that could fail and lead to disaster.
Information about those systems, such as the posts that hold down the shuttle to the launch pad or the hardware that connects the solid rocket boosters to the external tank, are detailed in the later volumes, Deal said.
Much of that information was provided by more than 200 shuttle workers who gave testimony under the condition their identities be kept secret.
"These are things that NASA still has to address, and to this point we've seen them ignored, which is a concern because some of them are as deadly as anything else in the report," Deal said at the time.
The five new volumes will be available to download from the CAIB's Web site beginning Tuesday morning at http://www.caib.us. Printed versions may be ordered for a fee from the U.S. Government Printing Office at http://www.gpo.gov.
The CAIB plans little fanfare in releasing the new volumes. No media briefing is planned.
Coincidentally, the rest of the report is to be released Tuesday at the same time the names of the Columbia crew will be unveiled on the official Space Mirror monument to fallen astronauts, which is located at the Kennedy Space Center.
The Space Mirror is made of black granite and has the names of astronauts who died in the line of duty carved from the stone. Light passes through the holes as the polished granite reflects the sky. The effect is to have the names appear drifting in the heavens when you look at the structure.
Maintained by the Astronauts Memorial Foundation, the Space Mirror was conceived and constructed following the 1986 Challenger disaster. Proceeds from the sale of a specialty Florida license plate helped pay for the monument.
Nearby the memorial is the Center for Space Education, which is considered a living memorial to the lost crews.
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