CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA officials will have at least one month's notice before the next shuttle will fly that the agency is on the correct path for the return to flight, the body tasked with overseeing the process said Thursday.
At least that's the stated goal of the Stafford/Covey Task Group, which held its first public meeting here at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
"Our task is to look at those things that will be recommended by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB), understand them and then look at the implementation that NASA makes with the corrective action to those recommendations," said Richard Covey, a veteran shuttle astronaut who is heading up the group.
Covey's co-chair is Tom Stafford, another veteran astronaut who flew during projects Gemini and Apollo.
With the help of more than two dozen experts named to the task group -- most of whom were on hand at KSC for the first meeting -- the group will be split up into three teams covering operations, management and technical areas.
Their job will be to advise NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe and tell him whether or not the shuttle program is doing all the things the CAIB intended NASA to do in order to safely launch the next shuttle mission, namely Atlantis on STS-114.
Less clear is how the Stafford/Covey group will handle long-term issues related to the agency's management style and decision making process -- NASA's culture.
"It's clear that the technical and operational issues would be something that will fall right into return to flight activities," Covey told reporters after the public meeting. "We've already begun to try and scope out the way that we will address managerial, organizational type of recommendations when they come out of the CAIB."
Members of the group have discussed with the CAIB the findings and recommendations that will be in the report due out Aug. 26, but they said they haven't read the draft version of the final report.
Instead, they will wait for the report to come out and then see how NASA responds to it before laying out their next major set of activities in anticipation of a public meeting near the Johnson Space Center in Houston in September.
In the meantime, the three panels of the task group already are looking at the five preliminary recommendations the CAIB has put out.
The group is chartered for up to two years of operations, but is only expected to exist until they present their report to NASA one month before the next shuttle launch -- whenever that might be.
The group was at KSC this week to meet with shuttle program managers but mostly to see first hand the recovered debris of Columbia that is laid out on a hangar floor. The debris is about to be moved and put in storage in the Vehicle Assembly Building.
"That was very difficult to see," Covey said of the wreckage.
advertisement
