Post-Columbia NASA hunkers down: " THESE COMMENTS come as part of NASA�s hunkering down in anticipation of being seriously skewered by the report now being written by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. The group, often referred to as the Gehman Committee after the retired admiral who chairs it, has already issued its technical explanation of the loss of Columbia and its seven astronauts on Feb. 1. The main thrust of their other report, due for release by the end of August, will be how NASA�s culture allowed the disaster to happen.
The impromptu press roundtable at NASA�s Johnson Space Center in Houston was organized to discuss documents that the space agency had just released that morning. These were transcripts of meetings of the Mission Management Team, the group that provides day-to-day decisions during human space missions. The tapes had been made in January and transcribed in the first week of February, and after six months NASA had gotten around to releasing them to the public.
The NASA official in charge of the Mission Management Team meetings was Linda Ham, an experienced flight control engineer and flight director. Along with fellow Mission Control Center management representative Philip Engelauf and flight director Leroy Cain (who had been on duty during the Columbia descent on Feb. 1), Ham answered questions from reporters during the half-hour roundtable."