o keefe

NASA Mission Control Center Status Report #21

NASA engineers continued to review data and recover debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia today as the analysis of what caused the orbiter to break up Saturday en route to landing continued. Space Shuttle Program Manager Ron Dittemore told an afternoon briefing that several teams of engineers are making progress in their study of data and video from Columbia’s launch and entry, but cautioned that it is a “massive job” requiring round-the-clock efforts to piece together the events that led to a loss of communications with the Shuttle over north central Texas 16 minutes prior to touchdown.

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe's Statement

As my press officer indicated earlier, we will make a statement now and a little later this afternoon, about 3 o’clock eastern time, there will be a full technical briefing conducted from the Johnson Space Center. So at this point, we?re just going to give you the circumstances, as we understand them, leading up to this particular tragedy today. We will not take questions from the media.