spacetoday.net: Columbia investigation board adds three experts

Posted: Thu, Mar 6, 2003, 10:34 AM ET (1534 GMT)
STS-107 patch (NASA)

NASA announced late Wednesday that it has approved a request from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) to add three people, including a former astronaut and a Nobel laureate, to the board. The new CAIB members are Sally Ride, former astronaut and first American woman in space; Douglas D. Osheroff, a Stanford University physics professor who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics for studies of helium superfluidity; and John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. Ride becomes the first member of the CAIB who also served on the Rogers Commission, the presidential panel that investigated the Challenger accident in 1986. The CAIB made the request Wednesday and NASA, which under the current board charts must approve changes in the board’s composition, immediately approved the request. NASA also approved a CAIB request to replace ex-officio member Bryan O'Connor, NASA's associate administrator for safety, with Michael Bloomfield, an astronaut who is a former head of safety in the NASA Astronaut Office.