Investigator: Shuttles should fly again

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -- The man heading the investigation into February's crash of the space shuttle Columbia said he saw "no showstoppers" that would prevent the remaining three shuttles from eventually returning to flight.

That was good news for NASA, which needs to fly shuttles to keep the $95 billion International Space Station program operating.

Retired Adm. Harold Gehman was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday with six other members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to review the shuttle's wreckage.

"The board has not come across any showstoppers that in our minds would prevent the shuttle from returning to flight," Gehman said.

NASA officials have said they would like to see a flight before the end of the year, since they currently have no way to deliver water and other life-support to the two-man crew living on the station.

But Gehman, whose final report is expected by autumn, said he could not predict how long it would be before the next launch.

"How high is the stack of return-to-flight items going to be when we get finished? I can't tell you that. But right now it looks manageable," Gehman told reporters.

Gehman's comments appeared to bolster an agreement made between President George W. Bush and NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe within hours of Columbia' loss February 1 that the agency would find the problem, fix it and then return to flight as soon as possible.

Since then, a number of critics, some of them in Congress, have questioned whether the shuttles, which are all based on technology available in the 1960s and 1970s, can ever be made safe to fly.

NASA has lost two of its five shuttles to catastrophic accident. The shuttle Challenger was destroyed shortly after liftoff 17 years ago. On February 1, as Columbia, the oldest shuttle, was ending a 16-day science mission, it broke apart while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.