CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Aug. 5 — Senior officials of NASA said today that they were making progress in addressing the five technical recommendations made so far by the independent board investigating the breakup of the shuttle Columbia.

But they would not say what the agency was doing about an issue the board has called just as important a cause of the disaster as mechanical failure: the space agency's management culture.

"There will be no attempt whatsoever to argue or defend a recommendation from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board," said Frederick Gregory, NASA's deputy administrator, who was visiting the Kennedy Space Center here to join the initial meeting of a new advisory panel that is supposed to critique the preparations to return to flight.

But when asked about the board's inquiry into how information has flowed within NASA, Mr. Gregory replied, "At this point we have not received any comments officially from the accident investigation board" on the subject of management.
The board is scheduled to release the main body of its report on Aug. 26. While the official communications have been technical, board members have dwelled at length on nontechnical subjects — chiefly, how NASA lost focus on the hazard of liftoff debris and did not heed some of its engineers' requests for military satellites to take pictures of possible damage during the flight.

Mr. Gregory said NASA had always delayed its operations whenever it found something it did not understand that could pose a safety risk. The investigation board, however, has focused on occasions when NASA faced a problem that it did not recognize as a risk.
Mr. Gregory appeared with Bill Readdy, the agency's associate administrator for space flight, and Bryan O'Connor, the associate administrator for flight safety and mission assurance. Mr. Readdy, responding to another question about whether NASA would re-evaluate its culture, said, "The comment that it's a culture thing maybe does apply in some small area." After the 1967 fire that killed the three Apollo 1 astronauts on the launching pad, he went on, it was a strong culture that "got us to the Moon, and got us back to the mission."
While NASA has spoken of returning the shuttle fleet to space by next spring, Mr. Readdy said the schedule would be determined by when NASA could achieve safety milestones, not by an arbitrary date. The planning for spring is simply to organize the work and energize NASA workers, he said. Still, agency officials have pointed out that without the shuttle, construction of the International Space Station cannot resume and full operations there cannot be carried out.

Last week, the investigating board recommended that NASA equip the three surviving shuttles with cameras that could take pictures of the orbiter and the external fuel tank, the part that shed the debris that was fatal to the shuttle Columbia, and transmit those images to the ground.

Over the last few months, it has also recommended better photography on liftoff, adding equipment so astronauts could repair the shuttle in orbit, inspecting the wing panels more thoroughly between flights and getting images from spy satellites while the shuttle is in orbit.
The accident investigation board has recommended many specific goals but not the means to meet them. Harold W. Gehman Jr., the retired admiral who is the board chairman, favors this approach and has said his panel should tell NASA what to do but not how.
One technical change not recommended by the board but under consideration by NASA is landing the shuttle either at Edwards Air Force Base in California, or here in Florida, but only when its path is to the northeast, rather than to the southeast, as was the case on Feb. 1.

The change would mean that little of the shuttle's descent would be over land, lowering the risk of harm to people on the ground if another shuttle broke up on approach. The advisory panel that began work here today will monitor how NASA carries out the short-term recommendations of the Gehman board, the ones required before the next shuttle flight.

Mr. Gregory said that all but one of the 27 members were outsiders and that they would spend the next three days in what he called "Shuttle 101," familiarizing themselves with the system. Their agenda includes a tour of the hangar where the Columbia wreckage is laid out and a look at a sample bipod foam ramp, the structure that shed the debris that damaged the Columbia's wing. It also includes a look at the launching-pad structure that was dumping flakes of zinc oxide onto the orbiter's wing, leading to corrosion.