Blast Theory Backed, Armstrong Says

WASHINGTON —  Analysis of a two-ton fragment from Challenger’s right booster rocket “confirms the hypothesis” that a leak in the rocket destroyed the shuttle and killed its crew of seven, a member of the presidential investigating commission said Wednesday.

“It tends to be evidence of confirmation,” said Neil A. Armstrong, vice chairman of the panel.

Armstrong and three other commissioners held a news conference Wednesday at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., to discuss the booster fragment brought to Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Tuesday, two days after being fished from the Atlantic.

The 11-by-20-foot section had a jagged 28-by-15-inch hole at the point where the segment was connected with another above it. A leak at that joint has been suspected of allowing hot gases inside the rocket to burn through and set off the sequence that ended in a fireball nine miles high on Jan. 28.

“I think other scenarios become increasingly weak,” said Eugene E. Covert, a panel member who is a professor of aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.