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Future of NASA Rides on Columbia Accident Report

Posted on: Tuesday, 26 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Aug. 26--WASHINGTON--Today, the investigation phase of the shuttle Columbia accident ends--and the future of NASA begins.

For nearly seven months, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has looked back. Back to Feb. 1, when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on a clear morning, streaking to its end across the brilliant blue sky of east Texas. Back to Jan. 16, when a launch that seemed normal in every way in fact contained a split-second event that would doom the orbiter and the seven-member crew.

And back even earlier, to years of budget fights and contracts with private companies and failed efforts to replace the aging shuttle fleet with something newer and safer. As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board has unwrapped the events leading up to the tragedy, the 30-year history of the shuttle program has been laid bare.

This morning, when the board releases its 250-page report, NASA can begin to look to the future -- from the short-term effort to return the remaining three orbiters to flight to the long-term outlook for human exploration of space.

"This is as big as 1969," said Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University and the author of several books on the space program. That's the year that a task force was assembled to map out the post-Apollo vision for NASA.

"This will determine what we do in space for the next 50 years," McCurdy said. "It's kind of the end on the technical side, which we've been pretty well saturated with.

"But it's the beginning on the managerial and policy side, and there's no guarantee that the momentum will be sustained."

The board's report will outline the cause of the accident, which has been well known for some time and was confirmed by board-sanctioned testing in July. Investigators determined that a 1.67-pound chunk of insulating foam flew off the shuttle's massive external tank about 82 seconds after the launch, smashing into the shuttle's left wing and creating a hole big enough to allow superhot gases to penetrate the wing during re-entry.

But what NASA officials, policymakers and agency watchers are waiting for is a definitive chronology and analysis of the dominoes that fell over time, creating the environment that allowed the foam strike to be discounted by mission managers. Only then can there be a clear picture of what should come next.

Retired Adm. Harold Gehman, who has led the board from the beginning, has expressed awe at the conviction within the agency that the foam could not possibly pose a danger to a shuttle or a crew. Time and again during the course of the investigation, Gehman and other board members have questioned NASA's "culture," and the program's safety organization, communications structure and ability to assess risk.

So it's no surprise that NASA is bracing for a scathing report.

"I fully expect that what we will read will be a very thorough, comprehensive and exhaustive treatment of what they believe were the contributors that led to this terrific tragedy," agency Administrator Sean O'Keefe said in an interview Monday. "I'm fully prepared for the fact that it's going to be a not terribly satisfying read, but at the same time an honest straight-up assessment of what they believe they have found and what the findings portend."

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who flew aboard Columbia in 1986 while a member ofthe House of Representatives, also is expecting a brutally honest assessment.

"I think the Gehman commission is going to spank NASA pretty hard," Nelson said. "I don't expect them to get on the budgetary issues, which are a major part of the problem, but I do expect them to get into the culture -- the lack of communication from the bottom up, the lack of attention to safety, the atmosphere of intimidation instead of encouragement of getting concerns expressed to the top management."

For example, e-mails disclosed since the accident show that lower-level engineers worried that the foam strike had seriously damaged the shuttle and sought more information, including satellite imagery. Higher-ranking officials in the agency never sought the photos because they didn't think they were necessary.

It is the culture issue, much more than the technical fixes, that could be the uphill climb for NASA.

While the recommendations already released by the board are daunting -- they include finding a way for astronauts to repair the reinforced carbon-carbon panels in orbit -- they are engineering problems. So far, NASA has expressed optimism that the modifications can be done relatively quickly, and is targeting a date of no earlier than March 11 for the next launch.

Figuring out how to make the already complex system of safeguards and safety standards better could be much more difficult.

David Goldston, majority staff director for the House Science Committee, which will open a series of hearings on the report next week, said the culture question is the biggest unknown in the report.

Just saying the culture at NASA is bad is both unfair to the agency and useless as an analytical tool, he said. What's important is defining exactly what is wrong, to allow solutions to be found.

"I think it is important to get a sense of what they mean by culture and to start putting some meat on that terminology, so people can figure out what to do about it. If you're not careful and just throw the word culture around then nothing changes, because people say, 'Well, that's a culture issue,' " Goldston said.

"On the other hand, if the term culture can be given some real definition -- so that we know when it means the bureaucracy is structured wrong and when it means this person didn't do the right thing and when it means these attitudes are omnipresent and problematic and they can be altered by doing X and Y."

McCurdy said it's hard to understand how some of the brightest minds within NASA -- people who have an intimate grasp of the inner workings of a craft as complicated as the space shuttle -- cannot understand the meaning of culture.

"Culture is generally defined as the assumptions that people make about the way things work in the organization," McCurdy said. "And one of the big cultural issues is the burden-of-proof problem. When someone in the contractor work force or at a NASA field center raises a substantive issue about the safety of the vehicle, who has the burden of proof? It's a fundamental assumption in our legal system, and it ought to be a fundamental assumption in our space flight system."

The first change McCurdy said he would make -- and one that is expected to be suggested in the report -- is to emphasize the experimental nature of the space shuttle. Language becomes a part of an institutional culture, he said, and even using the word "shuttle" implies a consistency and reliability that simple doesn't exist in the spacecraft.

Nelson, a member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said things absolutely have to change at NASA. The agency's organizational structure and safety procedures were also criticized in the aftermath of the 1986 Challenger accident -- and yet, Nelson said, there are eerie echoes of that tragedy in the loss of the Columbia and its crew.

"It's one thing for there to have been one accident, but when you have two accidents and we never learned our lesson from the first accident and it occurred again 17 years later, then it gets pretty serious, and I think people are going to pay attention to it," Nelson said. "Space flight is risky enough, but we can't afford additional risk because of mistakes. And so this is an important juncture."

Important, too, for NASA's budget, which has been relatively flat for more than a decade. The question of whether the agency will get additional money has been on hold until the board's report is released.

Then there is the practical matter of how much impact the board's report will have in a time when so many other issues are competing for the attention of the White House, the Congress and the nation. McCurdy, while pointing out that major policy changes tend to grow from major events, said he's surprised that the Columbia accident has held the public's attention for as long as it has.

Goldston, however, said that the House Science Committee, at least, is in it for the long haul. The committee plans to move authorizing legislation for NASA early next year, he said, and that will involve an extensive review of the agency's mission for the future.

"I think this is a pivotal moment in NASA's history. We need to make some really fundamental decisions about how to move forward," Goldston said. "I think this is going to be a very extensive, rigorous process and it really doesn't matter if it sort of falls off the more general public radar."

Sentinel space editor Michael Cabbage contributed to this report.

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