NASA Veteran Determined to Learn From Past Mistakes
Wayne Hale arrived at the Kennedy Space Center runway expecting to welcome Columbia home.
The NASA veteran joined a crowd of agency employees at the landing site near Cape Canaveral, Fla., on the morning of Feb. 1, 2003. They looked to the sky, searching for the shuttle. Each passing minute deepened the enormity of the moment.
"It became pretty clear that we should be seeing the shuttle, and there was no contact," he said. "That’s when it all kind of sank in."
Mr. Hale, a longtime shuttle flight director in Houston, was starting a new launch manager job in Florida. While Columbia was in space, he had requested satellite photos that might have shown damage to its left wing. A fellow NASA official canceled that request, reasoning that even if the photos did show damage to the wing, little could be done about it.
Despite his efforts, Mr. Hale was stricken with the feeling that he could have done more to help avoid the crash. As the first anniversary of Columbia’s demise approached, he wrote a candid memo to fellow space shuttle program employees.
"I stand condemned in the court of my own conscience to be guilty of not preventing the Columbia disaster," he wrote. "The bottom line is that I failed to understand what I was being told; I failed to stand up and be counted."
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, however, called the accident a collective failure.
Now back in Houston as manager of the space shuttle program, Mr. Hale said NASA has learned from the Columbia accident that complacency is unacceptable in a venture as risky as space travel.
After Columbia, the agency installed a number of new safety measures, overhauled the shuttle management team and encouraged engineers and employees to speak up if they see problems.
"One of the key lessons is that we’re not as smart as we think we are," he said. "You cannot be lulled into believing that just because we’ve been successful for a period of time, we can kick back and take life easy.
"I think there’s a huge difference from where we were five years ago," he said.
A picture of the Columbia crew hangs just outside Mr. Hale’s office, offering a daily reminder of the price of failure.
But Mr. Hale said that despite setbacks like Columbia, Challenger and Apollo 1, he’s still passionately convinced that exploring space is a worthwhile pursuit.
"We are a great nation, and we are engaged in great things that other nations cannot do," he said. "If we give up our pre-eminence in space … we have given up something that’s essential in the American character."