NASA Chief O’Keefe Agrees ‘We Must Follow This Blueprint’ in Accident Report

Aug. 27–WASHINGTON–A somber NASA chief Sean O’Keefe promised Tuesday to fully embrace the findings of a scathing report exploring the causes of the shuttle Columbia disaster as part of the debt owed the seven astronauts who died.

In a teleconference shown in NASA offices and facilities across the country shortly after the investigative report was released, O’Keefe described the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s report as “a seminal moment in NASA history” that the agency must respond to with a renewed sense of energy and responsibility.

O’Keefe said the board’s conclusions fulfilled the first of three pledges to the Columbia astronauts: to find the problem. He said he accepted the judgment of the report that a piece of foam slamming into the shuttle’s wing on liftoff was the immediate cause of the catastrophe, whileNASA’s culture of overlooking potential problems to meet deadlines and budgets set the conditions allowing the debris strike to happen.

Now, O’Keefe told NASA employees, the agency must turn to the second and third pledges: to fix the problems and then return to space.

“Our culture as an agency, as a group of people, as a community, as a family, is dedicated to these important exploration objectives,” O’Keefe said. “We need to change in order to mitigate against succumbing to these failings again.”

The NASA chief said it was too soon after the release of the report to describe the precise ways in which NASA must change. He promised that transformation would come after a careful review of the investigative board’s findings.

O’Keefe did not talk about a specific timetable to return to space, indicating that decision also depended on the speed with which the agency could digest the board’s recommendations and make concrete, lasting changes.

“We must go forward and follow this blueprint in an effort to make this a much stronger organization,” O’Keefe said. “All of us at NASA are part of the solution … ultimately to achieve the third commitment to return to the exploration objectives that they dedicated their lives to.”

As for the shuttle’s future, O’Keefe said that still depends on the speed at which replacement technologies, such as the Orbital Space Plane for transferring crews to and from the International Space Station, could be developed.

O’Keefe took the reins at NASA about 14 months before the disaster, with a reputation for budgetary rather than technical or scientific expertise, and with marching orders to get the agency’s spiraling deficit under control. His initial challenge was seen as managing the agency in an era of modest budgets and no dramatic mission on the scale of putting a man on the moon.

But in the wake of Columbia’s destruction, his role instantly transformed into the leader of an embattled agency, looked to by lawmakers and the public to articulate why the shuttle failed, and whether the aging program — or even human space flight in general — was worth continuing.

He struggled Tuesday to find stirring rhetoric to match the occasion of rallying NASA in the face of a report that blasted its culture and questioned its technical prowess.

In his address to the NASA family, O’Keefe quoted a NASA legend, former mission controller Gene Kranz, in the aftermath of the deaths of three astronauts killed in the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire in 1967.

O’Keefe paraphrased a Kranz line about being “tough” and “competent” as the price of admission to work at NASA. After reciting the names of the seven lost Columbia astronauts, O’Keefe said, “These words are the price of admission to the ranks of NASA. We should adopt them that way. Now, let’s get to work.”

The president of NASA’s employee union questioned O’Keefe about what he called a push to privatize NASA’s project.

Mark Cohen, president of Federal employees Union local 30, said the Columbia disaster happened in a “climate where NASA management sometimes tends to disdain our own technical competence (while) throwing the money over the wall to contractors.”

Tuesday’s report would not force any “major” changes in the NASA policy to rely on the engineering expertise provided by outside contractors on major projects O’Keefe said, but he indicated the agency would look to beef up its in-house engineering capabilities.

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