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NASA flight manager defends decisions

Posted on: Wednesday, 23 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

NASA flight manager defends decisions

Ham had dismissed foam problems on Columbia

By MARCIA DUNN Associated Press

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Houston -- With tears in her eyes, the NASA manager who dismissed the possibility during Columbia's doomed flight that the shuttle had been seriously damaged by foam defended her decisions Tuesday and said no one should be blamed for the tragedy.

"We were all trying to do the right thing. All along, we were basing our decisions on the best information that we had at the time," said Linda Ham, who led Columbia's mission management team.

"Nobody wanted to do any harm to anyone. Obviously, nobody wants to hurt the crew. These people are our friends. They're our neighbors. We run with them, work out in the gym with them. My husband is an astronaut. I don't believe anyone is at fault for this."

In her first public appearance since the space shuttle disaster nearly six months ago, Ham acknowledged with 20-20 hindsight, there are things the mission management team and all of NASA could have done better.

She said she did not seek spy satellite pictures of the orbiting spaceship because even though engineers wanted pictures, none of them approached her about it during the 16-day flight and she could not ascertain who was making the request.

Ham said she takes responsibility for that decision, as the head of the mission management team.

"But we are a team. We all heard the discussions," she said. "None of us felt that the analysis (of the danger posed by the blow from the foam) was faulty."

It wasn't until after the accident that she learned some of the engineers who wanted the spy satellite pictures had taken part in her meetings, but never spoke up.

Ham had to stop talking at one point in the news briefing.

She struggled to hold back tears and bit her lips, but the tears came anyway and she wiped them away with a borrowed handkerchief.

She and two other top NASA officials at Johnson Space Center met with reporters Tuesday several hours after NASA released the full transcripts of all five mission management meetings held during Columbia's flight.

During the second meeting, on Jan. 21, five days after Columbia's launch, Ham received a short briefing on the 1 1/2-pound chunk of fuel-tank foam insulation that slammed into Columbia's left wing during liftoff.

"Really, I don't think there is much we can do," she told her colleagues. "It's not really a factor during the flight because there isn't much we can do about it."

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