Shuttle board: NASA to blame as much as foam

WASHINGTON — The board investigating the Columbia accident has concluded that NASA management and safety-system failures were as much a factor in the destruction of the shuttle and its seven- member crew as the foam that delivered a fatal blow to the shuttle’s wing during liftoff.

Retired Adm. Harold Gehman, chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, told reporters Friday that the final report will give the same weight to the space agency’s decision-making errors as to the direct physical cause of the Feb. 1 loss of the vehicle and its crew. He spoke in Washington at the board’s final formal briefing scheduled before the release of its report near the end of August.

On Monday, the last in a series of impact tests sponsored by the panel proved conclusively that a piece of foam insulation that fell off Columbia’s propellant tank and struck the front of the wing during the Jan. 16 launch could easily have punched out a piece of the heat-shield material, leading to the catastrophe.

The test Monday, designed to re-create the launch-day impact, not only left a 16-to-17-inch hole in the carbon fiber panel, board member Scott Hubbard reported Friday, it also dislodged an adjoining T-seal, broke a lug that held the seal in place and left “a maze” of cracks running through the carbon fiber panel around the hole. Board members said the launch-day breach in the wing was probably a little smaller — in the six-to-10-inch range — but “in the same ballpark.”

Gehman said there had been a pervasive and virtually unquestioned assumption within the shuttle program that the foam couldn’t possibly have done such damage, even though NASA engineers had no data to prove it. This led to a series of flawed decisions, including top managers’ failure to act on engineers’ requests for spy satellite images of the shuttle in orbit.

Several board members said Friday that, based on Monday’s test, the damage was probably severe enough that an inspection in space could have revealed it.

Shuttle engineers referred to the Jan. 16 debris strike with the phrase “in family,” meaning similar to past experience and, they assumed, well-understood.

After the briefing, Gehman said the board has met twice with the astronaut corps, urging its members to “get more aggressive and formal” in addressing potential safety issues.