Space shuttle program faces big changes

The U.S. space agency has announced sweeping changes in the management of the shuttle program in a move that looks back to the loss of the shuttle Columbia on Feb. 1 and forward to the hard- hitting report on the disaster that is expected at the end of this month. The moves bring a number of new people known largely for their engineering expertise to replace or supplement members of the management team that was in charge at the time of the mission. All seven crew members were killed as the Columbia disintegrated upon re- entry. The departure from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of only one member of the mission management team was officially announced Wednesday: Ralph Roe, the orbiter project manager. In a move that surprised many, Roe was named to head a newly created office to provide independent assessments of safety and engineering for all NASA programs. In a telephone briefing, Bill Parsons, who succeeded Ron Dittemore in June as the shuttle program manager, said the new managers would help me pull this program together and help me decide the direction this program needs to go in the future.

Parsons announced the shuttle program management changes to colleagues at a meeting at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. An engineer who attended the meeting said the group had expressed concern about some of the new appointments. Parsons apologized for the abrupt changes, the engineer related, adding that Parsons said, We have to get out in front of this and get on with it.

To many within the space agency, the moves represented an attempt to take action before the report on the investigation is released at the end of this month and show that the agency was taking charge of its problems. The agency administrator, Sean O’Keefe, warned workers in Houston last week that the report from the commission investigating the Columbia accident would be really ugly and sharply critical of the space agency’s management. O’Keefe did not take part in Wednesday’s announcement. The changes within the shuttle program come in the midst of a broader management shake-up throughout the space agency. Arthur Stephenson, who had been director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, announced in May that he would step down. The center manages the external tank which shed insulating foam that struck the shuttle’s wing 80 seconds after liftoff. Last month O’Keefe shifted General Roy Bridges from his job as director of the Kennedy Space Center to run the Langley Research Center, where engineers who were consulted during the flight had urged closer attention to the potential for grievous damage to Columbia from the foam strike. The agency statement Wednesday did not mention whether anyone would be leaving the shuttle program. The engineer who attended the meeting said that one of the NASA managers who would be removed from management was Lambert Austin, who had come under criticism for passing along a flawed analysis by Boeing engineers of the possible damage caused by the foam that struck the wing. A member of Austin’s family reached by telephone on Wednesday night said he could not confirm whether Austin was leaving the shuttle program office. Some people inside and outside the agency said they were surprised that Roe, a manager so closely associated with the team that has been criticized for giving short shrift to the safety concerns of engineers during the Columbia mission, would be put in charge of the new office for independent safety assessment for the program. Early in the investigation into the Columbia accident, Admiral Harold Gehman Jr., the head of the board, asked that the space agency remove Roe and another manager, Linda Ham, from management responsibility on NASA’s side of the investigation in order to eliminate the potential for a conflict of interest. After sending a heated letter of protest to Gehman, O’Keefe removed both Roe and Ham from a management role in the investigation, though they continued to work with the board in a lesser capacity. In the telephone briefing, Parsons supported Roe’s appointment. At the meeting Wednesday, Parsons reportedly said he did not know what role Ham would have in the program.