NASA safety chief defends job
Posted on: Saturday, 15 November 2003, 06:00 CST
NASA safety chief defends job
Associated Press
Saturday, November 15, 2003
Cape Canaveral, Fla. -- The director of NASA's new engineering and safety center defended his job promotion Friday amid congressional criticism of his decision-making in the Columbia disaster.
Ralph Roe, along with some other shuttle officials, did not seek spy satellite pictures of Columbia's damaged left wing back in January, despite requests from lower-level engineers. At the time, Roe managed the shuttle vehicle engineering office at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Friday, in his first news conference since the tragedy, Roe said he and everyone else learned difficult lessons from Columbia's doomed mission.
"We had our friends and colleagues on board, so it has all marked us and scarred us differently, but in a very hard way," he said. "We all will take those lessons and ensure that we do our part to learn from what happened during Columbia and try to do our best to improve the agency and make spaceflight safer."
He added: "Sometimes as human beings, we often learn more from our failures than from our successes."
Sen. Ernest Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.), a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, repeated his disapproval Friday of NASA's selection of Roe. The space agency's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, created the safety center following the Feb. 1 disaster and asked Roe to lead it.
Roe and Roy Bridges, director of Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., home to the new safety center, said outside experts would be consulted on a case-by-case basis. In addition, safety center engineers will be rotated in and out every few years from other NASA installations to provide a fresh perspective and will report to NASA's top safety office, not the program under review.
The safety center eventually will look over technical details for the resumption of shuttle flights, targeted for no earlier than next fall.
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