NASA knocked for space station records
Posted on: Monday, 1 March 2004, 06:00 CST
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA is doing a poor job keeping track of breakdowns and other problems aboard the international space station, an internal audit released Friday found.
The post-Columbia safety review also found the space agency has failed to maintain a complete set of blueprints of space station equipment, and that many documents, agreements and instructions are outdated and filled with inconsistencies.
Soon after Columbia was destroyed last February, NASA's space station program began examining its own operations to identify safety risks. This is the second such report issued on the space station.
The 172-page report offered no examples of any breakdowns or other problems that are not being adequately tracked. But it said that NASA analysis of trends is seriously lacking, with inadequately trained personnel.
NASA was criticized after the Columbia accident for not keeping better track of recurring problems, such as foam breaking off and hitting the shuttles on liftoff.
The audit found shortcomings in the computer database that is supposed to contain electronic drawings of all space station parts. Some drawings were missing; others were on a backlog of items waiting to be entered into the system.
NASA released the report a day after a spacesuit malfunction forced an early end to the first spacewalk to be conducted outside the orbiting outpost without anyone inside overseeing the operation. A crimped cooling line caused cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri's spacesuit to overheat.
Nevertheless, NASA said it considered the spacewalk a success. It proved a two-person crew can safely conduct a spacewalk while leaving the station unattended, said Mike Suffredini, station operations manager.
The Russian spacesuits worn by Kaleri and astronaut Michael Foale are old and will not be used again, Suffredini said. It is uncertain how the cooling tube in Kaleri's suit became bent.
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