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Awaiting Columbia report, congressmen say NASA must change 'huge

Posted on: Saturday, 23 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- The report into the shuttle Columbia disaster will look hauntingly familiar to those who lived through the agony of Challenger.

Technical defects and bad management at NASA brought down both ships. But this time, two key members of Congress indicate they are ready to force drastic changes in the safety of human spaceflight.

``It's going to require us to knock some heads and to affix some accountability and to make sure certain people are let go and make sure changes are made. There's nothing that resists change more than a huge blob of bureaucracy,'' said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics.

Both he and Sen. Bill Nelson of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation have been periodically briefed by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, led by retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr. The panel will issue its report on Tuesday, and it promises to be hard-hitting.

``What used to be a muscled and strong work force and agency, aimed at the future and aimed at conquering space, is what Admiral Gehman has been telling us is now a blob of bureaucracy that is incompetent at overseeing manned spaceflight,'' said Rohrabacher, a California Republican.

Nelson, a Florida Democrat who flew on Columbia just days before the Challenger disaster, notes worriedly: ``This is a situation where the entire human space program is on the line.''

The Columbia board spent nearly twice as many months as the Challenger probe and took a harder, harsher look at the entire shuttle program.

But the similarities in the tragedies are striking.

``What caused the destruction of Challenger 17 years ago was not only about cold weather and stiffened O-rings, but it was the lack of information flowing from engineers up to the top management,'' Nelson said.

``We're seeing some of the same thing come out in this report, and I think NASA's going to have to change its ways.''

The Gehman board will ``start to peel back the onion'' of not only the technical reasons for the Columbia disaster but also NASA's communication and decision-making breakdowns, the senator said. A more permanent investigation to follow up on those deeper issues is a good idea, too, he added.

Approximately 250 pages, the report will be full of details about the persistent shedding of fuel-tank foam insulation over the decades. In particular, it will focus on the 1 1/2-pound (0.675-kilogram) piece that broke off during Columbia's mid-January launch and punched a hole the size of a dinner plate in the edge of the left wing. Two weeks later, that hole let in atmospheric gases heated thousands of degrees, melting the wing from inside out.

Although engineers worried throughout the 16-day flight that the foam strike might have been lethal and wanted close-up spy satellite photos of the wing, they never told the top brass. They were too afraid -- too intimidated by NASA culture -- to speak up.

``In the NASA culture, engineers are consulted,'' said one of the board investigators, Douglas Osheroff, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. ``But, in fact, it's managers who make the decision and there are never votes. ... The chair of the mission management team needs to poll everyone in the room, not for a go or no-go. 'What is your opinion on this issue? Explain.'''

The head of Columbia's mission management team, Linda Ham, and other top-level officials dismissed the worry over possible foam damage as a maintenance nuisance and nothing more.

The prevailing theme at the infrequent management team meetings was: There's no use checking for damage, no use even telling the astronauts about all the foam-strike details, since there's nothing anyone can do.

``Now that's wrong. Can you imagine?'' Osheroff said. ``By saying there's nothing we can do, when Linda Ham had no idea whether that was true or not, that was bad. But the thing that's the scariest was how quickly NASA discounted the importance of this impact, of the foam, and that was serious.''

NASA could have launched space shuttle Atlantis to the rescue, although the risk would have been high and the chance of success questionable.

In response to five recommendations already issued by the investigation board, NASA will develop inspection and emergency repair procedures for astronauts and install better cameras on the spaceships to monitor debris strikes during the eight-minute climb to orbit. Preflight inspections of the vulnerable thermal armor on the leading edges of the shuttle wings also will be improved before shuttle flights resume, possibly as early as next spring.

The space agency also has arranged for spy satellite photography on a routine basis for spotting potential shuttle damage, and plans to eliminate all foam from the troublesome section of each external fuel tank.

These kinds of technical issues should be easy to resolve, compared with the organizational problems that lay at the heart of the Columbia disaster, a NASA culture that prevents low-level employees from speaking out and fosters intimidation, according to investigators.

Diane Vaughan, a Boston College sociologist and author of ``The Challenger Launch Decision,'' said it's clear that the changes made by NASA after the 1986 shuttle accident did not go far enough. The space agency's can-do attitude still existed to the extreme when Columbia disintegrated on Feb. 1, she said.

``Even after the Columbia blew up, we had people saying that they couldn't see how the foam could possibly have done it,'' Vaughan said. ``There's kind of an aura of invincibility there that I fear is an indicator that NASA doesn't really understand how its own organization is working.''

Vaughan is heartened that the 13-member board directed by Gehman has spent seven months looking into the Columbia accident, compared with the four-month Challenger inquiry. Gehman and his group of safety specialists and scientists have spent $20 million on the Columbia probe.

Many of the board's members are professional investigators, and their approach seems to be ``much more hands-on,'' Vaughan said. But she noted: ``The crux of the matter doesn't rest so much with the board's report, but what NASA does with it afterward.''

Observed Dr. Jonathan Clark, the widower of Columbia astronaut Dr. Laurel Clark: ``It's one thing to say it, but another to do it.''

While the Columbia investigators will cite many technical changes for shuttle safety, they will not push for the extra money needed to pay for it. That's up to policy makers, Gehman stressed. ``We're not going to give the nation the answer,'' he said. ``There will be a whole number of things that have to be resolved.''

NASA, in the meantime, has a task force to help decide when it's safe to fly again. But Richard Covey, one of the two retired astronauts in charge of that group, said it will focus on the technical aspects and probably leave the NASA culture issues for others to untangle.

Osheroff, the Stanford University physicist, fears NASA's return-to-flight task force lacks the background of the Columbia investigation board and that it may feel pressure from the space agency to launch again too soon.

Gehman has agreed to reconvene the investigation board in a year to assess NASA's progress, if asked to do so by Congress.

While there may be a couple of major surprises in Gehman's report, Rohrabacher said last week, ``we expect we know what the meat of the report will say.''

``I'm expecting a very tough report on NASA's organizational culture and I'm expecting a very technical report on the specific problems with the shuttle,'' the congressman said. ``What Admiral Gehman will present to us will clearly map out the necessity for some dramatic changes at NASA.''

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe does not expect big surprises, either. He has been warning employees for weeks to brace for a stern appraisal, followed by a congressional and media tongue-lashing.

``It's going to be really ugly,'' O'Keefe told Kennedy Space Center workers earlier this summer. ``They've really taken off the gloves, and it's going to get now converted to print so everybody can read it. Everybody can have dramatic readings of it for a while to come.''

Air Force Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, a board member, says the report will be ``a frank assessment of what we've seen has happened to NASA over the years and its current state.'' Even Gehman has hinted that the tone of the report may well be newsworthy, given its toughness.

Yes, it will be ugly.

The investigators have spent the past seven months ``turning over every rock,'' said Deal, ``and there are some pretty muddy ones.''

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On the Net:

Columbia Accident Investigation Board: www.caib.us

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