Bureaucracy reportedly hindered shuttle safety

Bureaucracy reportedly hindered shuttle safety

Associated Press

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Cape Canaveral, Fla. — NASA inspectors charged with making sure space shuttles are safe to fly were forced to buy their own tools and prevented from making spot checks, a Columbia accident investigator says.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Duane Deal said NASA’s program that oversees shuttle inspections would “take a pretty big hit” in the Columbia accident report due out in late August.

Deal, one of 13 members of the board investigating the cause of the shuttle accident, says he obtained crucial information by offering confidentiality to the 72 National Aeronautics and Space Administration and contractor employees he interviewed over months.

“They’d be fired” if their bosses found out what they confided, Deal said. “It is not an exaggeration.”

He said his findings seemed to indicate that some NASA managers were “perhaps out of touch with the realities of manned spaceflight” when it came to the level of shuttle inspections needed.

Deal said that nearly nine out of 10 workers interviewed said the investigation board should review the space agency’s quality assurance program at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and other NASA installations. That unit provides oversight to ensure safe shuttle flight operations.

Mike Rein, a NASA spokesman at Kennedy, declined to respond directly to Deal’s assessments but noted that ever since the accident, the space agency had been reviewing practices in all areas and making improvements where necessary. “We’re working it hard and we think it’s especially important in the area of safety,” he said.

Deal, who has taken part in about a dozen investigations into military aircraft and rocket accidents, said NASA quality assurance inspectors were not allowed to do everything in their job descriptions. For instance, he said, they were not allowed to do spot checks, “to just wander around and see what you can see.”

He blames the NASA hierarchy for this “fairly serious” problem.

Bureaucracy also is the reason NASA quality assurance inspectors were denied the necessary tools to do their jobs, Deal said. “They were supposed to have a nine-time magnifier and they only had a three, and it was taking them months to get a nine-time magnifier, so they went down and bought one at Home Depot,” he said.