• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Columbia Investigation Panel's Report Contains 'Echoes of Challenger' Tragedy

Posted on: Wednesday, 27 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Aug. 27--The causes of the Columbia tragedy were foreshadowed 17 years ago in a report by the presidential panel that investigated the Challenger explosion.

People on the commission who investigated the explosion and those familiar with its report said Tuesday they were struck by similarities in the Columbia report, which included a chapter drawing parallels between the two. It even quoted former NASA astronaut Sally Ride saying there were "echoes of Challenger in Columbia."

"Why would I read it?" asked Don Kutyna, a retired Air Force general and member of the panel that investigated the Challenger disaster. "It's just a Xerox copy of our report."

Kutyna was exaggerating -- the new report digs far deeper than the previous one -- but much of the criticism in the two reports is unnervingly similar: schedule pressures overriding safety concerns, a culture that stifles dissent, a lack of deference to engineers' expertise and safety systems weakened by budget cuts.

Eighty-seven flights after the 1986 explosion of Challenger, the panel investigating Columbia's disintegration over Earth in February wondered how the lessons learned back then were "undone over time."

"Despite all the post-Challenger changes at NASA and the agency's notable achievements since, the causes of the institutional failure responsible for Challenger have not been fixed," the report said.

It added that unless the problems are fixed, "the scene is set for another accident."

The most specific problem involved unexpected anomalies that became routine and accepted: erosion of a crucial O-ring component on Challenger and shedding foam debris on Columbia. The phenomenon of becoming inured to a problem is known to sociologists as "normalization of deviance."

The Columbia report chapter on the two tragedies begins with that parallel.

It says the central questions of both investigations involved why NASA continued to fly in the face of such known problems and why NASA managers concluded those problems weren't a safety threat despite the concerns of their engineers.

"I think the strikingly similar way NASA managers analyzed information at the time of Challenger and now is what disturbed the board the most," said Howard McCurdy, a professor of public affairs at American University in Washington. "I think that culture is why they said they have to 'fix the problem that caused the problem.""

McCurdy pointed to one disclosure in the report as the perfect example of NASA's culture. Top shuttle manager Linda Ham confided in an e-mail that foam breaking off at launch time was a problem, but her concern didn't involve Columbia's safety. It involved the effect that solving the problem would have on NASA's flight schedule.

The report compared her decision to reject a request for telescopes or satellites to capture images of possible damage to Columbia's wing to NASA managers' decision in 1986 to launch Challenger despite concerns about O-ring erosion.

But Hans Mark, a University of Texas professor who was NASA's deputy director in the early 1980s, said the report's emphasis on culture is wrong. He said the real issue lies with high-level management.

"The two reports are quite similar because in both cases, the people who made decisions did so knowing the problems could cause catastrophic failures," said Mark.

The Columbia report adds that the echoes went further than the foam debris and O-ring problems. Though both were pinpointed as the proximate causes of the two accidents, each was grounded in failures of NASA's organizational system.

Diane Vaughan, a professor of sociology at Boston College and author of The Challenger Launch Decision, noted the report recommends changes that could fix NASA's cultural problems, but that it rightly distinguishes between those problems and others affected by the political process, the pressures that come with ambitious goals and inadequate resources.

But Roger Launius, former NASA chief historian, isn't optimistic anything will change.

"These are exactly the same sort of institutional criticisms we saw in the aftermath of the Challenger being presented here," said Launius. "They weren't fixed then (so) what (should) lead us to believe they'll get fixed now?"

-----

To see more of the Houston Chronicle, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.HoustonChronicle.com

(c) 2003, Houston Chronicle. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

More News in this Category