On Tuesday, the investigation phase of the shuttle Columbia accident ends–and the future of NASA resumes.
For nearly seven months, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has looked back to Feb. 1, when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on a clear morning, streaking to its end across the brilliant blue sky of east Texas.
As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board releases its 250-page report Tuesday, NASA can begin to look to the future–from the short-term effort to return the remaining three orbiters to flight to the long-term outlook for human exploration of space.
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“This is as big as 1969,” said Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University and the author of several books on the space program. That’s the year that a task force was assembled to map out the post-Apollo vision for NASA.
“This will determine what we do in space for the next 50 years,” McCurdy said. “It’s kind of the end on the technical side, which we’ve been pretty well saturated with.
“But it’s the beginning on the managerial and policy side, and there’s no guarantee that the momentum will be sustained,” he said.
The board’s report will outline the cause of the accident. Tests determined that a 1.67-pound chunk of insulating foam flew off the shuttle’s external tank about 82 seconds after launch, smashing into the spacecraft’s left wing and creating a hole big enough to allow superhot gases to penetrate the wing during re-entry.
But what NASA officials, policymakers and agency watchers are waiting for is a definitive chronology and analysis of what created an agency environment that allowed the foam strike to be discounted by mission managers.
A `culture’ of dismissal
Retired Adm. Harold Gehman, who has led the board from the beginning, has expressed awe at the conviction within the agency that the foam couldn’t possibly pose a danger to a shuttle or a crew. Time and again during the course of the investigation, Gehman and other board members have questioned NASA’s “culture” and the program’s safety organization, communications structure and ability to assess risk.
“I fully expect that what we will read will be a very thorough, comprehensive and exhaustive treatment of what they believe were the contributors that led to this terrific tragedy,” said agency administrator Sean O’Keefe.
“I’m fully prepared for the fact that it’s going to be a not terribly satisfying read, but at the same time an honest straight-up assessment of what they believe they have found and what the findings portend,” O’Keefe said.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who flew aboard Columbia in 1986 while a member of the House, also is expecting a brutally honest assessment.
“I think the Gehman commission is going to spank NASA pretty hard,” Nelson said.
“I don’t expect them to get on the budgetary issues, which are a major part of the problem, but I do expect them to get into the culture–the lack of communication from the bottom up, the lack of attention to safety, the atmosphere of intimidation instead of encouragement of getting concerns expressed to the top management,” he said.
For example, e-mails disclosed since the accident show that lower-level engineers worried that the foam strike had seriously damaged the shuttle and sought more information, including satellite imagery. However, higher-ranking officials in the agency never sought the photos because they didn’t think they were necessary.
Technical fixes addressed
It is the culture issue, much more than the technical fixes, that could be the uphill climb for NASA.
While the recommendations already released by the board are daunting–they include finding a way for astronauts to repair in orbit the reinforced carbon-carbon panels–they are engineering problems.
David Goldston, majority staff director for the House Science Committee, which will open hearings on the report next week, said the culture question is the biggest unknown in the report.
“I think it is important to get a sense of what they mean by culture and to start putting some meat on that terminology, so people can figure out what to do about it,” he said.
The first change McCurdy said he would make is to emphasize the experimental nature of the space shuttle.
Language becomes a part of an institutional culture, he said, and even using the word “shuttle” implies a consistency and reliability that simple doesn’t exist in the spacecraft.