38 replies to this topic

[Lazarus Long]

There are two significant aspects that are evolving out of the Columbia Shuttle Investigation, the first is represented by this articulate call that I for one second to begin the development of the Next generation of Shuttle Spacecraft; the first article of this post.

The second two articles are more subtle and represent the initial findings of the first field tests of the predominant theory of what caused the destruction of the shuttle and that is not just represented by the specific facts of the second article but by a process of introspection that the vast majority of people involved have to accomplish because we are a culture suffering from massive denial of how we have come to depend upon a "White Elephant” with respect to our own ethics and systems.

I am afraid more and more I find support for my initial suspicion, the problem with the Columbia accident is that in legal terms it was no "accident," even in the best light it is an example of negligent homicide. And any attempt to spin and cover up the fundamental flaws in the bureaucracy that have lead to this event and remove even the limited defense of negligence makes the complicit denial of such willful autocratic irresponsibility culpable of an additional conspiracy to cover up this homicide, deny justice through obstruction, and preserve a fundamentally corrupt system more interested with its own promotion and preservation rather than the defined goals for its existence.

To NASA's credit I do not think they have all lost their way in this respect, nor in fact are they behaving now as an organization worse than any other of the corporate ERON mindset, in fact they can be said to be exemplary of the best of self "policing" policy & procedures that can be found anywhere in today’s society. What is frightening however is that they are clearly far and away the exception proving the rule and make the shift to the Enron (type) Military Industrial Mindset more dangerous and suspect as we go forward. The argument is going to be made soon that NASA can no longer serve the public interest as the demands of “secrecy, security, and inherent risk” require this technology to become the responsibility of the Military. This complacency should be resisted with all possible effort by we the public. It would not be an example of progress but a statement of failure should We the People allow this to occur.

NASA should be at least commended for doing as MUCH as possible to counter the implicit claims I am making by not simply seeking the truth of failure and responsibility but by also being willing to realize that fault demands not simple retribution but change.

Can we as the citizens, taxpayers, and TRUE beneficiaries get beyond the guilt game and rise to this challenge by not simply demanding sacrificial “head’s to roll” but a commitment to the fundamental purpose for which the organization exists and go forward with a renewed commitment to this common purpose?

To say the system is at fault is not a simplistic indictment of that system that excuses its elimination, but a collective acknowledgement of our shared responsibility by making irrational demands upon the technology and individuals we depend upon to carry out our collective will. Change is called for but we should resist change that in fact will make progress harder in favor of making it easier to cover up such problems in the future. NASA is facing a mid life crisis, privatization of real Orbital and Outer Space is still nascent but it is time we also took heart from the intent of our own pioneers in this endeavor and allowed those that go forth to bear a commensurate amount of authority to go with their true responsibility for decisions made while on the mission and with the ALL the planning that goes into the mission.

LL/kxs


http://www.chron.com...outlook/1916531
While shuttle is grounded, rethink spaceflight
By DAVID C. ACHESON
May 19, 2003, 6:54PM

After the conscientious and thorough report of the Gehman commission on the space shuttle Columbia disaster, critical questions remain: When (and how) can the National Aeronautics and Space Administration resume manned spaceflight? And is manned flight necessary to NASA's scientific mission? The answer to the first question: not for a long time. The answer to the second: probably not.

The Gehman panel has indicated that the accident probably was caused by the impact of insulation tiles from the external fuel tank on the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing. Tile shedding has been a problem in the shuttle program, but how to fix it? Develop a shed-proof adhesive? Unlikely. Redesign the heat-shield system? That would be more likely to solve the problem, but it would need a multiyear development and testing program. Then there are the weaknesses in the shuttle system that had been concerns for years and that ought to be addressed while the shuttle program is grounded for reworking of the heat shield. Design and develop a successor space transportation system to replace the shuttle? Many years away.

The questions that have been raised about the culture at NASA are troubling. Will any fix of the shuttle be compromised by wishful analysis of what it will take to return it to flight as quickly as possible? This was the root cause of the Challenger accident, and people at NASA have suggested that familiarity with these problems and anomalies has bred complacency.

One may ask why NASA did not have a successor to the shuttle under development; NASA counters that some military and commercial aircraft fly 30 years or more after introduction and that the shuttle ought to be able to fly until 2010 or later. But those aircraft are not subjected to the intense stress that the shuttle experiences. A better analogy might involve the U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird supersonic high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. The U-2 missions have suffered numerous operational casualties and have been regarded by the pilots as too fragile to be safe. The vastly superior SR-71 was superseded by the deployment of surveillance satellites that could see more, notably the KH-9 and KH-11.

But durability of materials is not the sole criterion, important though it is. When it becomes clear that a given technology is not up to the performance demanded of it, a successor must be ready to go onstage or at least be in the wings. A successor to the shuttle would appear to be at least 10 years away.

NASA and the president would do well to take advantage of the shuttle's inevitable downtime to have a senior scientific panel independent of NASA consider America's scientific goals in space and whether they need to be served by manned spacecraft. Unmanned, highly instrumented spacecraft can do a great deal that manned missions cannot. They can fly beyond the Van Allen Belt without fear of fatal radiation from solar flares; circumnavigate planets; take readings of temperature, radiation, gravity, topography; and even produce soil samples. They can fly at a fraction of the cost of a shuttle flight, and all at no risk to humans. The 30-year performance of the unmanned Pioneer spacecraft, originally thought to have a lifetime of 18 months, should tell us something.

Manned flight devours the NASA budget and starves the unmanned missions, which are far more capable in space science, all for reasons that seem to stem from the mystique of the astronaut program. That mystique centers on the moon landings, which originated in President Kennedy's desire to one-up the Soviet space program and beat Moscow to the moon. NASA has been under pressure ever since to capitalize on those triumphs.

But the mystique is showing its age. It is delivering diminishing returns and not justifying the sort of confidence people once had in the space program. While the obligations of the United States to its partners in the International Space Station are far from trivial, there are overriding realities that all partners should accept.

It is time to take a mature, unemotional look at where manned spaceflight came from and where it is going, and with what technology and at what cost. Then either set it on a new path, with technology we can trust, or turn toward unmanned space science and set it free of its junior partnership.

Acheson, a Washington policy analyst and former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was a member of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident in 1986.


http://www.nytimes.c...nal/30SHUT.html
Mockup Wing Is Torn by Foam in Shuttle Test
By JOHN SCHWARTZ with MATTHEW L. WALD

HOUSTON, May 29 — A piece of insulating foam shot at a mocked-up shuttle wing opened a long slit in its leading edge, which may help to explain what caused the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, investigators said today.

In the experiment, which was conducted for the independent board investigating the shuttle disaster, researchers shot a 1.67-pound chunk of foam from a gas cannon at a full-size model of the wing's leading edge at about 530 miles per hour. They were trying to recreate the circumstances at the Columbia's launching, when a piece of insulating foam from the external tank slammed into the shuttle wing at similar speed.

The impact produced a 22-inch-long gap, ranging in width from the thickness of a dime to a quarter inch, a spokesman for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said this evening.

The test was not as realistic as possible; the target was made of fiberglass, not the material used in shuttles, reinforced carbon-carbon. Carbon-carbon, or R.C.C., is in short supply but will be used in a later test, said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Tyrone Woodyard of the Air Force. Fiberglass can withstand more forceful strikes without shattering, materials experts say. But investigators were excited by the test.

"If I was a gambling man, I'd bet it'll severely damage or perhaps even shatter a more brittle material such as the R.C.C.," said one of the commission's investigators. Another investigator said, however, that the main value would be to calibrate the testing mechanism, getting the speed right and the angle of impact, in this case 20 degrees, without using up scarce carbon-carbon samples.

In some ways, a narrow gap would be a more promising result than a shattered panel. Investigators note that before breaking up on Feb. 1, the Columbia entered the atmosphere far west of the California coast, but held together until it was over Central Texas, a sign that the breach in the wing must have been small and that the damage progressed relatively slowly.

That is why an expert outside the investigation suggested that today's experiment had solved the mystery. "That's the answer," said Paul A. Czysz, a professor emeritus at Parks College of Engineering and Aviation at St. Louis University, when told of the test results. A slit the size of one created in the test would let in a stream of gas three times as hot as a blowtorch." My God, that's like a barn door at those temperatures," he said.

Investigators have already concluded that a hole in the shuttle's left wing let in the superheated gases that destroyed the wing, and they knew that a piece of foam struck the wing on launching. But they would not have been able to link the two convincingly without experimental evidence, and some of them had been worried that the experiments might not produce any wing damage.

Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., who heads the investigation board, has repeatedly tried to lower expectations about the experimental results. He has said the board's recommendations will not be be based on absolute proof that the foam caused the hole.

Colonel Woodyard said the tests, which were conducted by the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, created a gap between a leading-edge panel and a part that fits between panels, called a T-seal for its shape. The impact appears to have shoved the seal sideways, exposing the inner structure of the wing behind it.

Professor Czysz suggested that the leading edge panels and seals shifted from the impact because the wing would not have been designed to resist a blow that exerted sideways pressure. "That just goes to show you that the thing you least expect to happen, will," he said.

A NASA engineer working with the investigators said the results were impressive but could not be conclusive until the tests were performed again using reinforced carbon-carbon. "All of the analysis and investigating and theorizing in the world just goes right down the tubes as soon as you have experimental information," he said. "The hardware doesn't lie."


http://story.news.ya...vestigation&e=1
Columbia Probe Has Possible Breakthrough
Fri May 30, 2:07 AM ET Science - AP
By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - In what could be a breakthrough in the Columbia accident inquiry, foam shot at a fiberglass mock-up of a space shuttle wing knocked loose a seal — the same type of piece that investigators believe was damaged during liftoff.

"We're not drawing any conclusions," said Air Force Lt. Col. Woody Woodyard, a spokesman for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "We've got to analyze the data and evaluate all the data before we can draw any conclusions."

But he described Thursday's result as "significant."

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board suspects a seal along the leading edge of Columbia's left wing was damaged when struck by a chunk of foam insulation that broke off the fuel tank during launch.

In the first and only shot of the day at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, a 1.67-pound piece of real space shuttle foam was fired at the fiberglass leading edge at 533 mph. The foam blasted through the 33-foot barrel of a nitrogen-pressurized gun toward pretend panel No. 6 on the leading edge, tilted at a 20-degree angle.

Upon impact, the adjacent seal lifted and pulled toward panel No. 7, leaving an opening about 22 inches long, Woodyard said. The width of the gap ranged from the thickness of a dime to more than a quarter-inch.

All the parts in the abbreviated leading edge were fiberglass and came from the never-launched shuttle prototype Enterprise (news - web sites), which is housed at the Smithsonian Institution (news - web sites) in Washington, Woodyard said. In highly anticipated testing in June, researchers plan to shoot foam at real carbon-composite wing pieces that actually flew in space.

Fiberglass is about 2 1/2 times more resilient than the carbon composite material that makes up real wing panels and seals, Woodyard said. That would suggest that a real panel or seal would have been even more damaged by a foam strike.

Thursday's result was within impact predictions, Woodyard said. Earlier this month, researchers in San Antonio fired foam at the silica-glass thermal tiles that cover much of the space shuttles, but little if any damage resulted — also no surprise.

On Wednesday, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said a mystery object that floated away from the shuttle on Flight Day 2 back in January almost certainly was half of a leading-edge seal. Such a long, narrow slit would be enough to let in the scorching gases of atmospheric re-entry, and that hole likely would have grown as the shuttle continued its descent, enough to cause its breakup over Texas on Feb. 1.

All seven astronauts were killed, just minutes short of their Florida homecoming.

The board's chairman, retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., has been reluctant to pin the blame on the foam strike, saying he lacks hard proof. He also has stressed that the impact tests in San Antonio will show whether foam could damage a shuttle wing — not whether it actually did. But others on the 13-member panel are convinced the foam led to the shuttle's destruction.

A final report by the board is expected by the end of July.

___

On the Net:

Columbia Accident Investigation Board: http://www.caib.us

[Lazarus Long]

I have noticed that links to the New York times and a few other online newspares and Journals appear to hav bult in expiration dates so I will will start posting teh entire article so as to prevent the problem of limited future access.
LL/kxs

http://www.nytimes.c...ial/08SHUT.html

Costs and Risk Clouding Plans to Fix Shuttles
By JOHN SCHWARTZ with MATTHEW L. WALD

HOUSTON, June 7 — It took thousands of people tramping across hundreds of miles of Texas countryside to recover the wreckage of the space shuttle Columbia and thousands more to analyze the parts and data that were crucial for diagnosing the accident that doomed it. But that was the easy part.

NASA is already working to fix the hardware problems that contributed to the shuttle's fiery break-up on Feb. 1. But the independent board that is investigating the accident has made it clear that the space agency itself also needs fixing. And that will be much harder to do.

Engineers are moving swiftly to prepare the remaining three shuttles to return to space, pressing ahead with a redesign of key components of the external fuel tank and discussing new ways to apply foam insulation and to repair the orbiter in flight.

The board has determined, however, that the accident was largely caused by failures of decision making and communications at NASA that amount to systemic trouble in the space agency. The board is getting ready to call for changes that would require a major infusion of money to rejuvenate the program.

But officials at NASA and Congressional supporters of space flight fear that reviving the shuttle program will require more money and zeal than Washington can muster in a time of soaring budget deficits and a new aversion in the American public to any risk of human life.

The 13-member board, which is headed by Harold W. Gehman Jr., a retired admiral, has finished its field work and is moving from Houston to Washington in coming days to finish writing its report. A draft outline was described by board members this week. The findings, which the board hopes to issue in late July, are expected to fuel a broad national debate on the future of American manned space flight.

The board has concluded that the shuttle was destroyed during re-entry on Feb. 1 when hot gases entered the left wing through a hole at the leading edge. The hole was probably created when a piece of insulating foam fell from the external fuel tank and struck the wing about 81 seconds into launching.

Some foam had fallen on every shuttle launching. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration recognized a problem, and had already twice redesigned a structure known as the bipod ramp, part of a fixture that attached the orbiter to the tank. A third ramp design was in the works at the time of the Columbia's flight.

But large pieces had fallen so often without serious harm that NASA no longer regarded foam as a dangerous problem, investigators found. The investigation also revealed chronic problems with the way foam was applied to the external tanks, especially on the bipod ramp. Technicians who dissected foam from other tanks' bipod ramps were surprised to discover gaps inside, and even a piece of duct tape.

The panel also found that NASA had not paid enough attention to everyday factors, like aging and exposure to a combination of rain and flaking paint from the launching tower, that had weakened the carbon composite panels that formed the leading edges of the shuttle's wings.

None of these problems would prevent a return to flight, Admiral Gehman has said. The board issued its first recommendations on April 17, and NASA has begun to respond. The board wants NASA to monitor the reinforced carbon-carbon panels on leading wing edges to guard against deterioration. NASA has begun looking into new tests for the panels that do not require damaging them.

Following the board's recommendation, NASA renegotiated an agreement with the National Imagery and Mapping Agency for surveillance of the shuttle by satellite on every mission.

Anticipating other board recommendations, NASA engineers are discussing ways to launch the shuttle only in daytime, a change that would provide better opportunities to watch for falling debris but would sharply limit the available launching windows for reaching the International Space Station.

Engineers have drawn up plans for the shuttle to perform a back-flip on every approach to the space station — a maneuver that shuttle crews have practiced in a simulator — so astronauts there can photograph its underside and quickly send the images to the ground. In the future, the shuttle will probably carry a repair kit for fixing damage from launching.

Board members said they were unlikely to recommend radical measures like a complete redesign of the orbiter's wings or a new thermal protection system. In fact, several board members have marveled that the Columbia flew smoothly for thousands of miles even as bits of its wing and insulation were shearing away.

While the cost of the changes the board will propose remains uncertain, estimates have soared into the billions of dollars. NASA officials say they cannot estimate expenses with any precision until they see the recommendations, but Admiral Gehman has said the board "will not be constrained by cost." Some possible recommendations, like requiring that a second shuttle be readied to fly during missions as a rescue vehicle, could add billions to NASA's needs.

NASA officials said soon after the accident that they hoped to be able to return shuttles to space by the end of the year, but now say that they do not actually expect to see a launching before next year. Delay beyond that is a dire option, they say, because the shuttle is crucial for resupplying the space station with heavy essentials like water and the materials that will be used to build on to the station.

An Agency's Erosions

The Gehman board will conclude that many of the shuttle's problems stem from an erosion in the space agency's decision-making process and safety culture, according to the draft outline of its report. The structure of the report, as indicated by the outline, shows that management lapses are seen by the board as a crucial factor in the accident — within a larger context of tight budgets and administrative upheaval.

In the 1980's, early in the shuttle program, the possibility of falling foam striking an orbiter during launching had been classified as "Criticality 1," a problem that could cause the loss of the spacecraft or its crew. But over time, the investigation revealed, NASA came to treat the loose foam as a maintenance issue and not a threat.

One NASA engineer who has worked with the external tanks said safety warnings had been minimized within the culture of the space agency. Speaking on condition of anonymity because of fears of retribution from his employers, he said that when an engineer pointed to possible flaws "you get a lot of other people coming back and saying, `It's fine,' because if you change it, it means it's wrong. And nothing can be wrong, because we're safe to fly."

In early 2000, Joe Lusk, then the chief engineer for external tanks at NASA'S Marshall Space Flight Center, wrote two memorandums listing some 30 "high risk" problems involving the external tanks, including "material deficiency" and "improper application" of foam. Those documents, investigators say, have proved to be such a concise diagnosis of the problems that eventually crippled Columbia that the board has used them as a checklist.

The board also found signs of complacency even during the crucial final safety review before launching. One board member, Steven B. Wallace, said during a hearing in April that the flight readiness review had become a rubber stamp.

"The work is kind of done before these meetings," Mr. Wallace said.

The NASA engineer who said it was difficult to raise problems added that that the reviews had become an "orchestrated event" in which "you're precluded from bringing anything new to the table."

Admiral Gehman said his investigators had found "missed signals going up and going down" NASA's management ladder. During Columbia's fatal flight, the foam strike was studied and then dismissed by managers as a maintenance issue that was not a threat to the orbiter. Shuttle managers then squelched efforts by lower-level engineers to get spy satellite photos of the shuttle or try other ways to get better information about the problem.

Just how difficult it will be to change engrained habits has been suggested by Diane Vaughan, a sociologist from Boston College who specializes in recognizing risk and improving communication. Professor Vaughan, author of an in-depth examination of the loss of the Challenger, which exploded 73 seconds after its launching in 1986, and the lessons for organizations that deal with high risk, has been working recently with the Gehman board. But during her testimony before the board in April, she said her 1996 book had brought her publicity and requests for advice from many organizations, but one was conspicuously silent.

"Everybody called," she said. "My high school boyfriend called. But NASA never called."


Uncertain Future

The board's final report will look beyond the shuttle program to the increasingly unfavorable environment it has faced for the past decade. John Logsdon, a board member who is the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said the board had developed a list of 17 possible factors that were "adding uncertainty to the operating environment."

One item on that list is NASA's shrinking budget. The $15.5 billion that the administration is asking for the 2004 fiscal year is what Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, calls a "tread-water budget" that does not allow any grand vision. Since 1966, when NASA was racing for the moon, the agency's budget as a percentage of government spending has dropped 84 percent. Mr. Barton estimated that if the space program had maintained its early level, it would have a budget today of $100 billion.

The board is also examining the Space Flight Operations Contract, which consolidated virtually all contractor activity for the shuttle program under a single corporation, United Space Alliance, owned by the Boeing Company and the Lockheed Martin Corporation. The move to privatize much of the space program has resulted in fewer safety inspections and less direct oversight from NASA, investigators said. The contract may be "inadvertently rewarding the wrong kind of behavior," by promoting speed over safety, Admiral Gehman said in a recent board briefing.

"If you're going to get paid bonuses for launching on time," he wondered, "then how many bonuses do you get for slowing the launch down?"

Corporate consolidation in the aerospace industry has increased efficiencies but "at the high cost of decreased competition" and a smaller population of space workers to support new initiatives, according to a somber report written last year by the Baker Institute at Rice University. The companies, the report said, have cut research and development and let their space activities dwindle to those tied directly to government money, which "have not been steady or dependable in the recent past."

If the space program is to rise from its doldrums, the report concluded, the government will have to make space a significantly higher priority.

The Problem of Risk

Some experts believe that part of the reason for the space program's decline is that Americans' tolerance for risk has diminished. In the 23 years since Columbia first flew, the use of seat belts and bicycle helmets has increased, the risk of death per 100 million miles traveled on the nation's highways has fallen by half, and public sensitivity toward risks of every kind, from vaccine side effects to loss of life in wartime, has grown.

"It's a psychology of aging yuppies, of being able to live forever, provided the right diet exercise and technology," said Charles A. Hurley, vice president of the National Safety Council.

Admiral Gehman said the public may be less willing to see major losses in shuttle flights now that they are no longer novel. The public's view, he said, may be that "you keep going up and down and up and down, 100 times, and O.K., you've proved you can do that, now why are we killing people?"

The risks are starting to collide with the realities in Congress, where a few voices now say they are unacceptable.

"I think we pitched the space program as a no-risk deal, and people started to take it for granted," said Mr. Barton, one of the few engineers in the House of Representatives. Mr. Barton has called for the shuttle to be remotely-operated as a cargo carrier, with no astronauts, until a replacement spacecraft is developed.

"We've lost 14 lives in two accidents," he said. "I've been in Congress for both of those accident investigations, and I don't want to be in Congress for a third one."

Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who is chairman of the House committee that oversees NASA, said part of the problem might be the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which made everyone more aware of risk. A Capitol Hill aide, who asked not to be named because he did not want to overshadow the lawmaker he works for, said that in NASA's recent history "nobody made people think about risk, in a period when people were less and less open to risk. That's a combination that makes it difficult for NASA."

NASA pioneers say the agency has to regain the passion for space and safety that guided them. T. J. O'Malley, who pushed the button that launched John Glenn into orbit on Feb. 20, 1962, and whose last mission was the initial launching of Columbia in 1981, said problems came up all the time for space pioneers, but "you can't downplay anything."

"Yes, we made mistakes," he said. "And we corrected our mistakes, and we made damned sure we didn't make them again."

But is NASA the agency to make those corrections? Dr. Logsdon said the answer depended on which NASA was being talked about.

"Is the agency that existed on Jan. 31 of this year the one that can do it?" Dr. Logsdon said. "The answer is likely 'no.' I think we can identify those things that need to change so that we can answer `yes.' "

[Bruce Klein]

I have noticed that links to the New York times and a few other online newspares and Journals appear to hav bult in expiration dates so I will will start posting teh entire article so as to prevent the problem of limited future access.

I've noticed similar problems.. good idea.

[Lazarus Long]

NASA Releases E-Mail to Doomed Shuttle Crew
Mon Jun 30, 4:35 PM ET Science - Reuters
http://story.news.ya...pace_shuttle_dc
By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Shuttle Columbia commander Rick Husband and pilot William McCool knew that insulating foam hit the craft after liftoff, but were told it was "not even worth mentioning," according to an e-mail released on Monday.

Investigators have said the foam strike seconds after launch is the most probable cause of the Feb. 1 disaster, in which the craft disintegrated over Texas as it re-entered the atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

The message from Steve Stich, a space shuttle flight director at NASA (news - web sites)'s Johnson Space Center, sent on Jan. 23, aimed to prepare Husband and McCool for any possible media questions about the foam strike.

"There is one item that I would like to make you aware of," Stich wrote. "This item is not even worth mentioning other than wanting to make sure that you are not surprised by it in a question from a reporter."

Stich went on to say that photo analysis showed that foam insulation from the shuttle's external fuel tank had fallen onto the shuttle's left wing "in the area of transition from Chine to Main Wing" -- where the shuttle's shape flares from nose to wing -- but was no cause for concern.

"The impact appears to be totally on the lower surface and no particles are seen to traverse over the upper surface of the wing," he wrote. "Experts have reviewed the high-speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage," he said, referring to the reinforced carbon-carbon material at the wing's leading edge and the shuttle's heat-shielding tiles.

"We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry," Stich added.

Husband wrote back, joking about one phrase in the e-mail: "Thanks a million Steve! ... I saw the word Chine below and thought it was 'China.' I guess it's believable that you might meet someone from China by the name of Main Wing ."

Soon after the accident, NASA released e-mail exchanges among various U.S. space agency engineers, questioning the impact of the foam strike, but agency officials concluded that it posed no threat to the orbiter.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the independent panel investigating the tragedy, has said the foam strike damaged the reinforced carbon-carbon at just the point mentioned in Stich's e-mail, allowing superheated gas to penetrated the shuttle on re-entry, ultimately tearing the ship apart.

The board's final report is due in July. Among other recommendations, board chairman Harold Gehman has said the panel will urge that NASA find a way to repair shuttle damage while in orbit and to rescue the crew.

[Lazarus Long]

When political bureaucrats micromanage the truth even the scientists teaching them will be at risk and most certainly all of us that seek to push the envelope that holds back our future.

The real danger to all advancement is from behind when lesser minds attempt to manipulate data so as to protect their postitions, special interests, or perhaps any possibly imaginable cause. Trying to second guess learning and truth appears to always lead to disaster.

Those who claim the "Need to Know" logic over which they hold the key are a threat to the survival of all humanity. It is about power not simple benign paternalistic protection of us.

No one is protected by ignorance, ever...

LL/kxs



This undated image released by NASA shows heat damage caused by a small leak through a seam into part of the shuttle Atlantis' left wing. It suffered a breach during its May 2000 fiery return to earth from the International Space Station, allowing superheated gases to scorch components inside the spacecraft in a scenario hauntingly similar to the suspected cause of the Columbia disaster more than two years later, according to internal NASA documents. (AP Photo/NASA)

NASA: Gases Penetrated Atlantis in 2000
http://story.news.ya...lier_breach&e=1
Wed Jul 9, 3:30 AM ET Science - AP
By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Superheated gases penetrated the left wing of the space shuttle Atlantis (news- web sites) during its fiery return to Earth nearly three years before a larger breach in nearly the same location is believed to have doomed the shuttle Columbia and its seven astronauts, internal NASA (news - web sites) documents show.

Atlantis suffered no irreparable damage after the May 2000 episode, and, after repairs, it returned to flight four months later. But after the incident, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ordered fleetwide changes in how employees install protective wing panels and sealants.

The small leak through a seam in Atlantis' wing during its return from the International Space Station (news - web sites) was disclosed in documents sought by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act. NASA blamed the breach on an improperly installed seal that became dislodged, opening a quarter-inch gap between insulating materials.

The mission commander, James Halsell, and two other astronauts on the mission told the AP they do not remember NASA ever informing them about the breach, which was discovered after Atlantis landed. Halsell, a shuttle veteran, is coordinating NASA's effort to return the shuttle fleet to space.

Some experts expressed surprise that hot gases generated by the heat of re-entry, which can reach 3,000 degrees, ever had leaked inside a shuttle's wing. Although protective wing panels have been found damaged, even cracked, the Columbia disaster was widely believed outside NASA to have been the first such breach.

"Very little information about the flaws of the tile system ever make it into the open literature, so those of us who work on this ... seldom hear much about serious problems such as this one," said Steven P. Schneider, an associate professor at Purdue University's Aerospace Sciences Lab. "I've never heard this sort of leak occurred."

NASA said it later determined Atlantis' exterior wing panels were not damaged by the overheating despite being discolored from the high temperatures. Aluminum structures inside the wing "looked outstanding," NASA said.

Other parts immediately behind the wing panels were covered with a glassy material, apparently from melted insulating tile and other sealant material.

NASA spokesman James Hartsfield said all damaged parts were replaced.

The space agency formally reported the damage to its Program Requirements Control Board, an internal safety oversight body, which ordered fleetwide improvements in the installation of sealant materials before Atlantis was allowed to launch for its mission in September 2000. Atlantis is expected to be the next shuttle into space when NASA is cleared to resume flights.

The superheated gases never penetrated deep within Atlantis' wing, and a spokesman for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Woody Woodyard, said there was no serious threat to the crew or the spacecraft.

NASA blamed the Atlantis damage on improper installation of a seal between two protective panels on the shuttle's left wing, "called a butterfly gap filler," at the Boeing Co. plant in Palmdale, Calif., during an overhaul of Atlantis in late 1997. The mistake went unnoticed during subsequent inspections because the part could not be seen without removing protective panels, NASA said.

Engineers found the damage on Atlantis while investigating the mystery of a partially melted insulating tile. Removing two protective wing panels nearby and peering inside the wing structure, they determined the dislodged seal had created "a substantial flow path," according to NASA's internal reports. The gap measured just over one-quarter inch, about the width of a paperclip or a No. 2 pencil.

The protective panels, insulators and other hardware inside the left wing "shows various signs of overheating," NASA reported. Photographs showed charred and scorched components, including parts made from titanium and inconel, two of the most heat-resistant materials on the shuttle. Titanium melts about 3,000 degrees; inconel melts about 2,550 degrees.

The board investigating Columbia's Feb. 1 breakup determined that superheated gases penetrated protective wing panels that had been loosened by insulating foam that broke off its external fuel tank on liftoff and smashed against the shuttle. Investigators believe searing re-entry temperatures melted key structures inside until Columbia tumbled out of control and broke apart at close to 13,000 miles per hour, killing its seven astronauts.

Investigators remain uncertain over the size of the gap that permitted hot gases to penetrate Columbia's wing. But they believe it was as small as a one-inch slit running vertically up the wing for nearly 30 inches. In a test Monday, a chunk of foam blew open a dramatic 16-inch hole in parts of a mock-up of a shuttle wing.

Temperatures during a shuttle's return can climb to almost 3,000 degrees — nearly one-third as hot as the surface of the sun — along parts of the spacecraft, especially the leading edges of its wings. Damage there is considerably more likely to doom a shuttle than anywhere else. NASA requires immediate repairs when damage to the wing's protective panels exceeds four-hundredths of an inch, about the thickness of a dime.

Halsell said through a NASA spokesman, Allard Beutel, that the problem on Atlantis probably wasn't raised with the crew because it could be fixed so easily and because officials didn't assign particular significance to the mild damage inside the wing.

Col. Susan J. Helms, who has since left NASA to return to the Air Force, said she wasn't told about the breach but that she missed post-flight briefings because she was training in Russia for duties on the space station.

"Usually the crew will receive a rundown of all anomalies generated during the shuttle flight and should have heard about this," Helms said.

Both Helms and Mary Ellen Weber said they didn't know if other crew members were told.

"There are thousands and thousands of things that can go wrong, and the crew is very much aware this can happen," said Weber, who operated the robotic arm on Atlantis. "Certainly, when you learn about this, if it had progressed, it could have been much more dire."

Weber, now an associate vice president at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, described Atlantis' return to Earth as mostly routine and remembered seeing an orange glow from hot gases dancing outside the shuttle windows.

Although damage inside Atlantis' left wing was detected post-flight, NASA worried about the shuttle's return even before the discovery.

During liftoff, a 6-inch chunk of ice had smashed against the back edge of the right wing; so experts deemed it prudent to adjust Atlantis' flight to rapidly cool its wings prior to the fiery trip through the atmosphere, NASA documents showed.

It was impossible to know whether this cooling technique, called a thermal conditioning maneuver, also helped minimize heat damage inside Atlantis' defective left wing. NASA later determined damage on the right wing was relatively minor.

NASA did not consider ordering the thermal conditioning maneuver on Columbia because it believed such a move would have interfered with efforts to warm Columbia's landing gear tires for a safe landing.

___

On the Net:

Shuttle investigators: http://www.caib.us

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov

[Lazarus Long]

So it is now official, my worst fears from the very beginning are confirmed. Now when will we come to realize that the problem lies not just with specific the individuals involved but a entire "social system" that promotes these human failings whether in NASA, government, or even business?

The problem is endemic to to what creates a successful bureaucrat. This is indicative of a social value failure as we are rewarding the wrong behaviors.

"We have met the enemy and it is ourselves."
LL/kxs

http://www.nytimes.c.../12SHUT.html?hp
NASA Management Failings Are Linked to Shuttle Demise
By MATTHEW L. WALD and JOHN SCHWARTZ

WASHINGTON, July 11 — Management failure at NASA was as important in the destruction of the shuttle Columbia and the loss of its crew as the chunk of foam that knocked a hole in its wing, the chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said today.

As the board prepares its final report about what led to the breakup of the shuttle over Texas on Feb. 1, people deeply involved in the investigation say board members have become more concerned about NASA's flaws in communication and in its evaluating and tracking of problems before the Columbia's launching and during its flight.

At the last scheduled briefing before the report's release, the panel chairman, Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., said today: "We have what we're now calling either the physical or mechanical failure, and then we have the systemic failures. And we're now putting them at equal weight."

This approach replaces the board's initial belief that there was "a hierarchy of factors" with the foam at the top, Admiral Gehman said. "That's why we're being so cautious and careful about the management sections and safety sections" of the report the board is writing.

His remarks suggest that the board will reach conclusions that parallel those reached by the commission that investigated the destruction of the shuttle Challenger 17 years earlier: that NASA knew in advance that it had an engineering problem but did not appreciate its significance.

At the briefing today, Admiral Gehman, who is retired, also hinted that while the board had already discussed many of its findings, the final report, now expected in late August, could have some surprises. When all the elements are assembled in a single narrative, he said, the tone may have "some news value."

Throughout the investigation, Admiral Gehman has said he was taking care not to go beyond the position approved by his board. Today, a person who has attended the board's deliberations said that at least 10 of its 13 members concurred with Mr. Gehman about the relative importance of management issues.

Some management factors have been obvious for weeks. For example, NASA knew that the shuttle was vulnerable to debris strikes and knew that it was being hit by foam debris on nearly every flight, but left the issue unresolved. That factor, board members have noted, resembles the O-ring failure that destroyed the Challenger in 1986, when NASA knew it had a component prone to problems but did not recognize the potential for catastrophe.

Another management issue is that during the Columbia's 16-day flight, after scientists realized that foam had struck the shuttle on liftoff, some NASA engineers thought the agency should get spy satellite photographs of the shuttle to look for damage, but managers decided not to.

The person who has attended the board's meetings said that more management problems would be listed in the final report, involving other examples of "flying with things you shouldn't fly with."

Some of these problems were cited in e-mail correspondence or in the minutes of the Mission Management Team meetings held during the flight, the person said, and showed "a lack of foresight" by managers.

Another issue, this person said, was that managers were supposed to meet daily during missions, but skipped meetings during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.

"It's just a mindset they got into, that this was an operational vehicle, on an operational mission, and you don't have to worry about it," the person said.

At the briefing today, Admiral Gehman said that NASA should stop treating the shuttles as "operational," but instead consider them as "developmental," even though they have been flying for 20 years.

This would mean, he said, "treat each launch as a first launch, each orbit as a first orbit, each re-entry as the first re-entry."

Instead, he said, NASA had become less interested in some details; for example, he said, it had allowed its capability to take photographs of shuttles on launching to "gracefully atrophy over the years."

The pictures of Columbia's launch spotted the debris strike, but the quality was poor, helping to mislead engineers into deciding there was no major problem, the board has said.

At NASA headquarters, Robert Mirelson, a spokesman, said that it should not come as a surprise that the board is taking management issues seriously, since the board has discussed such issues extensively and Admiral Gehman had made critical statements about the agency's management during Congressional hearings.

"They've been talking about that for a long time," Mr. Mirelson said. "How they word that as a recommendation or a conclusion, we'll have to see."

Today the board also released a 189-page revised "working scenario" of the flight, developed jointly with NASA. It showed that the foam that hit the orbiter about 81 seconds after liftoff was a bigger chunk than the six previous occasions that involved foam debris from the same area of the external tank.

The board seems to be preparing a harsh assessment of NASA's performance, but members indicated today it could be tempered.

Many conclusions about management problems will be based on military-style "privileged" interviews, in which witnesses are interviewed privately, individually and with a promise of confidentiality.

Admiral Gehman said he would leave it to Congress or NASA to follow up if the report uncovered an issue that required changes in personnel.

Also today, Scott Hubbard, another panel member, said that further analysis of a test in which researchers shot a chunk of foam into a shuttle wing panel at more than 500 miles an hour had yielded two new clues about what happened.

In the test, a part called a T-seal was broken in a way that made it likely to flap back and forth. That could account for wreckage that shows a pattern of burns indicating the alternating presence and absence of hot gases.

The other, he said, was the recognition that the target wing panel had broken in a way that left a piece of debris with one thick edge. In a radar image, that would match the "Day 2 mystery object," the unidentified part seen floating away from the shuttle in a radar image made during its second day in orbit.

[Lazarus Long]

I think soon I will close this thread but first I will post two articles and wait for a few days to see if others wish any final words before we lay these heroes to their final rest.

I am very concerned about the trends in our culture and I do see in the Columbia tragedy as a terrible lesson of significantly greater scope than just this particular calamity. It is a lesson we can all learn from and such lessons are best learned from the failures of others so as to not be repeated.

The first article is an interview with Dr. Sally Ride and the second is the about the contents of the findings of the actual Investigative board with links to the actual report.
LL/kxs

http://www.nytimes.c...CONV.html?8hpib
Painful Questions
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

SAN DIEGO — Though she is a true pioneer, Dr. Sally K. Ride, the first American woman in space, strode into a hotel lobby here this month and went unnoticed. Dr. Ride, 52, enjoys going about life with a degree of anonymity.

After her flights in 1983 and 1984, Dr. Ride, at the time one of the most famous women on earth, rejected most product endorsements, books and movie offers that came her way.

Instead, she was a co-author of several books for children on space and was on the 1986 presidential commission that investigated the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

In March, Dr. Ride was named to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which plans to release its report on the second loss of a shuttle on Aug. 26. Days before the report's release, as she and the commission worked out the last details, she spoke soberly of the lessons learned and apparently forgotten by NASA, of the costly legacy of NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" policy, and of her own feelings toward the shuttle.

With the conclusion of the Columbia inquiry, Dr. Ride, who is on leave as a professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego, is free to focus on her new mission, encouraging girls to become scientists. Her organization, Imaginary Lines in San Diego, organizes science fairs for girls, workshops for teachers and vacation camps where girls learn, as Dr. Ride says, "that science is really cool."

Q. This past February, as we all watched pictures of the Columbia exploding, people asked, "How could this possibly be happening again?" Do you have any answers?

A. We have been asking ourselves the same question. There are many parallels. Not so much between the accidents themselves, but between some of the organizational contributing causes to the accidents. One parallel is that before the Challenger accident there were several shuttle flights where the first stages of the problem were seen.

Q. Are there parallels between the Columbia problem and the famous O-rings, where rubber rings on the Challenger rocket boosters froze, leading to the explosion.

A. Yes, and it was recognized, dealt with in some way. But they never spent the money to do the required engineering tests to understand exactly what was going on. The problem occurred a second time, but Challenger got to orbit fine. Gradually, over the course of several flights, the mindset became: "We've seen this problem before. It didn't cause a catastrophe. It's probably O.K." It was seen as something that should be fixed, eventually.

With Columbia, there was a history of foam coming off the external tank during launch. Each time, it was identified as a problem. But there was never a real significant engineering effort to understand why this was happening, what the potential implications were and what needed to be done to stop it. There was no catastrophic damage the first time, the second time or even the third time. It got to be accepted as almost, "in the family."

Q. What role did the NASA internal culture play in creating some of the conditions that made the two accidents possible?

A. It's another parallel. Before the Challenger accident, engineers who wanted to postpone the shuttle launch were effectively, they felt, required to prove a safety problem. Normally, it's just the reverse.

With Columbia, the foam strike was observed the day after the launch, and a group of engineers was tasked with accessing what damage could result. Again, those engineers found themselves in having to prove that there'd be catastrophic consequences in order to be listened to. Normally, it would be just the opposite. In order to get additional imagery of Columbia so they could determine the damage, they had to prove that there was a very, very serious problem.

Q. NASA never obtained additional photographs of Columbia's damaged area. The leader of its mission management team, Linda Ham, has said that once the foam strike was detected, some of her engineers wanted her to ask the Pentagon to take spy satellite pictures of the shuttle. Because she could not track down who was urging that, she dropped the matter. Was that an adequate response?

A. That's not good enough. One of the responsibilities of a NASA manager is to be inquisitive to a fault. You have to ask and ask and ask. If you think there's any hint of a problem, you have to get to the bottom of it. In my mind, the question was not, Who is asking this question? What the managers needed to be asking is, What are the potential consequences of this foam hit? And tell me now.

There wasn't any of that quality that Mission Control is almost famous for, which is grabbing onto the pants legs of a problem and not letting go until it understands what the problem is and what the implications are. And that didn't happen in this case. The managers, the Mission Management Team and the Mission Evaluation Room, did not grab onto this problem and insist on an answer. It was really quite the opposite. They assumed they knew the answer. They assumed the foam was not going to be a problem. And they were insisting that people disprove the preconception they had.

Q. Since the accident, there has been much talk about the role budget cuts may have played in the tragedy. What could a bigger budget have done about the kind of cultural problems of NASA's workplace that you have just cited?

A. All the money in the world would not have changed the attitude of management we saw. But different budget allocations may have resulted in a stronger safety organization, with members present at all the right meetings. If they had the tools, the trend analysis and the engineering analysis, they might have stood up in these meetings and offered checks and balances. Partly because of funding and priorities, a checks and balances system didn't exist that could have mitigated the problem.

We're hoping that in the future there might be an independent technical organization within NASA with its own resources that will give engineers a venue to help them develop data for their arguments.

Q. Dan Goldin, the NASA administrator from 1992 to 2001, had a mantra, "Faster, better, cheaper." Was that a mistake?

A. "Faster, better, cheaper," when applied to the human space program, was not a productive concept. It was a false economy. It's very difficult to have all three simultaneously. Pick your favorite two. With human space flight, you'd better add the word "safety" in there, too, because if upper management is going "faster, better, cheaper," that percolates down, and it puts the emphasis on meeting schedules and improving the way that you do things and on cost. And over the years, it provides the impression that budget and schedule are the most important things.

Q. The board investigated whether a rescue of the Columbia crew might have been feasible. What's the point to that kind of second guessing?

A. Because as we started to investigate decision making, we were getting a sense that NASA people were wondering: "Why are you asking about this? This doesn't have anything to do with the accident."

We said, "O.K., let's study if a rescue or a repair might have been possible." NASA formed a team to look into it. The scenario that we gave them included a series of events that led to the conclusion on Flight Day 5 that there was catastrophic damage to the wing. Their study showed that it might have been possible to have gotten Atlantis to the launch pad by about Feb. 10 and to keep everyone on Columbia alive until the rescue team reached them.

A lot of things had to go right for that to work. But the study proved it was feasible. This same kind of study could have been done by NASA in time to do it during the mission.

Q. An editorial in The New York Times questioned the value of NASA's emphasis on low Earth-space orbits and the shuttle, which it described as "finicky, complicated, costly vehicles that pose considerable risk to the astronauts." Would you agree?

A. I think your editors were asking if NASA, as structured today, is capable of operating the program we've got and, in particular, an aging space shuttle fleet. The answer is a qualified yes. Counting the Apollo 1 fire, there have been three major NASA accidents, each of them almost a generation apart. The problem is, People forget. The lessons of Challenger, for instance, were on everyone's minds at NASA for several years after that accident. Then some people retired. New people came in. Seventeen years passed. Over the years, a lot of things crept into the system without people's noticing.

The other thing is, You've got to have the perspective that space flight is really risky. Choose your favorite rocket. If it's really good, it fails 2 out of 100 times. If it's not quite as good, it fails 4 out of 100 times. The shuttle launched successfully 112 times and failed twice. That's a very good record for a launch vehicle. That's a bad record for anything that carries people.

I flew the shuttle twice. It got me home twice. I like the shuttle.

Q. What does an astronaut do when she comes back from space?

A. I'm currently on leave from my U.C.S.D. post to start Imaginary Lines. What drove me to start the company was the sense that a lot of the stereotypes about girls and science and math that we all assumed would be gone by now, have not gone away. Eleven-year-old girls still aren't encouraged quite as much as 11-year-old boys about science and math. A girl might still feel negative pressure from her peers if she's the best one in the math class.

Yet, research shows that girls enjoy science as much as boys throughout elementary school. It's in the middle-school years that they start to drift away. And that's partly because of peer pressure.

So some friends and I decided we'd start programs to help girls get through those middle school years with their interest in science intact. And we'd do it by creating programs that girls think are fun — science festivals, science camps, science clubs — that girls can go to with their friends, and that will connect them to each other and role models.

We set it up as a business because we thought it was a better way to have an impact quickly. It's no secret that I've been reluctant to use my name for things. I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life. But this is something I'm very willing to put my name behind.

[Lazarus Long]

http://www.nytimes.c...ND-SHUT.html?hp
Final Shuttle Report Cites 'Broken Safety Culture' at NASA
By JOHN SCHWARTZ and MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, AUG. 26 — NASA will lose more shuttles and more astronauts to disaster if it does not transform its "broken safety culture," the independent board that investigated the loss of the space shuttle Columbia said today in its final report.

Management blunders and organizational problems at NASA were as much to blame for the Columbia's destruction as the errant chunk of insulation that punched a hole in the spacecraft's left wing on liftoff, setting in motion a chain of events that culminated in the mission's fiery end during the return to earth on Feb. 1.

The 248-page final report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, made public today, offers a scathing view of a space agency that deluded itself over time into downplaying the risks of space flight, with missed communications, complacency and missteps that all added up to disaster.

The report makes clear that engineers within NASA had a strong sense that the Columbia might have been severely damaged during liftoff, and knew the proper steps to take next, including three requests for outside assistance in getting photos of the shuttle in orbit so that the extent of the damage could be assessed.

A high-risk rescue mission could have been mounted, the board said, if management had recognized the severity of the problem and acted quickly. What doomed the Columbia and its crew was not a lack of technology or ability, the board concluded, but missed opportunities and a lack of leadership and open-mindedness within NASA management.

The accident "was probably not an anomalous, random event" the report said, "but rather likely rooted to some degree in NASA's history and the human space flight program's culture."

At the same time, the board members said that they were unanimously committed to the future of spaceflight. "None of us has come to the conclusion that it is not worth the risk and not worth the money," said Prof. John Logsdon, a member of the board and the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

The space shuttle, the report said, is not inherently unsafe, although it should be made safer and should be replaced "as soon as possible" — a prospect that is at least 10 years away, since there is not even a replacement vehicle on the drawing board at this time. The failure to develop a successor vehicle "represents a failure of national leadership."

The board's chairman, Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., emphasized that that despite the panel's criticisms, NASA is an organization that the nation can take pride in. "This board comes away from this experience convinced that NASA is an outstanding organization," he said.

The space agency's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, issued a statement today thanking the board for its report, which he called a "blueprint" for change. "We have accepted the findings and will comply with the recommendations to the best of our ability," he said. "The board has provided NASA with an important road map, as we determine when we will be `fit to fly' again."

President Bush said in a statement: "The next steps for NASA under Sean O'Keefe's leadership must be determined after a thorough review of the entire report, including its recommendations. Our journey into space will go on."

In its report, the board avoided simple answers or recommendations for quick fixes.

"It is our view that complex systems almost always fail in complex ways, and we believe it would be wrong to reduce the complexities and weaknesses associated with these systems to some simple explanation," the report said in its opening statement. "Too often, accident investigations blame a failure only on the last step in a complex process, when a more comprehensive understanding of that process could revel that earlier steps might be equally or even more culpable."

This broader look, the board said, was drawn from several members' long experience in accident investigation. The disaster, the report said, was fully rooted in a flawed NASA culture that downplayed risk and suppressed dissent. "We are convinced that the management practices overseeing the space shuttle program were as much a cause of the accident as the foam that struck the left wing," the report said.

Those organizational problems flow directly from the space agency's "history and culture," and were rooted in such external factors as schedule pressures, years of tread-water budgets for the space agency, shifting national priorities and the need to build and maintain the International Space Station, the report said.

There were, as well, internal factors like roadblocks to communicating safety information and to voicing disagreement. "Reliance on past success," the board said, served as a substitute for thorough safety testing and sound engineering practices: if something had worked in the past, the logic went, it would work in the future.

In its opening page, the report issued a somber warning: "In this board's opinion, unless the technical, organizational and cultural recommendations made in this report are implemented, little will have been accomplished to lessen the chance that another accident will follow."

What brought down the Columbia, the accident investigation board said, were not just physical failure, but also "underlying weakness, revealed in NASA's organization and history, that can pave the way to catastrophic failure," as well as other factors. "Left uncorrected, any of these factors could contribute to future shuttle losses," the report stated.

The Columbia, the first shuttle in the American fleet, broke up over Texas on Feb. 1 as it was returning from what had appeared to be a nearly perfect 16-day mission, its 28th. The seven-member crew died in the accident — the second loss of a shuttle in 102 flights.

Taking nearly seven months, the $400 million investigation involved 25,000 workers pacing gradually across eastern Texas and Western Louisiana gathering more than 84,000 pieces of debris — nearly 38 percent of the shuttle. That debris told a story as its yielded secrets through a jigsaw-puzzlelike reconstruction that included where the pieces were found and metallurgical testing that helped to show the path of the searing heat that entered the wing.

A staff or more than 120 people, including some 400 NASA engineers, worked with the 13 members of the board to tell the story.

The investigation eventually found the cause of the accident: a large piece of insulating foam breaking away from an area called the bipod ramp and striking the leading edge of the left wing 81.9 seconds into the flight. That impact, at 545 miles per hour, punched a hole that was probably about 100 square inches in the eighth panel.

But the Columbia Accident Investigation Board went beyond the search for physical causes of the accident or simple mistakes made by individuals. Instead, it looked to the broader sociological questions of whether NASA had developed flaws in its culture over time that downplayed risks and placed success — measured in terms of things like ontime takeoffs — over safety.

"The board's conviction regarding the importance of these factors strengthened as the investigation progressed," the report said. In fact, the "broken safety culture" at NASA "encouraged flying with flaws because the shuttle could not be held up for routine problems that were not defined as a threat to mission safety," the report said. The section of the report devoted to these issues is entitled, "Why the Accident Occurred."

The factors that led to the Columbia disaster echoed those that underlay the loss of the shuttle Challenger in 1986, the board said. "While it would be inaccurate to say that NASA managed the space shuttle program at the time of the Columbia accident in the same manner it did prior to Challenger, there are unfortunate similarities between the agency's performance and safety practices in both periods," the report said.

By the time of Columbia's final mission, the report stated, the bad habits "that were in effect at the time of the Challenger accident — such as inadequate concern over deviations from expected performance, a silent safety program and schedule pressure — had returned to NASA," and "history became cause."

The foam problem itself had roots in the shuttle program's history and culture. After an exhaustive look back through shuttle history and maintenance records, the investigators found that the shuttle had been designed with the notion that any damage to its thermal-protection system could cause critical harm. As the chairman of the accident board, Admiral Gehman, put it during a news briefing, "It is a requirement that thou shalt not touch the T.P.S., the thermal-protection system."

But in fact, small pieces of foam hit the orbiter on almost every mission, and NASA managers had come to believe that foam debris did not pose a serious threat to the spacecraft; they were considered "in family" — the NASA term for events that could be tolerated. But larger pieces from the bipod ramp had fallen off at least seven times before, though NASA apparently did not know that because it had not carefully examined videotapes of launchings.

During the Columbia mission, foam struck again, and was noticed in videos the day after liftoff. But "mission management failed to detect weak signals that the orbiter was in trouble and take corrective action," the report said.

Analysis of the damage by Boeing engineers gave a seemingly reassuring answer: that the foam had probably not caused serious damage to the wing. Although engineers within NASA continued to worry and discuss their fears among themselves, the mission management team put the matter behind it, and even quashed three attempts by engineers to seek help from outside agencies in taking photos of the shuttle with spy telescopes on satellites or on the ground.

The e-mail discussions among engineers did not reach the mission management team, and engineers like Rodney Rocha, the co-chairman of the debris assessment team, did not pass along their concerns. "They were separated from the decision-making process by distance and rank," the report stated.

In the management team meetings, which the board characterized as rushed and filled with preconceived conclusions, "managers demonstrated little concern for mission safety." And although the mission management team's chairwoman, Linda Ham, said that she never heard of the requests for photos, the board's assessment was curt: "Managers' claims that they didn't hear the engineers' concerns were due in part to their not asking or listening."

Without a robust, independent safety culture, the concerns had nowhere to go. Members of the debris-assessment team told investigators that if they raised safety issues to managers who they perceived had already made up their minds, "they would be singled out for possible ridicule."

"Imagine the difference if any shuttle manager had simply asked, `Prove to me that Columbia has not been harmed,' " the report said. The silence of the engineers, the report continued, "was not merely a failure of safety but a failure of the entire organization."

NASA has been bracing for a harshly critical report for months. "It's going to be really ugly," Mr. O'Keefe, NASA's administrator, told workers at the Kennedy Space Center this summer.

The board's recommendations include relatively quick fixes for the problems that led to the foam strike and to the lack of action during the mission, but it also urges longer-term change: a sociological transformation to ensure that the concerns of engineers can be heard, explored and supported.

"Based on NASA's history of ignoring external recommendations, or making improvements that atrophy with time, the board has no confidence that the space shuttle can be safely operated for more than a few years based solely on renewed post-accident vigilance," the report said, predicting that the long-term recommendations "will be internally resisted" by the space agency.

The report also said that the board saw its role as far greater than simply fixing problems that caused the Columbia disaster. "The loss of Columbia and her crew represents a turning point, calling for a renewed public policy debate and commitment regarding human space exploration," the report stated. "One of our goals has been to set forth the terms for this debate."

The report also puts a challenge to the nation to accept the full measure of risk inherent in space travel. "Space flight is still far from routine," the report said. "It involves a substantial element of risk, which must be recognized, but never accepted with resignation."

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report.
http://www.caib.us/n...rt/default.html

New York Times Interactive on the Lost Shuttle
http://www.nytimes.c...CSINDEX_01.html

New York Times archive on events
http://www.nytimes.c...cial/index.html

[Lazarus Long]

I have been building this thread as an archive for serious study of a problem facing our Nation's Space program and also towards addressing suggestions for how to go forward. I also feel as I suggested earlier that much can be extended by recognizing a "Kenneth Lay" mindset at NASA that has come to dominate much of our culture and this is no idle question, for it may be that those we have come to have the most confidence in our betraying that trust as much through self indulgent complacency as lack of vision and dogmatic self righteousness.

I strongly suggest contemplative review of this entire thread and the link to the actual 246 page report that is available as public record. I also have included the full length articles as a sort of "time Capsule" which can allow future students of this event to sit in one place without having to leap about cyberspace and study the course of events and feelings that transpired in meditative study .

I want all to remember that this time failure meant death for all aboard and a serious blow to the entire Civil Space Program. This is what happens if we become to complacent with success.