COLUMBIA LOST
NASA's management under scrutiny
By R. Jeffrey Smith, Joby Warrick and Rob Stein
Washington Post
The thunderous explosion of Columbia over central Texas yesterday was presaged by a drumbeat of warnings by government auditors and experts who voiced concerns about lapses in oversight and deferred safety improvements for NASA's aging fleet of space shuttles.
Associated Press
Although "safety first" was the watchword of shuttle launches, aerospace engineers have repeatedly complained that belt tightening and shifting priorities were denying Columbia and the three other shuttles the necessary upgrades and improvements.
Columbia begins its takeoff Jan. 16. While attention has started to focus on possible damage to Columbia's thermal tiles on the left wing from a piece of debris that hit during liftoff, the cause of the disaster remains uncertain. During the past decade as its budget shrank, NASA delayed or scrapped upgrades to the aging shuttle fleet. The agency's belt tightening has drawn criticism from shuttle safety experts.
As recently as last April, the former chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warned Congress that NASA's management of the shuttle program had drawn "the strongest safety concern the panel has voiced" in 15 years. "I have never been as worried for space shuttle safety as I am right now," the chairman, Richard Blomberg, said.
None of this was supposed to happen. The last shuttle disaster, 17 years ago, provoked calls for a revolutionary changes in the program's management. The agency promised that safety would henceforth be put far ahead of all other considerations, including budget constraints, the demands of its users, and any political pressures.
"We will never launch when it is unsafe," Fred Gregory, then NASA's director of space flight, promised the House Science and Space subcommittee nine months ago.
While none of those who issued warnings would implicate any specific defect in the new disaster, they had warned repeatedly that safety was losing out in the battle for scarce NASA money. The program's 40 percent budget decline over the past decade had undermined its ability to guarantee flawless performances, they said.
NASA's response was mostly to say it disagreed. The problems were not that bad; safety was still the top priority; the number of shuttle "anomalies" or defects was dropping fast. "NASA will continue to ensure that an adequate staff and shuttle work force" is available to maintain a perfect record, Gregory promised.
But safety experts have long said NASA's claim that safety was improving stemmed from an illusion. The shuttle, they said, was an aging, balky, and delicate vehicle that exceeded NASA's own risk limits for manned flight, and time was not its friend.
The ungainly glider was created in the 1970s through a marriage of adventurous design and well-known technology. By all accounts, the program has never really embraced the past decade's stunning advances in aerospace engineering and safety testing.
After the shuttle Challenger exploded on launch in 1986, for example, numerous safety advisers urged that a crew ejection capsule be added to save lives even in the midst of calamity.
NASA has studied the problem for years, but the costs of retrofitting such a device kept it from acting.
No new shuttle has been in development, and in fact, many of the most recent safety alarms stemmed from the agency's recent plan to try to extend the life of the current shuttles by another 25 years. Blomberg warned in particular that budget tightening compelled the shuttle program to spend most of its resources on current operations while planned improvements, including some that would "directly reduce flight risk" were deferred or eliminated.
"The concern is not for the present flight or the next or perhaps the one after that," Blomberg said last April. "One of the roots of my concern is that nobody will know for sure when the safety margin has been eroded too far."
"Repeated government and contractor hiring freezes" during the shuttle's operating life "have led to a lack of depth of critical skills" that become more troubling as the system ages, Blomberg said.
In an implied criticism of Congress and the White House, the panel said NASA's budgets were "not sufficient to improve or even maintain the safety risk level of operating the space shuttle. Needed restorations and improvements cannot be accomplished under current budgets and spending priorities."
The most detailed independent assessment of shuttle safety in recent years, completed in March 2000, pointed to specific problems that analysts yesterday said may have played a role in the Columbia's breakup.
It called for scrutiny of wiring problems in "difficult-to-inspect regions" of Columbia, in particular — a problem that NASA said it had fixed. It also said that NASA was not using the latest scientific techniques to find and fix structural cracks and other consequences of routine aging. The panel said further that NASA was not working hard enough to find and fix corrosion beneath the tiles that protect the shuttle from intense heat during re-entry and that it was not working hard enough to find a way to probe or study portions of each shuttle's structure that are entirely inaccessible.
"The large reduction in NASA Quality Assurance Inspectors for each shuttle is very disturbing," said the panel, which was chaired by Henry McDonald, the director of NASA's own Ames Research Center.
Some of the safety alarms stemmed from what experts have described as inadequate NASA oversight of those parts of the program that have been privatized. Just two days ago, for example, the General Accounting Office described NASA's management of all its major contractors as "weak" and "debilitating," and accused the space agency of placing "little emphasis on end results (or) product performance."
The GAO report was the latest in a series by the congressional auditing agency faulting NASA's management of major programs, including the shuttle. Weak contract management had been ranked as a "high-risk" problem at NASA since at least 1990, the report said.
The increased fiscal pressure on NASA is partly the result of steep budget cuts over the past decade. NASA and other civilian agencies involved in the space program saw their budgets slashed by $1 billion in fiscal 2002, while Department of Defense spending on space programs rose by $600 million, according to a recent study by the Aerospace Industries Association, an industry trade group.
"The civil space program that NASA runs has been neglected for a generation, and as a consequence we find ourselves flying increasingly aged technology," said Loren Thompson, a defense industry analyst for think tank Lexington Institute.
In 1996, NASA turned over space shuttle flight operations to United Space Alliance, a private firm owned by Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. Under pressure from the Clinton administration and Congress to cut costs, NASA had gradually shifted many responsibilities to the private sector.
While NASA managers have described their contractor oversight as adequate, NASA's Office of Inspector General disagreed. "The lack of systematic and well-documented contract surveillance is a particular area of concern," the Inspector General said in a report last June.
"What people have done to keep an old system flying is just amazing. But it's an old system. At some point they had to expect something to go wrong," said Donna Shirley, a former Mars exploration manager at NASA and now an instructor in aerospace engineering at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. "It's remarkable that they've kept it going this long."
