Shuttle report brings relief, anxiety at Johnson Space Center
Cutbacks feared as NASA is urged to focus on safety
HOUSTON -- Within the tight-knit community of engineers and scientists at the Johnson Space Center, a report faulting the NASA culture for the Columbia disaster was met with a mixture of relief and hope that safety will stay at the forefront.
The process by investigators of unraveling what went wrong with Columbia was very therapeutic, said Jonathan Clark, a NASA flight surgeon whose wife was among the seven astronauts killed in the shuttle disaster Feb. 1.
"Now that we've gone through the recovery efforts and the board report is out, we're now focused on returning to flight safely, doing it right."
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued its report Tuesday on the tragedy, attributing it in part to a flawed safety culture within NASA. Rather than faulting any individual for the tragedy, the board focused on management failures.
The space center employs about 16,000 people, 13,000 of them contractors. It was established in 1961 and is home to the space shuttle and space station programs, as well as Mission Control.
Tony Verrengia, who worked 20 years for NASA in the Gemini, Apollo, and space shuttle programs, said he is worried whether the commitment to safety will be long-term. A similar focus initially was leveled after the Apollo 1 launch pad fire in 1967 and the 1986 Challenger accident.
"It's probably going to be the same, where they're trying to aggressively correct all these things that they were asked to do," said Verrengia, now retired. "The fundamental problem is that they have not had the kind of support they need to keep manned spaceflight going at the right level."
Clark said the various recommendations the investigative board made in its report about fixing NASA's safety culture, including upgrading outdated inspection equipment, are not "going to be cheap" to implement.
"That's going to be the real issue," he said.
Some space center employees who gathered Tuesday at The Outpost Tavern, a bar frequented by astronauts and center workers, were skeptical that Congress would give NASA the financial support it needs to improve its safety culture.
The employees, who did not want to give their names for fear of losing their jobs, said that the investigative board's report was correct in its conclusions and that a flawed safety culture has been a big problem for some time.
The employees said they also had feared the board's report would unfairly label many of them as incompetent. Instead, the workers blamed flawed attempts to meet unrealistic goals of shuttle performance.
Some employees also worried whether changes made as a result of the report and concerns about the viability of shuttles could reduce the manned spaceflight program and or lead to job cuts.
The Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership has concluded that the impact from the space center on Houston and the surrounding area exceeds 24,000 jobs, producing more than $885 million in business volume and personal incomes of more than $2 billion.
