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NASA gives key decision a 2d look Early assumption of safety weighs on space agency By Raja Mishra and Anne Barnard, Globe Staff, 2/4/2003
''I am the accountable official,'' said NASA shuttle manager Ron Dittemore, who cautioned that investigators had not reached any conclusions. ''The hardest thing has been driving home alone with my thoughts.'' Even as NASA turned its critical gaze inward, President Bush yesterday awarded the agency its largest budget increase in a decade, proclaiming America's push into space would continue as he prepared to attend a memorial service for the seven dead astronauts in Houston today. The president's resolution was echoed in a statement released by the astronauts' grieving families: ''The bold exploration of space must go on. Once the root cause of this tragedy is found and corrected, the legacy of Columbia must carry on for the benefit of our children and yours.'' Unraveling the root cause, said NASA officials, may require recovering tiny pieces of insulating tile scattered somewhere between California and Texas, the only potential evidence linking the left wing damage to the crash.
The investigation has narrowed its focus to a decision-making process that began soon after the Columbia blasted from its launch pad. Just over a minute after liftoff, a piece of bricklike exterior insulation broke off the top portion of a giant external fuel tank connected to Columbia, smashing into the shuttle's left wing and disintegrating. The same thing had happened three months earlier, during a shuttle Atlantis flight, which landed safely. Still, NASA officials began intense analysis of the Columbia incident within a day of liftoff. Using computer models, NASA estimated this piece of hardened-foam debris weighed 2.67 pounds and was 20-by-16-by-6 inches in size, according to data released yesterday. The worst case scenario, predicted by the computer models -- which NASA said tend to overestimate damage -- was loss of a single tile near the main landing gear door or chips off several tiles in a 32-by-7-inch area of the left wing. The tiles were Columbia's main protection against the intense heat it would encounter upon reentering the atmosphere. As the Columbia orbited, engineers and debris specialists met numerous times to discuss the insulation strike, issuing their final report on Jan. 27, six days before the shuttle was scheduled to land. They concluded: no danger. In fact, said NASA officials yesterday, no one on the 17,000-person shuttle team said during the Columbia's 16-day mission that such an impact would in any way impair the Columbia. ''I was not aware of any reservations from anyone on our team,'' said Dittemore. But the shuttle, as it flew over California at 8:52 a.m. Saturday, encountered a 30- to 40-degree temperature spike in its left wheel well -- not an enormous increase, but enough to raise eyebrows at Mission Control. Soon, several left-side temperature gauges showed increases of up to 60 degrees, as did the external left hull. Because the increases were scattered and not catastrophic, Dittemore said there was some other root cause behind the heat spikes that appears to have doomed the shuttle -- something he refused to speculate about. ''There's some other event, some other missing link, that we don't have yet,'' said Dittemore. The link, said Dittemore, could be somewhere in the shuttle debris, or may be discerned from voluminous shuttle computer data still under study, including 32 seconds of transmissions beamed to Mission Control even after communication with the crew was lost. Previous incidents where debris hit a shuttle during liftoff have been thoroughly studied, and the data incorporated into the mathematical and computer impact models now being used to analyze the Columbia crash. However, some evidence is lacking this time around. Film of the fuel tank shot during liftoff was destroyed during the fiery reentry. Gerry Griffin, a former NASA flight controller and former director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said a 20-inch chunk of insulation hitting the shuttle would not be unusual. But the maximum size of the damage NASA estimated -- 32-by-7 inches -- would be unusually large, he said. ''If it was on the bottom of the wing, that could be significant,'' he said. Another researcher who has studied the organizational culture of NASA, said the scenario unfolding is reminiscent of the 1986 Challenger disaster, which was attributed to weather-induced failure of a small component called an O-ring. In her book, ''The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA,'' Diane Vaughan, a sociology professor at Boston College, concluded that NASA had become too accepting of damage to O-ring seals. NASA engineers initially took seriously and tried to address O-ring problems, she said, but because they believed they had fixed it and nothing went terribly wrong, they accepted more and more frequent and extensive damage. Yesterday, after Dittemore's briefing, she wondered whether the same thing happened with tile damage and the shedding of insulation since it had occurred again and again without catastrophe. ''That's one of the things that seems a possibility,'' she said. She said that she sympathized with space officials who must make decisions with imperfect information and accept a degree of risk. ''It's a necessary part of the culture,'' she said, ''but it also has its dark side in that certain kinds of problems can become routine for them.'' Meanwhile, the already sprawling debris search widened yesterday, now covering a 28,000-square-mile area stretching from central Texas to western Louisiana. Top priority was placed on recovering astronaut remains. Some body parts have been recovered. ''We are trying to recover these national heroes and get them back to their families as soon as possible,'' said NASA's deputy administrator Michael Kostelnik. President Bush met behind closed doors with NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe, ''to hear the status of the investigation, what leads they have about what may be the cause,'' said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. ''I think he's going to want to know how the morale is at NASA. . . .The president has profound faith in the men and women of NASA.'' That faith was reflected in a $469 million, or 3 percent, increase in NASA's 2003 budget to $15.5 billion, a welcome addition for the space program after a decade of more or less flat budgets. Included within the increase, was a 4.7 percent funding boost for the space shuttle program, to $3.97 billion from $3.2 billion. NASA also plans to spend more than $200 million on researching nuclear-powered spaceships. Project Prometheus, as it's dubbed, aspires to send unmanned craft to Jupiter's moons. The space program money was earmarked before the Columbia tragedy, but became public yesterday as part of the unveiling of Bush's overall federal budget proposal. Congress must give approval before any money can be spent. Bush will lead the memorial service today in Houston, with another scheduled in Washington on Thursday. Yesterday, NASA released an e-mail astronaut Laurel Clark sent to her family the day before she perished: ''This was definitely one to beat all. I hope you could feel the positive energy that beamed to the whole planet as we glided over our shared planet. Love to all, Laurel.'' Tatsha Robertson of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Material from Globe wire services was also used.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 2/4/2003.
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© Copyright 2003 New York Times Company |
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op-level NASA officials may have underestimated damage the space shuttle Columbia's left wing suffered during liftoff, a crucial mission lapse that federal investigators now suspect may have played a role in the shuttle disaster.
