The Washington Post February 25, 2003
NASA's Handling of Warnings Troubles Congress
Heads of Two House Panels Promise Inquiry and Say Shake-Up of Senior Agency Officials Is Possible
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Key lawmakers and space experts said yesterday they were troubled by newly released documents suggesting that NASA had discounted warnings of several engineers that the shuttle Columbia was damaged several days before it disintegrated over Texas.
House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.) vowed to take up the matter when he meets this week with retired Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., head of the commission investigating the Feb. 1 shuttle disaster. And Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), chairman of the House space and aeronautics subcommittee, warned that the documents and subsequent investigation may lead to a shake-up of senior NASA officials.
"I'm going to wait for the Gehman commission to give me their assessment," Rohrabacher said in an interview. "But [the documents] could well be significant and could well cost a lot of people their careers.
"We need to hold people accountable if they made mistakes," he added. "If it's a systems problem, we need to fix it. If it's a personnel problem, we need to change the personnel."
NASA released internal e-mails and documents Friday that indicated that as many as three pieces of material -- not just one big chunk, as previously assumed -- may have struck Columbia's left wing 81 seconds after liftoff Jan. 16 with devastating impact, endangering the layers of carbon coating and ceramic tiles that protect shuttles from intense heat during reentry.
The documents also showed that while Boeing Co. engineers concluded that Columbia could safely land despite potential damage to the shuttle's left wing, some NASA engineers at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., were more worried about the shuttle's safety than previously known and at least one felt their concerns were not being fully heard.
One of the engineers, Robert Daugherty, complained in an e-mail that those managing Columbia's flight had chosen not to do simple studies to clarify what risks it would face on landing and had treated such information "like the plague."
Boehlert praised NASA officials for releasing the documents instead of orchestrating a coverup, as former space agency officials did following the 1986 Challenger disaster. But he stressed that NASA officials will be held accountable for their decisions.
"The questions we have to ask is, were these e-mails from well-intended people given the attention they warranted? Was there appropriate follow-through? Or were they summarily cast aside and their findings deemed irrelevant? We don't know that yet," he said.
John E. Pike, a space policy expert and critic of NASA, said the documents raise questions about whether space agency officials intentionally disregarded the warnings of damage because there was nothing they could do to correct the problem. The astronauts had no way to repair damage to Columbia's left wing because they didn't have a repair kit on board, and there was no way for the shuttle to dock with the international space station.
"The documents are entirely consistent with [the notion] that they didn't want to know about the problem because there was nothing that could be done," said Pike, who is director of the nonprofit group GlobalSecurity.org.
These and other comments represent the first real criticism of NASA's handling of the Columbia disaster, and they may signal the start of more aggressive congressional oversight of the unfolding investigation. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe was treated with deference during his Feb. 12 testimony before a joint committee of Congress, and few lawmakers sought to probe into the circumstances leading up to the accident.
During a luncheon at The Washington Post last week, O'Keefe reiterated that his agency had no warning of imminent disaster during the Columbia flight, either from the shuttle sensors or from Boeing studies of the debris during the mission. He said that he had only a passing familiarity with the problem of the left wing and that he had been assured the problems were "very routine."
Yesterday, NASA spokesman Robert Jacobs said that "a line from an e-mail represents only a small portion of the overall process that went into the decision" that the shuttle had not been seriously damaged.
Rep. James T. Walsh (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA, said, "It sounds like there were a number of different opinions about how to handle this situation, and they decided on a course of action that the preponderance of information told them to do."
But Rep. Bart Gordon (Tenn.), the ranking Democrat on the Science Committee, said he was troubled by the seeming lack of interaction between top NASA officials and mid-level engineers during the shuttle mission. "My concern is that the NASA administrator said this is the typical type of dialogue that's going on," Gordon said. "But from what we've seen, it was more of a monologue than a dialogue."
Copyright © 2003, The Washington Post Company
