The Houston Chronicle March 14, 2003
Eyes in sky may have helped
Experts: Failure to use satellites to view Columbia was error
By Mark Carreau, Dan Feldstein, Bill Murphy
Discussions fizzled within NASA about arranging for the use of spy satellites or ground-based telescopes to examine launch damage to shuttle Columbia while it was in orbit, action that independent experts say was a mistake and one that investigators are examining.
Camera-equipped satellites and telescopes, normally used to evaluate international security threats, might have revealed the danger to Columbia from damage imparted by debris that struck under its left wing moments after the shuttle's Jan. 16 liftoff.
But discussions within the space agency of seeking help from the Pentagon and partners within the national security community came and went on Jan. 21 and 22, largely because mission managers did not believe Columbia was at risk.
Paul Fishbeck, a Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor who since 1990 has analyzed the threat to shuttles posed by flying debris, Thursday assailed NASA for not turning to the Department of Defense for help.
"When you have uncertainty about what is happening, one thing you can do is go out and get information," said Fishbeck. "To jump to a conclusion and say there is no problem after experiencing one of the biggest debris hits on the orbiter is premature."
The cause of the shuttle's Feb. 1 breakup over Texas has not been determined, but the Columbia Accident Investigation Board assigned to handle the probe considers the debris impact a prospect in a complex chain of events.
The dimensions of foam that investigators believe peeled away from the shuttle's fuel tank and struck Columbia's left wing was not measured. But the analysis of the damage performed by Boeing for NASA during the flight estimated the debris was about the size of a briefcase and weighed less than three pounds.
On Jan. 27, NASA's mission management team formally signed off on the Boeing findings.
The investigation board is in the midst of interviewing those who participated in the assessment and the decision-making, said Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the panel. The board's interest primarily is in determining how NASA's decision-making processes could be improved before the agency resumes shuttle missions.
NASA said Thursday its discussions of asking the military for help never reached top managers.
Talks began Jan. 21, four days after tracking cameras at the shuttle's Kennedy Space Center launch site revealed debris striking the wing. Lambert Austin, a NASA shuttle planning manager at Johnson Space Center, was contacted by an employee of United Space Alliance, the agency's prime shuttle contractor, who asked Austin how he would contact the Pentagon for imagery, said NASA spokesman Kyle Herring.
Austin attempted to contact Wayne Hale, another NASA shuttle planning manager at Kennedy, without success but left a message on an answering machine. Austin, who would not discuss the matter Thursday, also spoke with an Air Force officer in Houston before leaving for the day.
On Jan. 22, Austin then turned to NASA's Linda Ham, chair of Columbia's mission management team, said Herring. Within hours, Ham consulted with representatives of three NASA and United Space Alliance teams responsible for flight operations and shuttle engineering to determine their interest in contacting the military.
After finding an absence of interest in pursuing the matter further, Ham reported the outcome to Ron Dittemore, the shuttle program manager, and the discussions of Pentagon aid stopped at that point, said Herring.
The capabilities and uses of spy satellites and ground-based military telescopes are among the nation's most closely guarded secrets. But Ted Molzcan, a Canadian who leads a worldwide network of people who track reconnaissance satellites as a hobby, explained how the devices might have helped.
If NASA had wanted sharp pictures of Columbia in orbit, at least one U.S. spy satellite was almost certainly in position to offer them, said Molczan, an amateur satellite watcher in Toronto.
He calculated that a particular Keyhole satellite, owned by the National Reconnaissance Office, had six opportunities to take shuttle pictures with a capacity to detect objects of 6 inches or less - on Jan. 18, 20, 25 and 29, and twice on Jan. 30. A shuttle thermal protection tile is 6 inches across.
The most fruitful pass would have been Jan. 20, when a distance of 118 miles might have allowed the satellite to detect sections on the shuttle as small as 2.4 inches, Molczan said.
NASA will not discuss the use of spy satellites to observe shuttles on previous missions. But the agency was not convinced of the value of a ground-based telescope survey of the shuttle Discovery during a late 1998 flight in which former U.S. Sen. John Glenn, the ex-Mercury astronaut, was a passenger.
Another independent expert agreed that spy satellite imagery would have been a benefit to NASA. But John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, a Virginia-based group that studies security issues, questioned the appropriateness of seeking the help when the Pentagon and other security agencies are consumed by the threat posed by Iraq, North Korea and terrorists.
"Somebody, somewhere would have to ask themselves whether this was a serious enough issue to interrupt the intelligence community at a critical time like this," Pike said.
NOTES: Chronicle reporters Dan Feldstein and Bill Murphy contributed to this story.
Copyright © 2003, The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
