ABC News.com June 11, 2003
Not Just the Foam
NASA to Take Hits in Columbia Report
By Lisa Stark
June 11- The board investigating the Columbia disaster plans to release a final report that will go far beyond the direct cause of the accident and will focus heavily on underlying factors that contributed to it, according to a draft outline obtained by ABCNEWS.
From the very start, crash investigators have been looking at what happened when the the space shuttle lifted off on Jan. 16 and a piece of insulating foam broke away, hitting the left wing. The final report will say this was the likely caused Columbia to break up on Feb. 1 as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts.
But the Columbia Accident Investigation Board will go further and will note other factors that played a role, including budget restraints, NASA's safety culture and decision making.
The report, which is expected to be released in late July, talks about eroding safety margins at NASA. It says the agency had "a system that failed to identify the true hazards."
The foam strikes are one example: There had been numerous strikes in the past without an accident, and NASA had decided this was an acceptable risk. It was seen as a maintenance issue, not a safety problem.
"The shuttle was giving off warning signs of an impending failure and NASA's safety organization - and their attitude toward safety - was that their organization was not listening to what the shuttle was trying to tell them, that there was an accident waiting to happen," said John Pike, an ABCNEWS consultant and director of GlobalSecurity.org. Pike previously was in charge of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists.
Anybody There?
One section of the report, titled "The Machine Was Talking, but NASA Failed to Separate Signals from Noise," talks about missed signals. The focus is on those in charge of the Columbia mission, and their decision-making processes.
The report points to a communications breakdown. After the disaster, e-mails revealed engineers voiced concern during that mission that not enough was being done to determine if the shuttle was at risk.
Plus, the report will revisit the 1986 explosion of the shuttle Challenger as it was lifting off. The Challenger and Columbia tragedies are the only two accidents to take place in the U.S. shuttle program.
The Challenger disaster was traced to a problem in an O-ring seal - a problem that had shown up on previous flights. The board that investigated that accident also focused on the NASA safety culture as a factor in the Challenger accident.
The document obtained by ABCNEWS is the sixth revision of the report outline and there will no doubt be further changes. It will include findings and recommendations - things that NASA must do in the short term to return to flight - and in the long term to lessen the risk of another tragedy.
Copyright © 2003, ABCNEWS Internet Ventures
