Orlando Sentinel (Florida) August 27, 2003
Deadlines At Odds With Safety
Some Nasa Workers Felt Intimidated Into Silence About The Brisk Construction Pace Set For The Outpost And Thought A Target Date For Completing The First Phase Was Arbitrary
By Gwyneth K. Shaw
WASHINGTON -- The pressure to meet an ambitious schedule of construction missions for the international space station created an environment in which at least some NASA workers felt reluctant to raise safety issues for fear of delaying the timetable.
As a result, the space station -- the main justification for continuing to fly the shuttles after more than 20 years -- played a role in the fate of Columbia, even though the crew never even got close to the orbiting laboratory.
"Most of the Shuttle Program's concern about Columbia's foam strike were not about the threat it might pose to the vehicle in orbit, but about the threat it might pose to the schedule," according to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report, referring to the foam that fatally damaged the shuttle's left wing during liftoff.
Senior NASA officials set a Feb. 19, 2004, date for completing the preliminary phase of the space station, which was over budget and behind schedule. To the consternation of many workers, the date was heavily promoted by NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, who was brought in specifically to get the station back on track.
But making that schedule was a tall order -- launching 10 flights in 16 months. And the home stretch, five flights scheduled between October 2003 and February 2004, put the shuttle program under the same workload that existed when Challenger exploded in 1986, the board noted.
Pressure to meet an ambitious launch schedule also was considered a contributing factor in that accident.
NASA's commitment to the February date influenced many of the decisions leading up to Columbia's Jan. 16 launch, the report says. And it may have colored the way mission managers looked at the chunk of foam that separated from the orbiter's external tank and smashed into the shuttle shortly after liftoff.
"When a program agrees to spend less money or accelerate a schedule beyond what the engineers and program managers think is reasonable, a small amount of overall risk is added," the report states. "These littler pieces of risk add up until managers are no longer aware of the total program risk, and are, in fact, gambling.
"Little by little, NASA was accepting more risk in order to stay on schedule."
Foam separating from the external tank was a prime example.
Four months before Columbia's launch, foam from the same area of the tank struck Atlantis during liftoff. The problem was discussed before the launch a month later of Endeavour.
However, when Endeavour took off without any foam-separation problems, the issue was dropped from the review before the next launch -- Columbia.
When engineers realized Columbia's wing had been struck by a chunk of foam, Linda Ham, the head of the Mission Management Team, e-mailed then-shuttle-program manager Ron Dittemore and declared the rationale for flying Endeavour without a fix was "lousy then and still is."
But her concerns were mostly for the amount of time it would take to solve the problem -- down time that could compromise the February 2004 station milestone.
Some within NASA failed to grasp the need for such an absolute date, according to board interviews published in the report. But O'Keefe touted the date regularly, telling congressional committees and reporters how many flights were left to meet that goal. The timetable was emblazoned, in multiple colors, on charts outlining the construction sequence for the station.
There was even a screen saver distributed to NASA employees, counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until Feb. 19.
Employees might not have understood the reasoning behind the date. But they felt the pressure, coming from the highest levels, to meet it.
As one unnamed employee reflected, according to the report: "I guess my frustration was I know the importance of showing that you manage your budget and that's an important impression to make to Congress so you can continue the future of the agency, but to a lot of people, February 19th just seemed like an arbitrary date. It doesn't make sense to me why at all costs we were marching to this date."
Another unnamed worker told the board: "I don't know what Congress communicated to O'Keefe. I don't really understand the criticality of February 19th, that if we didn't make that date, did that mean the end of NASA? I would like to think that the technical issues can take priority over any budget issue or scheduling issue."
Board members said the focus on the date is an example of a motivational tool gone awry.
"There's, I guess, a line between what's morale-building and encouraging the workforce, and what actually then becomes another subtle form of pressure," board member Steven Wallace said.
Retired Adm. Harold Gehman, the board's chairman, said the pressure to launch, or meet any goal, isn't always bad -- that encouraging workers to meet specific goals can be an effective management method.
"But our concern is that various places in the organization are denying that there was any schedule pressure, and other places in the organization were screaming that there is schedule pressure. And that disconnect is what we're concerned about," he said.
Could O'Keefe, in his zeal to make the station -- plagued for years by delays and cost overruns -- adhere to a schedule, have inadvertently contributed to another problem?
"I think that is probably a fair assessment of the situation," said U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who chairs the House Science Committee.
Even now, the station is the driving force behind the urgency to return the remaining three shuttles to orbit, since the station has a reduced crew of only two people now and is dependent on the Russian space program to supply it and to ferry astronauts to and from the outpost.
But there is always pressure to fly -- and there has to be, said John Pike, executive director of GlobalSecurity.org, a space-policy and defense think tank in northern Virginia. Without the station, the shuttle has essentially no reason to launch at all, he said.
"I think that it's unavoidable," Pike said. "Left to its own devices, they wouldn't fly because you could always come up with a reason for putting it off another day. There has to be a strong predisposition to fly in order to keep the thing going."
© Copyright 2003, Sentinel Communications Co.
