Sunday Express August 31, 2003
BUNGLING NASA IS LOST IN SPACE
From David Gardner in Los Angeles
THE blistering report into the Columbia shuttle disaster has ripped the fragile veneer of invincibility from the US space programme and presented it with the biggest challenge in its history.
Nasa may have won the race to get man on the moon, but now the beleaguered agency is facing a fight for its very survival.
While the public has grown increasingly apathetic to the scientific goals of the shuttle missions, it was at least impressed by Nasa's apparently effortless ability to send astronauts back and forth to space with the regularity of a No9 bus.
The disaster report's damning indictment of the petty bureaucracy, arrogant complacency and sheer incompetency that cost the lives of five men and two women on board the doomed Columbia shuttle in February has shattered that public confidence.
What this week's findings underline is the fact that the Columbia crew foundered not on the unexplored reefs of space but on shoals of red tape bungling. Now the question once being whispered in Washington is growing in volume: Is it still worth the risk to send man into space?
"The country really needs to face up to the question of whether this is something we want to do, " said John Logson, a space policy expert and a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "And if so, " he added, "are we willing to pay the price for doing it?"
Few outside Nasa's space centres in Houston and Cape Canaveral, can name even a handful of astronauts who have been in orbit since the glory days of Armstrong, Aldrin and Co.
According to the 248-page document, Nasa managers missed eight separate opportunities to prevent the disintegration of the shuttle.
The cause of the disaster was confirmed as a chunk of foam debris slamming against the wing. But board chairman Harold Gehman Jr insisted that Nasa had been warned 10 times before the tragedy that the shuttle's delicate thermal protection system was never designed to withstand such impacts.
Buried in the report is reference to a statistical "sleight of hand" by Nasa before the Columbia flight that understated the chances that the falling foam debris could wreck the shuttle.
The investigation also exposes a more fundamental lack of trust between Nasa, the White House and the US Congress that provides the funding. The draw for political support for manned missions was always the public relations value. Now the politicians are not so sure.
"George Bush is the first President since Eisenhower who has no idea why he has a human spaceflight programme, " said John Pike, a space policy analyst.
There is evidence that the American public largely shares the President's ambivalence.
The report stops short of grounding future shuttles. But it demands an overhaul of the agency's "values, norms, beliefs and practices" and says it wants Nasa to break it's "culture of invincibility".
Change is all the more difficult in an organisation as proud as Nasa, which has always identified itself with the scrappy can-do clique of engineers that rescued the Apollo 13 crew and fixed the Hubble Space Telescope against all the odds.
Any changes will be "internally resisted", suggests the report and Nasa deputy administrator Fred Gregory didn't exactly sound motivated to make wholesale changes when he said earlier this month that Nasa would look at "any processes that might need to be changed".
But the eyes of the world are on Nasa now, just as they were on July 20, 1969. Only then, Neil Armstrong's immortal words "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" seemed to be just the start of something new and exciting.
The findings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board may be the beginning of the end.
© Copyright 2003, EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS
