Space

DATE=02/28/03

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=MARGARET WEITEKAMP, HISTORIAN, HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGE, NEW YORK

NUMBER=3-564

BYLINE=TOM CROSBY

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=

/// Editors: This interview is available in Dalet under SOD/English News Now Interviews in the folder for today or yesterday ///

HOST: NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe answered questions from angry U-S lawmakers Thursday who wanted to know why he never saw e-mails from engineers warning that the Space Shuttle Columbia could fall apart. Columbia broke apart upon re-entry February first, killing all seven astronauts. A piece of insulating foam breaking off and striking the shuttle during lift-off is a possible cause of the disaster. Worried engineers wrote a series of e-mail memos the day before the scheduled landing, saying the shuttle's left wing could fall off and doom the crew, if super-hot gases leaked into the landing gear wheel well.

Historian Margaret Weitekamp (white-eh-camp) has written extensively about the space program and spent a year in the the Space Agency Headquarters history office. She also interviewed astronauts for a book put out by the Discovery Channel television network. She spoke with V-O-A's Tom Crosby about the widening investigation of the Columbia tragedy.

DR. WEITEKAMP: Right now, the revelations that there was a series of e-mails going back and forth, discussing what turns out -- or at least what looks like now -- to have been the precise problem that resulted in the breakup of the Space Shuttle Columbia is an indication that this process is going to take longer before they're able to get Shuttles back up. It's in that way becoming more like the accident, which resulted in the loss of the Challenger Shuttle in 1986, in that they found in that investigation both a technical problem with the o-rings, which did not expand correctly at cold temperatures, and, in this case, they seem to have isolated a problem in the left wing.

But what they found in 1986 as well was that there was a larger problem of organizational culture, that the program had become inured to the real risks of space flight and had gotten used to, in a sense, getting away with assessing risk, and then being able to go ahead anyway. And I think it's going to be a matter of time, if we figure out whether that was the case with regard to this shuttle flight, as well.

MR. CROSBY: But don't these memos seem to indicate that that might very well be the case?

DR. WEITEKAMP: I think it may. It is going to remain to be seen whether there is a larger, more systemic problem. One of the things that the Space Agency is saying right now is that there are a series of e-mails like this all the time about any number of problems that might crop up. And clearly, in retrospect, this was a set of e-mails under discussion that should have gone to a higher level, because that seems to have been the actual problem that the orbiter was facing upon re-entry.

What the Space Agency is saying right now, however, about the fact [is] that there are discussions like this all the time and it's going to be a matter of them figuring out why it was that this risk, which turned out to be very real, was not assessed, so when there was perhaps a chance that something could have been done.

MR. CROSBY: What would that something have been? Once they were airborne, what could they have done at that point?

DR. WEITEKAMP: Well, I'm not an engineer, I'm an historian, so I don't have as much information on what would have been possible. And I think that it would have been possibly a situation where the Space Agency was in a real bind, with an orbiter that needed to come back in for re-entry. And if they had real assessments that there were fatal risks to doing that, they would have had to see if they could engineer some sort of a solution before bringing the Shuttle back in.

MR. CROSBY: I would imagine, too, that they might have considered the possibility of having the Shuttle dock at the International Space Station and leaving the crew there.

DR. WEITEKAMP: I'm not sure if that would have been possible on this mission, given where they were and the equipment that they had aboard. But, of course, that might have been a solution and perhaps something that the Space Agency could have considered had these e-mails gone to a higher level.

MR. CROSBY: As one who has looked at the history of the space program over a great many years, are we looking now, do you think, at an aging Shuttle fleet and perhaps ought to be thinking about redesigning our Shuttles?

DR. WEITEKAMP: I think, if there is going to be a redesign of the launch vehicle, there is going to need to be from the Space Agency an articulation of a new vision for human space flight, a new reason for going into space, and then a design of a spacecraft that would match that reason, whether it's going to be long-duration space flight, or continued science missions. I think that one of the things the Space Agency is facing right now is that this is a fleet of spacecraft that they had hoped to run, say, until the year around 2020. And it looks right now like that may not be realistic, and there is going to have to be some serious reassessment done in light of what is found with the Columbia investigation.

MR. CROSBY: Your conversations with Shuttle pilots turned up the fact -- and I'm quoting something you've written -- the orbiter flies like a brick on re-entry. One tends to wonder if the Space Agency might be thinking about some way of giving manual control back to the pilots of the Shuttles.

DR. WEITEKAMP: As I understand it, re-entry procedure is a kind of delicate balance between what's done with the computer and the actual pilot bringing it in. As much as the Shuttle looks like, or has a visible appearance that reminds one of an airplane, the conditions that it's flying under don't allow the same maneuverability that an airplane has. And that is something that really makes it rocket through the atmosphere upon re-entry under tremendous forces. And really, as I've said, astronauts have described it to me, that it flies like a brick, it sounds like a train is coming down on you. Which makes it very likely that those who were aboard this -- and the new video that has been released by the Space Agency, which is going to come public, I believe, in the next couple of weeks, I think will reveal that this crew was enduring the re-entry as well as any other crew does, but -- would not have been aware that there were significant problems.

HOST: Historian Margaret Weitekamp of Hobart and William Smith College in New York. Her soon-to-be-published book is "The Right Stuff the Wrong Sex: The Lovelace Woman in the Space Program 1959-1963."

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