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News: Oberg: NASA Can Learn, Endure USA Today February 02, 2003 Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-02-02-oberg-oberg_x.htm Past disasters show NASA can learn and endure By James Oberg and Alcestis "Cooky" Oberg Only last week, historians and space workers had observed the grim anniversaries of the two worst spaceflight disasters in U.S. history. Three Apollo 1 crewmembers perished Jan. 27, 1967 in a fire during a spacecraft test, and seven astronauts were killed Jan. 28, 1986, when the Challenger broke apart during launch and fell back into the Atlantic Ocean. Now that pair of disasters has become a triplet with the loss Saturday of the space shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts. Just as the returning spaceship was being subjected to maximum heat from re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, some flaw apparently caused it to suddenly turn sideways and be torn apart. The lesson of the first two tragedies is that America and its space program can endure. Our space engineers can find the causes of the most horrible failures, fix them and fly again. But just what is it about those earlier disasters that can aid us now? The first step is to stop calling Apollo 1 and Challenger "accidents." In hindsight, there was an inevitability about the chain of human misjudgments that created the hazards and let these disasters occur. There were measurable causes — human, managerial and equipment-related — not random and unpredictable chaotic events beyond human control. We learned after the Apollo 1 fire, for instance, never again to use a highly flammable pure oxygen atmosphere in a spacecraft, but rather to use gas mixtures closer to normal air. After Challenger, NASA redesigned the unsafe "O-rings" that were supposed to seal the gaps between the rocket segments, preventing flames from escaping out the side. Will this third human spaceflight disaster follow that same pattern? The cause of the loss of Columbia and her crew will take weeks, even months to determine. An equal or longer period will be needed to develop and implement fixes to allow space shuttles to fly again. But even at this early date, intuition tells us that the catastrophe may not be due to a fundamental shuttle design flaw, such as the Challenger's O-rings, since shuttles have landed more than a hundred times without problems. However, we have to take a hard look at the servicing of the spacecraft on the ground between missions and especially the manufacture of the orange throwaway fuel tanks. A large piece of insulation from one of those tanks tore off during launch and smashed into the Columbia's left wing. That wing was the site of a sequence of troubling indications in the minutes leading up to the vehicle's disintegration. This suggests a possible cause and effect for the catastrophe. Investigators must determine whether the insulation blanket detached from the tank and whether Columbia's thermal protection tiles were securely attached. Also, there is suspicion surrounding the condition of the left landing-gear door, which might have been weakened. Investigators realize that disasters of this magnitude are rarely attributable to one single stupid error. So, they will look for other unusual situations that might — in combination with what would normally be minor tile damage — add up to the "really bad day" that NASA officials ruefully described on Saturday. These lines of inquiry cannot avoid safety issues that have been raised in recent years about the cutbacks in trained staff to service shuttle hardware. We certainly expect to see NASA's entire shuttle processing system be rigorously evaluated. Determining the true cause of this disaster may or may not validate these earlier warnings. The fundamental uncertainty is whether we can be confident that NASA will be honest with itself and with the American public about these frightening possibilities. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, dangers posed by mismanagement were often glossed over with "happy talk" and "spinmeistering," not true reform. For instance, the Challenger-disaster investigation pointed to NASA's own "flawed decision-making process" as one of the fundamental causes of the catastrophe. Many questioned whether NASA had the institutional courage to fix itself: to really look at hard facts — whatever the political or budget climate might be — and to do what was really necessary to safeguard a sound space program. Instead, NASA maintained a "circle the wagons" mentality and resisted genuinely independent oversight. After Saturday's accident, however, the current leadership made a good first impression when Ron Dittemore, manager of NASA's space shuttle program, laid out detailed facts to the media with unprecedented candor: no posturing, no "putting the best face on it," no stonewalling and no spinning tactics that had been so much a feature of NASA's public relations machinery for the past 20 years. One hopes this level of new public honesty is maintained and strengthened in the coming weeks and months of the investigation. It remains to be seen whether this was a true, unavoidable accident or the consequence of human errors that NASA should have known how to avoid. If, as with the two earlier tragedies, this was not an accident, and if handled right, then we can get the space program back on track. Every space disaster raises questions and forces changes. But the Columbia catastrophe must also look beyond insulation blankets and tiles, or whatever the technical causes of the disaster were. NASA and the nation must face the larger questions, too: Is the budget decision-making process within NASA and Congress really endangering our astronauts? Shouldn't we retire these fragile old vehicles soon and replace them or supplement them with more robust spacecraft? What are our goals for a national space program five, 10, 20 years down the road — not just through the next launch, the next fiscal year, the next election ... or the next catastrophe? James E. Oberg is a former shuttle engineer, and Alcestis "Cooky" Oberg is a freelance space and science writer living in Houston. She is also a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. |
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