NASA's safety culture blamed

NASA's own bureaucracy was as much to blame for the space shuttle Columbia disaster as a dislodged piece of foam insulation that punctured the orbiter's wing on takeoff, the board investigating the Feb. 1 accident said in its final report, released yesterday.

"The first cause was the foam that came off and struck the reinforced carbon-carbon material. The second was the loss within NASA of its checks and balances," Harold W. Gehman Jr., chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, said at a news conference.

In a blistering 248-page document, the 13-member board said bad management within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a flawed safety culture helped doom Columbia and its seven-member crew.

The board issued 29 recommendations for the space agency, 15 of which must be completed before the next launch. But, in often-harsh terms, the panel said that both striking changes and heightened oversight are needed to ensure that the remaining three shuttles fly safely.

"Based on NASA's history of ignoring external recommendations, or making improvements that atrophy with time, the board has no confidence that the space shuttle can be safely operated for more than a few years based solely on renewed post-accident vigilance," the report said.

The board also urged Congress and the White House to require long-term changes in the way NASA conducts itself to prevent the recommendations from becoming the "second report on the shelf to be followed by a third report."

"I don't believe we should just trust NASA to do things," Gehman said.

Board members recommended that NASA:

Take high-resolution pictures of the external fuel tank after it separates from the shuttle and make them available soon after launch.

Determine the structural integrity of the heat-shielding material known as reinforced carbon-carbon, which was damaged by the foam strike, before shuttles fly again.

Get in-flight images of the shuttles from spy satellites and other sources.

Use the international space station as an orbiting repair and inspection shop for damaged shuttles.

Upgrade its imaging system to get at least three "useful views" of the shuttle starting at liftoff and continuing at least until the solid rocket boosters separate during ascent.

Board members said some of those urgent fixes will prove simple - for example, obtaining satellite photos of the shuttle orbiting Earth, allowing a long-distance damage inspection.

By far, board members and outside experts said, the toughest immediate challenge NASA faces will be developing an untested system to allow spacewalkers to inspect and fix damage to the thermal protection tiles and the reinforced carbon-carbon, or RCC, that protects the wing edge.

'The biggest challenge'



"I think we're all in agreement that the RCC repair will be the biggest challenge," said board member Sheila E. Widnall, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. "It will be an engineering exercise that will wring out the organization."

NASA is already working on ways to patch a hole such as the one that doomed Columbia. The repair would involve spacewalkers inserting an umbrella-like locking device into the hole, which would be screwed down and caulked with heat-resistant material to seal the patch.