Panel May Urge Restructuring NASA Over ‘Russian Roulette’ : Astronauts Want Safety Decisions Double-Checked

The Rogers commission today strongly hinted it will recommend reorganizing NASA’s command structure to make sure flawed decision-making does not result in “Russian roulette” with the nation’s space program.

Four top NASA astronauts testifying before the commission investigating the Challenger disaster, including chief astronaut John Young, said they were in favor of establishing an independent review panel to double-check decisions relating to shuttle flight safety.

“I’m glad because there again, that’s one of the things we are thinking about recommending, some sort of independent safety panel,” commission chairman William Rogers said.

Rocket Joint Problems

Young and fellow astronauts Robert Crippen, Paul Weitz and Henry Hartsfield said today they were unaware of problems with the booster rocket joint that triggered the Challenger explosion.

Young wrote a stinging memo last month suggesting that pressure to meet the busiest launch schedule ever planned for American astronauts may have contributed to the explosion that destroyed Challenger and killed its seven crew members Jan. 28.

Challenger was cleared for launch despite unanimous disapproval from engineers with the company that built the shuttle’s solid-fuel rocket boosters.

But their concern about the effects of record cold weather on crucial rocket seals was never passed on to top NASA managers by the agency’s rocket engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Compliance Claimed

“According to the people at Marshall, they complied with the system,” Rogers said. “They say, ‘We had no obligation under the system to do anything we didn’t do.’ If that is the system, that’s wrong, and that’s not a good system.”

Panel member Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, questioned the way NASA sets launch criteria based on previous experience that might not be indicative of what risks actually are present.

“An argument is always given that last time it worked,” he said. “It’s a kind of Russian roulette. It was a risk, you got away with it, but it shouldn’t be done over and over again like that.”

Hartsfield also told the panel he was in favor of a bail-out system in event of engine failures that would require the shuttle to “ditch” in the ocean at high speed. Current shuttles do not have such systems.