Shuttle Panel Hits Marshall Flight Center

The Rogers Commission urged wholesale changes in personnel and “indoctrination” at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and said former booster manager Lawrence B. Mulloy falsely testified that he had warned top shuttle executives of problems in the rocket’s joints.

The panel’s report said management at Marshall--the highly autonomous Huntsville, Ala., facility that supervises propulsion systems on the space shuttle--was isolated from the rest of the space agency and should be altered “by changes of personnel, organization, indoctrination or all three.”

A breached booster rocket joint, whose weaknesses were known but ignored, destroyed the space shuttle Challenger, and NASA must return to the safety-conscious attitude of the Apollo moon flight era to avoid future tragedies, the commission’s report said.

“We know exactly how this accident occurred,” commission Chairman William P. Rogers told a news conference, in calling attention to the panel’s call for a change in the shuttle booster. “I certainly hope there will be no nagging questions.”

‘Safer, Better’ Program

President Reagan, formally accepting the report, said that because of the commission’s work “our shuttle program will be safer and better prepared for the challenges that lie ahead.”

Because Americans “don’t hide our mistakes, we are not condemned to repeat them,” Reagan told members of the commission and others gathered in the Rose Garden.

The report says that Marshall managers “failed to provide full and timely information bearing on the safety of flight 51-L (the Challenger mission) to other vital elements of shuttle program management.”

And on another point it said required attention, the commission noted that Marshall has never tested the shuttle’s liquid-fuel main engines “to the point of failure to determine actual engine operating margins.”

Problems From Marshall

In addition, Rogers said his panel’s problems in obtaining information during its probe were confined to the Marshall center and did not develop elsewhere in NASA.

The panel came closest to criticism of individuals in its treatment of former booster manager Mulloy, who has already been demoted to a special assistantship in another Marshall department, and of Stanley Reinartz, recently transferred from Marshall shuttle project manager to head of unspecified special projects.

Mulloy told the commission that the worries about rubber-like O-rings used to seal the booster rocket joints were brought up at the flight readiness reviews with top NASA managers before the Jan. 28 launch.

“It is disturbing to the commission that contrary to (Mulloy’s) testimony, the seriousness of concern was not conveyed in Flight Readiness Review to Level I, and the (Challenger) readiness review was silent,” the commission report said.

Level I and Level II include the men who decide whether to launch.