Panel Blames Shuttle Disaster on Poor Design, Management : Report Asks Major NASA Policy Shifts

The Challenger commission, making broad-scale and controversial recommendations in its report released Monday, placed its foremost emphasis on a major renovation of NASA management.

Although major portions of the recommendations were already being implemented, others are expected to become central elements in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s decisions necessary to get the shuttle fleet flying again. The panel recommended that NASA:

--Redesign the faulty booster rocket joint, with the redesign to be reviewed by an independent committee from the National Research Council.

--Review the shuttle management structure, with authority centralized in Washington. Astronauts should be brought into management, and a safety advisory panel reporting to the shuttle program manager should be established.

--Identify, improve and review all high risk components of the shuttle. Maintenance procedures must be improved.

Office of Safety

--Establish an Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance to be headed by an associate administrator, reporting directly to the NASA administrator.

--Consider changes of personnel, organization or indoctrination at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

--Establish criteria for tires, brakes and nose-wheel steering. Until the systems meet those criteria, landings at Kennedy Space Center in Florida should not be planned.

--Try to provide a crew escape system, and increase the range of flight conditions under which an emergency runway landing can be successfully conducted.

--No longer consider the shuttle to be the nation’s sole vehicle for space launches.

But, by design or coincidence, several of the recommendations put forth Monday were already well under way. NASA has already launched programs to review all of the critical safety items aboard the shuttle system, including a redesign of the booster. It has begun a study of possible crew escape systems and started efforts to eliminate the handling problems that shuttles have experienced on landing.

Several hours after release of the much-anticipated accident report, NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher told reporters that the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Science, had named an oversight panel headed by H. Guyford Stever, a former director of the National Science Foundation and former presidential science adviser, to review the booster redesign.

Fletcher promised to give the recommendations the same serious consideration the commission did in writing them and declared that he does not expect difficulty in responding to them.

Yet, when it came to specific cases beyond the initiatives already under way, Fletcher, who has been serving in his second tenure as chief of NASA only a little more than a month, carefully avoided tipping his hand on any of the recommendations, some of which stand to be expensive and time-consuming.

Escape System

One of the most expensive recommendations laid out by the panel Monday was its call for efforts to provide a system so that astronauts could escape from a stricken shuttle.

However, officials say, there is no single escape system that would serve astronauts during both the powered ascent and landing phase. The addition of an escape system would require major redesign of the orbiter and require far more time and money than now projected by NASA in its shuttle recovery plan, NASA and industry sources say.

In its recommendations on the redesign of the solid rocket booster, the panel called for a more rugged design of the joint between booster segments and more punishing qualification tests before the reworked rocket is used to launch the shuttle--another costly proposal.

Last month, NASA officials estimated that the booster redesign and other new safety precautions would cost about $526 million, but Fletcher said later that the figure was only a rough guess and might be off by as much as $100 million.

Vertical Tests

Besides full-scale tests simulating actual flight conditions and tests under a wide range of temperatures, the commission said NASA should give “full consideration” to conducting “static firings of the exact flight configuration in a vertical attitude.”

Government and industry engineers contend that such expensive and time-consuming tests would yield little valuable information. However, aware that such a recommendation was in the works, NASA and engineers at Morton-Thiokol Inc., the rocket manufacturer, have been studying the possibility of vertical tests for weeks.

“You’re just not going to learn a damn thing new from a vertical test,” a Thiokol source said Monday. “Besides, you have to build a big girder system to hold it down. Certainly, the data gain is not enormously more than what you’d learn on a horizontal firing. Yet it would be very costly. Frankly, this may be one recommendation that won’t sell. It’s just too costly for too little benefit.”

Mothballed Complex

Still, faced with the prospect of building an entirely new test complex for such testing, the space agency has been considering the possibility of modifying and re-activating a mothballed launch complex at the Kennedy Space Center.

While NASA’s projection of the shuttles’ return to flight status by July, 1987, is widely considered overly optimistic, Fletcher has indicated that he will not be rushed into hasty management changes. After shuttle flights resume, he said, creation of a space station will be the agency’s “next immediate goal.”

Retired Air Force Gen. Samuel C. Phillips, who was recruited to conduct a study of the agency’s management--focusing particularly on relations between the independently minded field centers and their relations with Washington--is not expected to submit a report until the end of the year.