Shuttle Nearly Lofted With Too Little Fuel

The space shuttle Columbia came within 31 seconds of being launched without enough fuel to reach its planned orbit last Jan. 6 after weary Kennedy Space Center workers mistakenly drained 18,000 gallons of liquid oxygen from the craft, according to documents released Tuesday by the White House panel that probed the shuttle program.

Although the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said at the time that computer problems were responsible for the scrubbed launching, Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who flew on the mission, said Tuesday that he was informed of the fuel loss while aboard the spacecraft that day.

Nelson said he was told later by space officials that the fuel loss would not have affected the Columbia’s safety in flight. But he said others privately disagreed with that assessment.

“I’ve been told that (Columbia pilot) ‘Hoot’ Gibson would’ve had to use all his flying skills to make an emergency landing in Dakar, Senegal, with a loaded orbiter,” he said, a feat some experts view as nearly impossible to achieve.

The Columbia was safely launched Jan. 12 with a crew that included Nelson.

The Challenger disaster occurred 73 seconds after its Jan. 28 liftoff, killing all seven crew members. In its newly released documents, the presidential commission on the Challenger accident cited Columbia’s “potentially catastrophic” liftoff as an example of fatigue and overwork problems that it said may also have contributed to the Challenger’s disastrous launching only weeks later.

Worker Fatigue Cited

The panel made public a massive four-volume appendix to its June report on the Challenger accident, which blamed the spacecraft’s fate on poorly designed booster rocket seals. The appendix detailed the evidence backing that major finding but also suggested that worker fatigue and other pressures of NASA’s fast-paced shuttle program were key factors in the disaster.

In addition, the commission made public NASA’s analysis of Challenger scraps retrieved from the floor of the Atlantic last spring, concluding that the shuttle’s crew cabin was “essentially intact” and plummeting nose-down in a steep left bank when it smashed into the ocean. The report offers no opinion about whether the crew was alive when the craft hit the water.

According to the appendix, Columbia’s brush with disaster last Jan. 6 occurred when Lockheed Space Operations Co. workers “inadvertently” drained super-cold oxygen from the shuttle’s external tank five minutes before the scheduled launching. The workers misread computer evidence of a failed valve and allowed a fuel line to remain open.

The leak was detected when the cold oxygen caused a temperature gauge to drop below approved levels, but not until 31 seconds before the launching was scrubbed.

NASA said then that the liftoff was scrubbed because computer problems delayed the closing of a valve. Space agency spokeswoman Shirley Green said Tuesday that the agency’s public information office did not learn of the fuel loss until much later.

Fuel Loss ‘Not News’

The fact of the fuel loss is “not news,” Green said. “The information . . . has been made public and was discussed at length in Congressman Nelson’s safety hearings” on the shuttle, held in June.

Nelson said Tuesday that NASA considered refueling and launching the shuttle that same day. “A mistake had been made in flipping a switch which caused the liquid oxygen to be drained out of the fuel tank. We knew that when we were still out there in the orbiter,” he said.

Lockheed spokesman John Williams, in Titusville, Fla., acknowledged the error but refused to comment on the presidential commission’s version of the incident.

The commission, quoting a Lockheed report, said the fuel loss could have “significantly” affected Columbia’s ability to achieve its planned orbit. Lockheed cited fatigue as a factor in the incident, the panel stated.

The panel said fatigue also may have contributed “significantly” to the disputed decision by NASA and Morton Thiokol Inc. officials to launch Challenger in cold weather despite evidence that booster seals were ineffective in the cold.

50-Hour Weeks Common

The panel said “certain key managers obtained only minimal sleep the night before the teleconference” in which the fatal launching decision was made. Workweeks of 48 to 50 hours were common in the months before the launching, with many workers putting in much longer weeks, the panel noted.

In a previously unreleased study of 2,900 workers’ time cards in the weeks before the Challenger disaster, the panel noted that the ragged pace of activity that January--including five aborted launchings and two actual launchings--”resulted in an unusually high amount of overtime.”

The panel concluded that “there is no system at Kennedy for monitoring overtime from the safety perspective” and concluded the overwork and fatigue present a continuing safety threat to the space program.