3 Tests That Found Hubble Flaw Ignored, Probe Finds : Space: The mirror maker reportedly discounted the data and never told NASA, whose supervision is faulted.

Three tests before launch clearly detected the flawed mirror on the $1.5-billion Hubble Space Telescope, but its manufacturer discounted the information and did not tell the space agency, an investigating committee concluded Tuesday.

But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is also “100%” to blame for the $50-million mistake because it failed to supervise the mirror’s manufacture with “reasonable diligence,” said Lew Allen, the panel’s chairman and director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

His committee’s anatomy of the embarrassing mistake is reminiscent of events that led to the 1986 space shuttle explosion--replete with ignored warnings, lax government supervision, a “closed-door” mind-set in which bad news was frowned upon and NASA’s desire to cut costs and catch up with the project’s timetable.

“There were at least three cases where there was clear evidence that a problem was developing and it was missed all three times,” Allen said. All three occurred in 1982.

Two months after the telescope was launched, scientists discovered that the 94.5-inch-diameter primary mirror was too flat in the center, thus producing blurry images and threatening to prevent as many as half of the planned experiments and observations from being carried out.

“The most unfortunate aspect of this Hubble Space Telescope optical system failure is that the data revealing these errors was available from time to time in the fabrication process but was not recognized and fully investigated at the time,” the committee report said.

Senior personnel at the firm that manufactured the mirror had dismissed the data as the unreliable result of a faulty piece of test equipment, Allen said.

A spokesman for the Danbury, Conn., company--then known as Perkin-Elmer Corp. and now as Hughes Danbury Optical Systems Inc.--said its officials are studying the report.

NASA hopes to correct the telescope flaw in the summer of 1993 when a replacement camera is to be sent up that will be outfitted with a corrective lens, said Lennard Fisk, NASA’s assistant administrator for space science and applications.

That mission will be performed by a space shuttle crew and will cost $50 million, including the redesigned equipment. The mirror itself cannot be corrected.

After the flawed mirror was discovered, NASA appointed Allen and five outside experts to investigate how the mistake occurred. The group released its report Tuesday.

Despite the challenge of manufacturing a mirror that required “unprecedented performance,” the report said, “there was a surprising lack of participation by optical experts” during the manufacturing process. This was all the more bewildering, Allen said, because similar errors had occurred in the making of mirrors for other telescopes.

Still, “some members” of the firm’s optical operations division, which made the mirror, had been alarmed by the prelaunch test results. But the company’s management structure “provided a strong block against communication between the people actually doing the job and higher-level experts both within and outside of P-E,” the report said.

The division “was allowed to operate in an artisan, closed-door mode,” it continued. “The impermeability of this division seems astounding,” causing “discrepant data to be discounted without review,” the report said.

At the same time, NASA’s “quality assurance” official on the scene was not an optical expert and thus was “not able to distinguish the presence of inconsistent data results from the optical tests,” the report said.

“Perkin-Elmer should not have allowed a situation that inhibited communications to exist,” Allen said at a news conference at NASA headquarters here. “NASA had every right to expect that Perkin-Elmer would have done a better job with this. They had competency and experience in optics, and NASA should have expected more professional performance than they actually got.”

Yet, Allen continued, “it is fundamentally NASA’s responsibility as a government agency to get this done; NASA should have been aware of what was happening at Perkin-Elmer.”

Aside from the three clear instances in which the mirror’s flaw should have come to light, Allen said, there were several other instances when “clear evidence that problems were developing” was unnoticed or overlooked.

Allen and Fisk said Tuesday that new management philosophies and more rigorous checks and balances by NASA and its contractors would not allow similar mistakes in the future.

In the mid-1980s, lower-level NASA officials and private-industry employees were privately expressing concern about the ability of the O-rings on the space shuttle’s two solid rocket boosters to withstand cold weather, saying that a break in the seal they provided could prove catastrophic to the orbiter.

But senior NASA officials brusquely dismissed those concerns. On a frigid Florida morning almost five years ago, they ordered the long-delayed launch of the Challenger.

Almost instantaneously, an O-ring failed, and barely two minutes after liftoff a flame from one of the solid rocket boosters ignited the massive liquid-fuel tank. It touched off a spectacular explosion that killed everyone aboard, including Concord, N.H., schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe.