NASA Breaks Rules to Keep the Space Shuttle in Orbit

NASA officials set aside one of their own flight rules Friday, keeping the space shuttle Columbia aloft an additional day despite a failure in one of the vehicle’s four flight control computers.

Columbia is scheduled to land at 4:24 a.m. PST today at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, relying on three backup computers to control its wing flaps, rudder and brake system.

Under National Aeronautics and Space Administration flight rules, the failure of one computer is supposed to require a landing as soon as possible. But in a controversial decision, NASA officials waived that rule Friday.

Weather conditions did not permit a landing at Kennedy, meaning that the shuttle would have had to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

A landing at Edwards would have cost the budget-strapped space agency about $1 million and an additional five days of shuttle processing time, which will be avoided if the shuttle lands in Florida.

But NASA officials insisted that the decision does not compromise safety because the shuttle can land on just one of its three remaining computers.

“If they thought for one moment that there was any risk to the crew, they would have landed today at Edwards,” said Laurie Boeder, NASA’s associate administrator for public affairs. “You don’t want to be rigid and inflexible.”

NASA officials said the rule was created early in the space shuttle program in the 1970s, when there was concern that a common defect could theoretically cause all four computers to fail in rapid order.

But after more than 50 flights since the Challenger disaster, the agency has gained confidence in the systems through experience. Lee Briscoe, NASA’s mission operations director, said Friday that the rule was possibly too conservative.

But John Pike, a frequent NASA critic at the Federation of American Scientists, said the space agency was making a serious policy error by waiving the rule.

“Maybe the rule is screwed up, but rewriting the rule book while the clock is running strikes me as not the right time to do it,” Pike said. “You write the rules in a moment of calm reflection and then you follow them--otherwise they are not rules.”

Pike said he was prepared to accept NASA’s conclusion that landing with three computers is safe but that the decision to waive the rule to save $1 million sends a bad message to the NASA work force and to the public.

The former director of the space shuttle program, Bryan O’Connor, left his job last week, saying he believes that a management reorganization at the space agency could jeopardize safety. In addition, other NASA managers are reportedly leaving the agency, unwilling to stake their reputations on a system of questionable safety.

Boeder took sharp exception Friday to critics who are questioning NASA’s judgment, saying: “Nobody at NASA has any motive to do anything unsafe. If we didn’t want to take any risks at all, we wouldn’t fly.”

In addition to the computer failure, the 16-day Columbia mission had problems with a faulty engine indicator, glitches with O-ring seals on a rocket nozzle and a balky cabin cooling system--problems that NASA officials say are routine issues in a complex vehicle like the shuttle.

The mission’s biggest disappointment occurred when the tether connecting a $154-million Italian satellite to the shuttle broke, marking the end of what was to have been the centerpiece of the mission.