Panel Urged NASA to Develop Shuttle Escape

In each of the past two years, a high-level panel that advises NASA on safety issues has urged the space agency to develop an escape system that could help astronauts during a crisis.

The panel was so concerned about the lack of an escape system that in its most recent annual report, released in March, it challenged NASA to explain its “risk acceptance rationale” for flying the shuttle without any way to rescue the crew. It said NASA should either add an evacuation system to the shuttle or start work on a new type of spacecraft with better protections for the crew.

That same board, known as the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, is now deciding whether to issue a statement on the matter after the Columbia disaster.

NASA has considered a variety of crew evacuation ideas over the life of the shuttle program but deemed most of them to be unworkable or prohibitively expensive. Following the advisory panel’s advice would not have helped crew members on Columbia because an escape system would take years to develop.

But the tragedy has served to underscore the absence of any escape or rescue plan for crews under nearly all circumstances, even as the risk of problems rises with the aging of the shuttle fleet.

Seymour Himmel, a retired NASA executive who served on the safety panel, said: “There have been quite a number of studies and reports from aerospace contractors like Boeing and Lockheed on how ... escape provisions could be made.... Every one of them ended up costing more than a totally new vehicle.”

The newest shuttle, Endeavour, cost about $1.7 billion.

The aerospace safety panel’s appeal to NASA to create an escape system was prompted by a change in the projected lifespan of the shuttle fleet.

NASA had planned to retire its shuttles in about 2012 and replace them with successor spacecraft that would have crew evacuation systems. More recently, it has become apparent that NASA will be relying on the shuttles until 2020 or beyond.

The panel’s concern arose from “the realization that the shuttle was going to be flying a lot longer,” said Norris Krone Jr., an aeronautical engineer at the University of Maryland and a former member of the safety advisory panel.

NASA has replaced six of the panel’s nine members since the last annual report.

The shuttle’s current design allows for a crew escape only if the mission is aborted below 20,000 feet and the craft is in a controlled glide.

In pushing for a more comprehensive escape system, the safety panel was stepping into a decades-old debate within NASA on how far to go in designing protections for the crew.

Over the years, the agency has considered reinstalling ejection seats that were on the earliest shuttle, as well as building a crew compartment that could separate from a troubled spacecraft and parachute to the ground.

NASA’s most recent study, in 2001, included consideration of a hybrid system of ejection seats for the commander and pilot, and an escape capsule located in the cargo bay for the rest of the crew.

But those measures could work only during certain phases of a spaceflight, and not during orbit or reentry to Earth’s atmosphere, where problems for Columbia developed.

Most recently, NASA has been considering a craft that could serve as a rocket-propelled “lifeboat” if the shuttle ran into trouble while in orbit, Krone said.

The concept has a long history within NASA. “We looked at that possibility pretty closely,” said Tony England, a former NASA scientist-astronaut who flew on Challenger a year before its catastrophic 1986 accident. “The problem is, you’ve already got a very complicated system with the shuttle, and you’d be putting more complication in it.

“You would be trying to add safety in some areas that may expose you to more risk in other areas,” said England, now a professor of space sciences at the University of Michigan.

The panel is an independent board administered by NASA that consists of outside experts. It advises the agency on matters of aerospace safety.

Richard D. Blomberg, who chaired the panel until last year, said that an escape system might carry its own risks, such as additional weight and explosives. “It’s just more things that can go wrong,” he said.

Theoretically, a shuttle could use the international space station as a haven. That option was not available to Columbia, which was not outfitted to dock at the space station.

Asked Tuesday about using the space station as a backup resource for future missions, Michael Kostelnik, NASA deputy associate administrator for the space station and shuttle, said: “In hindsight, that’s probably a good thought. We really haven’t thought about the way ahead. We’re really focusing now on this particular problem and trying to sort out what the cause is, and then we’ll be focused on the fix.”

Previous spacecraft did include escape provisions, but those were aimed at saving the crew during liftoff. In the Apollo program, England said, designers included a rocket above the cabin that the crew could have ignited during a troubled liftoff, pushing the cabin from the rest of the stack.

During four shuttle flights in the early 1980s, the shuttle carried two ejection seats. They were later removed.

“Ejection seats only help during certain phases of flight, so the goal was to make systems redundant and safe enough so that you didn’t need an ejection system any more than you do in a commercial airliner,” England said.

He said that in the early days, shuttle designers considered giving the crew compartment the ability to separate from the orbiter, similar to what was later adopted for the F-111 fighter-bomber. In that aircraft, now retired, the two crew members sat in a pressurized cockpit, which could be separated from the aircraft by explosives and then descend by parachute.

A similar system was considered for the shuttle, England said, but “it was decided it didn’t make sense.”

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Times staff writer Lisa Getter contributed to this report.