Columbia Board Delays Final Report

Columbia investigators on Wednesday delayed by a month the scheduled delivery of their final accident investigation report, saying they still have massive amounts of work to complete.

“We are still writing and editing,” said Laura Brown, spokeswoman for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

The board had hoped to issue its report July 23, giving it to Congress before its summer adjournment. Now, the board expects to release the report just before the Labor Day weekend, Brown said.

It is not clear what ramifications the delay will have for the space shuttle program, which has been on hold during the investigation.

Board member John Logsdon said the delay should not have any direct effect on NASA’s effort to return to space or on Congress’ examination of the board’s findings. Logsdon said Congress will be in recess during August and would not have had the opportunity to act on the report even if it were on schedule.

Logsdon noted that the board has been making interim recommendations in recent months to allow NASA to begin work to return the space shuttle fleet to flight as soon as possible. A number of other recommendations are expected to be laid out in the final report and at least some of those will call for far-reaching, long-term changes to NASA management.

“NASA is not going to be surprised by the report, because we have been working with them very closely,” Logsdon said.

Indeed, Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University, said his section of the report will find that budgetary cutbacks at NASA had eliminated upgrades to the shuttle fleet and delayed modernization of the space agency’s aging infrastructure.

NASA reduced the number of safety personnel it employed and relied to a greater extent on its contractors to conduct safety inspections. But the board will not conclude that those budgetary pressures contributed to the Columbia accident, Logsdon said, though they did affect long-term safety.

In recent years, NASA went through a process of setting priorities on upgrades and determined that replacing auxiliary power units would possibly be the most important safety improvement. Unfortunately, Logsdon said, that particular upgrade was not technologically possible.

At the same time, NASA never put on its list improvements to the external tank foam that is believed to have caused the Columbia accident. Of course, Logsdon noted, NASA could not see then that it was a safety problem.

A number of outside experts have long worried that NASA was being forced to carry out the human space flight program with inadequate resources and said it would eventually affect safety.

However, even if the investigation board’s findings are not surprising or groundbreaking, they are likely to be highly influential when Congress begins examining how to fix NASA.

The investigators’ delay may provide a clue about whether NASA itself is being too optimistic about when it can return to space flight. The agency has said it hopes to begin flying the shuttle in the next six to nine months, allowing a resumption of assembly of the international space station.

But some outside experts have questioned whether that schedule is realistic.

For example, the investigation board has said that NASA must develop a practical capability to inspect the shuttle in space and repair damage to its thermal protection system caused by debris striking the craft during launch.

A test this week in San Antonio showed that foam debris could punch a large hole in a shuttle wing.

Such a hole probably could not be fixed even with the kind of repair capability the shuttle astronauts would eventually have, Logsdon said.