NASA Boss Rejects Call to Fix Blame for Shuttle

Following a scathing report on the lapses that led to the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, Republican and Democratic senators on Wednesday pressed the NASA administrator to find those responsible for the disaster and hold them accountable.

But Sean O’Keefe, NASA chief, refused to assign blame during his congressional testimony or in a subsequent meeting with reporters. He disparaged demands for what he called “a public display or a public execution or a firing squad that lines up at noon,” even as he asserted that a new management team soon would lead the remaining shuttles back to flight.

The exchanges over disciplinary action within NASA underscored the tensions within a space agency struggling to right itself after the second shuttle loss in 17 years.

“This is one of the seminal moments in our history,” O’Keefe said of the 45-year-old agency. “It is defined by a failure.”

The Columbia, on its way to its landing site in Florida, blew apart on Feb. 1 in the skies over Texas, an accident that has prompted the same sort of soul-searching within NASA that occurred after the loss of the Challenger in 1986.

O’Keefe, who took over NASA barely a year before the Columbia breakup, is seeking to remake the culture within the agency -- quickly -- without demoralizing it.

Lawmakers, on the other hand, are seeking evidence that the $6 billion spent each year on human spaceflight is not wasted. Some charged that NASA had missed chances to save the Columbia and its crew.

“Now they talk about an accident, but it was an avoidable accident,” said Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.). “You talk about failure, but it was an avoidable failure.” Hollings, the senior Democrat on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which oversees NASA, said a captain of a Navy ship under similar circumstances would be “cashiered.”

In the first congressional hearing on the shuttle program since the release of a report last month that faulted safety procedures within the space agency, senators from both parties questioned whether NASA needed a broad shake-up.

“How do you change a culture at an institution without changing the people involved?” asked Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), adding that it “seems to me that you are talking about major, wholesale changes in personnel within the NASA system.”

O’Keefe replied that 15 or so senior leaders of the space shuttle fleet had been replaced in the months since the Columbia breakup.

“What you see is a management team in place that’s different today than it was a year ago, to be sure, and certainly very different than it was seven months ago,” O’Keefe told the panel.

Pressed by Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the committee, on whether the previous leadership of the shuttle program had been disciplined, O’Keefe said: “The folks who are in positions today will lead in the future and be accountable for this activity. Those who are not there, I think you can draw the conclusion from that.”

O’Keefe sidestepped repeated questions about whether the administration would seek more money than it already has requested, either to upgrade the remaining three shuttles to return them to flight or to accelerate plans for a replacement vehicle.

Lawmakers this month are drafting a spending bill to fund NASA in the 2004 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

Many are impatient with the space agency’s continued commitment to flying shuttles for the next decade or longer; some, such as Brownback, are leaning toward mothballing the fleet sooner rather than later.

“Are we throwing good money after bad?” Brownback asked. “There’s a fair feeling that this is an older technology, it’s a complex technology, that we may just be at a point it’s time to say ... scuttle the shuttle, and we move on to the next technology.”

O’Keefe pleaded with the Kansas senator to keep an “open mind.” He said he would make public a plan for fixing the shuttle program within days.

Harold W. Gehman Jr., the retired Navy admiral who chaired the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, told reporters after the hearing that the “space shuttle portion of the NASA program is going to have to have more money.” But he declined to say how much.

Gehman’s board, which formed after the accident, found that a breakaway piece of foam from an external fuel tank fatally damaged Columbia’s left wing within seconds of liftoff. Superheated gases penetrated the breach on reentry into the atmosphere and caused the orbiter -- the oldest in the fleet -- to disintegrate.

The seven astronauts aboard were killed. Two searchers died in a helicopter crash while looking for debris in eastern Texas.

While some lawmakers are calling for a replacement vehicle, others wonder whether the government should reconsider its commitment to human spaceflight. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked O’Keefe to give Congress an assessment within six months of the costs and benefits of human versus robotic exploration.

“There are a lot of critics who say, ‘Look, they give the bulk of the money to manned programs, but most of the research seems to come from areas that aren’t manned,’ ” Wyden said.

O’Keefe called Wyden’s proposal “an intriguing idea.”