NASA Overseers Fearful for Shuttle

Key officials responsible for overseeing NASA have expressed serious concerns about launching the space shuttle Discovery without additional work to prevent foam insulation from breaking off the ship’s fuel tank.

Those concerns were voiced in a series of e-mails from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General to NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin and to the chairman of an advisory panel that monitors NASA safety. In the e-mails, copies of which were obtained by the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, officials discussed lingering safety doubts over the foam threat and the schedule pressures in the shuttle program.

The messages focus on NASA’s controversial decision to launch Discovery before redesigning foam ramps on the fuel tank that engineers determined could shed dangerous debris during flight.

During a review of Discovery’s flight readiness June 16 and 17, mission managers set July 1 as the date for the shuttle’s liftoff despite unprecedented “no go” votes from the agency’s top safety official and chief engineer. Much of the e-mail exchange took place June 16, while the review was underway.

The messages are significant because the inspector general’s office is responsible for independently investigating problems in NASA’s programs and operations. One of the office’s investigators, Larry Neu, was an observer for Inspector General Robert W. Cobb at technical meetings.

“The shuttle program and ultimately the administrator,” who is making the final decision, “are rolling the dice but they think their odds are good,” Neu e-mailed Cobb after attending a June 7 meeting that certified design changes to the fuel tank. “And they have a rescue shuttle if their luck runs out (assuming the rescue shuttle does not get hit by foam on its launch!).”

A spokeswoman for NASA’s Office of the Inspector General did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests Thursday for comment from Cobb and Neu.

Cobb is under investigation by a Bush administration integrity committee after accusations that he repeatedly quashed probes into wrongdoing at NASA and maintained inappropriately close ties with agency officials he was responsible for monitoring. Cobb has denied the allegations.

Cobb’s e-mail exchange with Griffin was prompted by a letter from NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, which was set up by Congress to monitor safety after the deadly 1967 Apollo 1 launchpad fire.

The panel recommended that Discovery be launched on a test flight with as few as two crew members to minimize the risk to astronauts. Another shuttle flight to the international space station would be added later to carry out the mission, which includes transporting supplies and a new crew member. Griffin and other NASA managers decided to proceed with the flight as planned.

“While the panel may not specifically agree with the decision, we are respectful of what Mike [Griffin] decided,” retired Vice Adm. Joe Dyer, the group’s chairman, said in an interview Thursday. “Someone has to decide, and there was genuine and open debate.”

On the afternoon of June 16, as the Flight Readiness Review was nearing the end of its first day, Cobb sent an e-mail to Dyer and Griffin that outlined concerns he and Neu shared. Although deciding that his office did not have “decent criteria to [officially] weigh in on the issues,” Cobb said, “there are a few things that bother me.”

The e-mail quotes legendary Mercury and Gemini Flight Director Chris Kraft as saying: “We would never fly a manned vehicle if we know something was wrong with it until we fixed it.”

“I do not know if this is the right standard to apply,” Cobb wrote. “If it is, I question whether NASA is meeting it.”

Cobb took issue with a decision by the shuttle program manager, N. Wayne Hale Jr., to flight-test Discovery’s fuel tank before making additional modifications to the 37 ice-frost ramps that still pose a threat. Hale’s rationale is the No. 1 reason given publicly by mission managers for proceeding with the flight.

“The logic that ‘it is more appropriate to make one change at a time, to take care of the biggest problem that we have,’ might make sense if these were genuine test flights and all about testing,” Cobb wrote.

Cobb also raised the issue of schedule pressure, a factor that investigators found contributed to the 2003 Columbia accident, which killed seven astronauts. NASA must fly 16 missions to complete the international space station before the shuttle fleet’s planned retirement in 2010.

Although the Columbia Accident Investigation Board “delved deeply into ‘schedule pressure,’ ” Cobb wrote, “I suspect a morph of that into what I would call ‘program pressure’ or ‘mission pressure,’ where a perception may develop that if NASA takes the time to fix things like the ice-frost ramps for the next immediate flight, it will demonstrably not be able to carry out the vision of building out the station by 2010.

“This could mean that the program is over. The pressure to timely execute is positive in many respects,” Cobb wrote, but it “can lead to bad decisions,” as suggested by the Columbia investigation board.

In an e-mail to Cobb sent to other NASA senior managers, Griffin disagreed with the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel’s suggestion that trimming Discovery’s crew would reduce risk. An additional flight later, he said, would add risk of its own.

Griffin noted a “safe haven” could be provided for astronauts aboard the space station for an estimated 82 days if a shuttle were damaged. However, his e-mail tacitly acknowledged that schedule pressure was a factor in the decision to launch Saturday.