Management Reported To Be Big Factor In Columbia Tragedy

The NASA management culture contributed as much as anything else to the Columbia shuttle tragedy. That's the word from retired Admiral Harold Gehman, chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

"A goodly portion of the report, perhaps half, is going to deal with the issue of management and management techniques," Gehman said last week. "We will not tell NASA how to organize ... but we will tell them what needs to be done," Gehman said at a briefing.

The CAIB's report to the president, Congress and all of America is due out before August. Members have already attributed the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia to a chunk of insulating foam which fell off the orbiter's external fuel tank and impacted its left wing, 82 seconds after liftoff. The resulting damage to Columbia's wing is blamed for allowing super-heated gases past the carbon-carbon surface and inside the wing structure itself, melting vital structural components and causing the shuttle to break apart over Texas and Louisiana. All seven astronauts were killed in the Feb. 1 disaster.

"Missed Signals, Bureaucratic Fumbling"

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has spent the past week trying to brace his team for what he expects to be a blistering CAIB report. He may not be wrong. Board members have been critical of what they see as danger signals overlooked by space agency management, bureaucratic fumbling that contributed to the Columbia disaster. "It's not just the foam that NASA has to do something about," Gehman told reporters. Among the major criticisms from the CAIB: NASA denied heated requests from engineers studying the foam impact who wanted to turn spy satellite cameras on the wounded shuttle. The NSA, which operates those satellites, even offered its assistance. Again, NASA managers said "no."

Criticism of NASA's corporate culture isn't confined to the CAIB. Even as Columbia was in orbit on its final, doomed mission, Allen Li at the General Accounting Office (the investigative branch of Congress), wrote a stinging assessment of the shuttle program in particular and the space agency in general. The report listed several "challenges" facing NASA which the authors believed could threaten the agency's ability to manage programs like the shuttle missions. "Because they are rooted in NASA's culture and long-standing ways of doing business, NASA will need to make a major transformation," the summary said.

The report also suggested:

• Retaining NASA's best workers and doing more to attract new ones to replace those who leave.
• Controlling costs for the $95 billion International Space Station.
• Cutting the expense of launches; on the shuttle, it costs about $10,000 per pound (0.45 kg) to put objects in space, while NASA once aimed to launch for one-tenth that amount aboard an as-yet-undesigned new launch vehicle.
• Improving the way NASA manages its contracts. Outsourcing accounts for as much as 85 percent of NASA's budget.

But the CAIB report will supposedly take a much differenct track, blaming part of the problems that led to the Columbia disaster on budget cuts -- and spreading that blame throughout NASA, Congress -- all the way up to the White House. NASA, according to a draft CAIB report, can't continue to launch such frequent and ambitious missions without proper funding. Either the missions should be drawn back, the CAIB will reportedly say, or Washington will have to cough up more dough for the shuttle program.

FMI: www.nasa.gov