Human failings serve as NASA wake-up call

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON - Over the past few months, space engineers have been forcibly reminded that booster seals and wing panels aren't the only things that can crack in space: Humans can, too.

To the embarrassment of NASA officials, and to the glee of far too many outside cynics, the public has been treated to a ghastly parade of human failings from space workers that might have led to disaster if they occurred during flight: February's story of a love triangle gone wrong, which resulted in the arrest of astronaut Lisa Nowak; a murder-suicide at NASA's Johnson Space Center; and last month's tales of heavy alcohol use in the astronaut corps.

Still more stories circulate among the astronauts themselves. One account focuses on a spaceflier who had a detached retina corrected "on the outside" without NASA's knowledge. Another story tells of a veteran shuttle commander who should have been disqualified on medical grounds, but was allowed one last flight when the medical team acquiesced.

Engineers are accustomed to measuring the reliability of space hardware. They have developed tests and measurements that can go a long way toward winnowing out the "failure points" in mechanisms, designs or operational plans.

Where disaster has occurred, investigation boards have determined them to be the result of human failings somewhere along the line — for example, skipping procedures that were already known to be necessary.

But how about people? How can they be measured, and how can weaknesses be filtered out so that there is not a loss of concentration at a critical time, or a loss of the mental or physical ability to react properly?

Medical issue is a complex one
Applying medical standards to astronauts was the main theme of the report issued last month by an independent panel of eight physicians — the report that stirred all the controversy over alcohol use. Commissioned by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin in the wake of Nowak's arrest, the report assessed the space agency's ability to monitor the "psychosocial health of astronauts" and identify "potential system vulnerabilities" in current practices.

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At the same time, I've been conducting a private, informal survey of two dozen former astronauts and flight surgeons, and comparing the comments with information gleaned during my two decades at Mission Control in Houston. The results have convinced me that the issue of maintaining medical standards for flight crews is a complex one.

The astronauts say some people have flown even though they shouldn't have, and some people have been grounded even though they shouldn't have. Some of these cases have had significant impacts on individuals — and yet this process, for all its flaws, appears to have functioned sufficiently well to forestall any significant impact on U.S. human spaceflight so far.

This is despite the stories of a few men and women who flew sometimes with illnesses, sometimes with surgical complications, sometimes with physical disqualifications, sometimes with unverified psychological balance.

Privacy shrouds process
As with the anecdotes mentioned in the last month's report — such as the stories of pre-flight alcohol abuse, which monopolized the public's attention to the disregard of the report’s more central findings — these stories are unverified. (In fact, NBC News reports that investigators have been unable to substantiate the claims about alcohol.)

Medical anecdotes are difficult to confirm because NASA follows the federal government's policy on protecting the medical privacy of employees. "All individuals have a right to medical privacy. NASA respects that right for all its employees, including astronauts," NASA spokesman James Hartsfield told me at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"The policy we have with regard to astronauts and missions, that are of high national interest, is [that] we would respect the medical privacy issue unless there is a matter that significantly impacts the mission,” Hartsfield said. For example, NASA has in the past disclosed medical conditions that affected launch schedules, spacewalks and other mission activities — while withholding comment on medical matters extraneous to such activities.

Meanwhile, the medical standards process, in public and in private, remains hit or miss. It seems based on judgments that are sometimes skewed by careerist strategies — for example, not angering people who could help dictate the future assignments of those making the decisions.

Getting away with such a strategy "so far" may seem not unlike "getting away" with plume leakage from the shuttle's solid rocket boosters, until Challenger ... or getting away with debris damage to the shuttle's underbelly dozens of times, until Columbia. Is it only a matter of time before undetected weaknesses in this component conspire with other failures to create conditions for another tragedy in space?

The medical stresses will grow more severe as NASA moves through a string of complex missions on the international space station, through the twilight years of the space shuttle era, and onward to a new era that will take humans beyond low Earth orbit. Human weaknesses that may have been tolerable before now may, at some point, reach a breaking point. To forestall such disasters, a fuller appreciation of the history of medical screening is needed.

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