Shuttle panel divided over NASA compliance

The nature of the task group’s final report, and how NASA will use it, is unclear. Reportedly, there is serious discussion on fundamental questions such as the definition of "compliance," "verification," and other terms. Even if the group lists unsatisfied CAIB recommendations, NASA may decide that those particular CAIB prescriptions do not apply to the first shuttle flight, but only later ones.

Pressure and precedents
The task group had originally wanted to have 30 days between its reaching a final conclusion and the date of the shuttle launch. The schedule pressure of NASA having to consider the group’s recommendations as part of its own readiness review a week before launch may not allow sufficient time for thorough deliberation, observers have privately said.

The quality of NASA’s decision-making process is further threatened by the current leadership transition at the agency. The new administrator, Michael Griffin, has yet to be confirmed. Even if he were to take office prior to the shuttle launch date, he would be required to make perhaps the most important decision in the history of the shuttle program with only a few days notice.

Also worrisome to many is the fact that NASA’s current headquarters leadership consists essentially of the very same individuals who were in charge in January 2003 when the judgment was made that it was safe to fly the Columbia shuttle, and later, that it was safe to disregard multiple clues that significant damage might have been done to the thermal protection system during launch.

NASA and the Stafford-Covey group are not getting tied up with empty semantics. They are wrestling with the fundamental principle of flight safety, that a potentially hazardous condition must be proven to be safe. It is foolhardy to complacently assume it is safe until its danger can be proved. That attitude has led to hideous catastrophes in space history, and in enterprises on Earth as well.

The overwhelming consensus among space workers is that the next shuttle mission will be far safer, and that the memory of the Columbia disaster has motivated everyone to be especially careful. But this is almost always an intuitive judgment, not a measured, calibrated conclusion of an explicit process. It is faith and hope and anecdotes, not a certified, legalistic determination.

That may be why some task group members, and other observers both inside the shuttle program and outside, are particularly concerned that the existing safety process be followed through to its logical end, no matter how cumbersome it has turned out to be, and how long it takes. Creating shortcuts and "back doors" now would, some believe, gut the effectiveness of future safety review processes after the first few shuttle missions have succeeded, after the subverted safety process seems to have worked, and after public and political pressure is off.

James Oberg, space analyst for NBC News, spent 22 years at the Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer.

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