1998 critique of NASA safety practices

1998 critique of NASA safety practices

I continue to go through my archives and note articles such as this (which
contributed to my later book).

The operative quotation is:

[Re Mir-Shuttle Program safety flaws]

"Many new and important safety issues keep showing up by chance, which
raises questions about how much remains concealed.... Decisions seem to
keep being made in the absence of all relevant information, and although
NASA has thus far avoided the consequences, it is setting a bad example for
future safety assessments.... Inadequate, incomplete information is a recipe
for improper decisions and dangerous consequences."


May 18-24, 1998 // SPACE NEWS // page 23

James Oberg

Handling Mir Misinformation



Assessing Mir hazards continues to be difficult even as the American
presence there is winding down. Many new and important safety issues keep
showing up by chance, which raises questions about how much remains
concealed. And the news media tends to inflate reports of trouble based on
the not unrealistic assumption that official statements are deliberately
understated.



Decisions seem to keep being made in the absence of all relevant information
(cosmonaut Valery Ryumin is going to Mir aboard the space shuttle Discovery
to investigate safety-related features of Mir that NASA has pretended
already were settled), and although NASA has thus far avoided the
consequences, it is setting a bad example for future safety assessments.



The British television channel BBC-2 ran a special Horizons show April 23
about the 1997 crises aboard Mir. Called “Mir Mortals,” the program involved
detailed assessments of the various accidents experienced aboard the Russian
space station. It included interviews with astronauts and cosmonauts
involved and special graphics. Co-produced with WGBH-Nova in Boston, the
show may later be seen on American television.



The program contained an astonishing assertion attributed to Vasily
Tsibliev, commander of Mir during its worst months. He reported that
following a collision with a Progress supply drone in June, the crew fled to
a Soyuz spacecraft but found that they were unable to power it up.



The batteries were flat and they had to wait more than half an hour until
the tumbling station emerged into daylight and by chance turned the Soyuz
solar panels toward the sun.



NASA’S immediate official reaction was to deny it — “Categorically untrue,”
stated Johnson Space Center spokesman Rob Navias — and a week later, when
Tsibliev’s shipmate, astronaut Michael Foale, returned to Moscow, he
asserted that as far as he knew, the Soyuz batteries always were fully
charged. Tsibliev’s statements, unambiguous as they may seem, were
attributed to some sort of misunderstanding or confusion.



Yet on the same BBC program, Foale said the Russians tended to be
overprotective of him, shielding him from difficulties and problems. Other
Mir veterans, speaking privately, told me they did not find Tsibliev’s story
at all unbelievable. So what actually happened remains ambiguous.



Another shipmate, Aleksandr Lazutkin, said at a space conference in
mid-April in Moscow that the Mir crew (including Foale) also fled into the
Soyuz after a cable-pulling incident in July 1997, only to find again that
they could not power up the spacecraft. In that incident, a cosmonaut
accidentally unplugged a cable to Mir’s orientation control computer,
causing the station to drift out of its sun-pointing attitude and lose
significant power.



Before they could use the radio or turn on the Soyuz’s thrusters to orient
the drifting Mir, they had to wait until its random motion turned them
toward the sun. Yet no mention of this problem was ever released in Moscow
or in Houston.



Thanks only to journalists’ filing of Freedom of Information Act requests,
we now know a lot more about that cable-pulling incident. While it was easy
to blame the Mir’s loss of control on a single, simple crew mistake, the
actual cause was much more complex and much more disturbing.



The truth was that the Mir went out of control mainly due to a series of
erroneous responses from the Mission Control Center team in Moscow. Their
inadequate performance magnified a trivial slip-up into a life-threatening
crisis. This was documented in an internal memo that NASA did not even turn
over to its own

Inspector General’s Office during a congressionally mandated inquiry into
Mir safety, according to a source in the Inspector General’s Office.



The catalog of major Moscow Mission Control errors is apparently growing,
probably due to the continuing hemorrhage of experience and talent resulting
from ludicrously low wages.



Most recently, another incident during a spacewalk April 7 artificially
created an emergency. While spacewalkers Talgat Musabayev and Nikolay
Budarin were struggling with installing a brace on the broken Spektr solar
array, the Mir suddenly went to free drift and began turning away from the
sun, threatening the power generation from its solar panels. Moscow
concluded that the boom-mounted rocket pack used to maneuver Mir, a device
known to be running short of fuel at that time, had suddenly exhausted its
supply of fuel.



The crew was about to go into an hour-long period of no communications (the
Altair relay satellite system normally used during spacewalks was
temporarily broken), so they were ordered to rush through the final bracing
procedure and then perform an expedited entry. They had to get back inside
and rewire the station’s attitude control system to regain control. This
involved hurrying through the airlock procedures even though the outer hatch
was already known to be dangerously warped, requiring delicate, methodical
manipulations to make it work properly.



As it turned out, the rushed return — which left the crew panting so hard
they could hardly talk, according to radio listeners in Europe — was a risk
that never needed to be taken. The boom jet pack had actually not run out of
fuel at all. U.S. astronaut Andy Thomas could have easily reset the Mir
computer to solar inertial and the spacewalk could have continued. Instead,
the Mir was staggering out of attitude because of another series of ground
errors. Mission Control had sent up an erroneous pointing command, and the
Mir’s computer had rejected it.



Ground experts failed to diagnose the cause of this computer problem and
jumped to the wrong conclusion. As a consequence, they ordered the crew to
perform some hazardous and entirely unnecessary emergency procedures, which
fortunately they got away with.



Yet subsequent accounts by media including the Associated Press and Reuters,
based on statements by officials in Moscow and Houston, maintained the
ran-out-of-fuel story long after the truth was known by NASA — but not
shared with the public. Evidently it was deemed important to keep secret the
alarmingly low level of space operations competence of our Russians
partners.



The public record on real Mir safety issues continues to be inadequate and
the list of things Moscow and Houston have not disclosed seems to keep on
growing. It includes:



• The stroke of luck that saved Mir during the Progress collision, when
the crew would have had no idea where the leak of air out of the Spektr
module was, except one of them happened to glance out a nearby porthole at
the moment of contact. Also, NASA soon knew that the errant Progress drone
repeatedly hit other sections of Mir as well, but in public maintained the
story that only the Spektr had been touched, according to sources

who saw a videotape of Progress’ approach.

• The cause of the premature ignition of the Soyuz soft-landing engine in
August. According to sources at Johnson Space Center, this now is being
attributed by the Russians to water condensation on wires during flight, a
condition also endured by most of the rest of Mir’s electronics.

• The extent of injuries during the February 1997 fire aboard Mir This has
always been downplayed by NASA, but we know from people who were on Mir that
cosmonaut Valery Korzun suffered third-degree burns along the back of one
hand and elsewhere. The release of on-board photographs of his injuries was
conveniently refused by NASA on grounds of medical privacy.

• The on-board photograph of the post-fire medicinal cognac gathering (the
release of which originally was refused by NASA officials until Freedom of
Information Act requests were filed).



Inadequate, incomplete information is a recipe for improper decisions and
dangerous consequences. It also creates the atmosphere of media distrust
that leads to exaggeration and overreaction. These recent trend of U.S.
adoption of Soviet-style cover-up is disturbing and must be re versed if the
right decisions for international space station are to be guaranteed.



James Oberg is the Houston- based author of the book ‘Red Star in Orbit.”

The program contained an astonishing assertion attributed to Vasily
Tsibliev, commander of Mir during its worst months. He reported that
following a collision with a Progress supply drone in June, the crew fled to
a Soyuz spacecraft but found that they were unable to power it up.

The batteries were flat and they had to wait more than half an hour until
the tumbling station emerged into daylight and by chance turned the Soyuz
solar panels toward the sun.

[...when] astronaut Michael Foale, returned to Moscow, he
asserted that as far as he knew, the Soyuz batteries always were fully
charged. [...]

Yet on the same BBC program, Foale said the Russians tended to be
overprotective of him, shielding him from difficulties and problems.

Even given that overprotective attitude - surely Foale had been in a Soyuz
before, and seen it being powered up? I can't imagine somebody with even
just a passing experience not being able to distinguish between a normal
power-up and "wait[ing] more than half an hour" until enough power becomes
available.

Jan

From STAR-CROSSED ORBITS, McGraw-Hill, 2002

Acknowledgments

Aerospace technology is one of the few arenas of human activity where you
can't bluff or bully your way through, or camouflage shortcomings with a
blizzard of excuses and rationalizations. Although its practitioners strive
for among the most challenging and exciting of endeavors, to overcome (or at
least evade) gravity, they realize these dreams must be founded on severe
reality. Anything that deflects or distracts from reality is 'bad', and can
instantaneously exact a horrifying price from the careless. As the bumper
sticker says, "Man forgives, God forgives, nature never."

So the first acknowledgment of this book must be to the men and women, of
all nations and of all times, who have dedicated themselves to this
profession and to the ferocious obsession with truth that its proper pursuit
entails. Their accomplishments will define the way our era is remembered in
times to come, and what they have accomplished will be remembered when their
names, and the names of politicians and movie stars and sports champions,
and the names of countries themselves, have all been forgotten. Without the
wisdom, wealth, and power that space activities are making available, I
doubt that our civilization, our species, even our entire biosphere, can
long endure.

Second only to this is the acknowledgment of the help of hundreds of these
aerospace professionals in collecting, sharing, and assessing the
information in this book. Since they recognize that preferring reality over
make-believe is not a mental trait widely shared, and is often punished,
they know that their cooperation with me must be anonymous, for their own
protection, except in special circumstances when they can allow their names
to be used. This places a tremendous burden on me, to demonstrate to my
readers the credibility of statements from people who are unavailable to
verify these statements. All I can do is assure my readers that I know and
trust the people whose information I've used.

snip


James Oberg
Galveston County, Texas
June 2001