Roadkill at NASA

Admiral Gehman has made the right assessment of NASA, attributing the
loss of Columbia to the "culture" at NASA. Still, though he has
pointed the bayonette, he hasn't driven it home, with a malicious
twist. I will do so now.

When I was at graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin's
Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
(1997-2001) they were fond of calling themselves "JPL West." When
little Sojourner landed on Mars in 1997, for example, all the
professors told us ad nauseum that well over half the technical people
shown celebrating on the TV coverage in the JPL control room were
graduates of UT Austin. Well, it's time for them to face up to that
fact.

The NASA report fails to acknowledge that NASA is a whole, whole lot
more than an government organization with lots of civilian employees.
A major part of the organization is the academic people who do
research for NASA - a huge part of which is done at UT Austin, the UT
Center for Space Research, the Texas Space Grant Consortium, the Jake
Pickle Reseach Center, etc... None of these organizations are the
least bit accountable, yet they form for all practical purposes the
"culture" at NASA.

The Longhours at UT Austin are the gremlins that haunt the halls of
NASA, who make anonymous decisions with no accountability; they are
the problem at NASA, and should face the full spotlight of the
investigation for their role in the loss of Columbia.

Bill Clark, PE, MSE
US Naval Academy '78
Austin, Texas