Columbia Investigator Worried NASA Won't Change Culture, Allowing'Faulty Reasoning' to Prevail

Jay wrote:

From the article at:
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20030801_1116.html

Fears NASA Won't Change
Columbia Investigator Worried NASA Won't Change Culture, Allowing
'Faulty Reasoning' to Prevail

The Associated Press



CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Aug. 1

A Nobel Prize-winning member of the board investigating the space
shuttle Columbia disaster says he fears NASA won't change its culture,
possibly leading to yet another accident.

The "same faulty reasoning" that led to the 1986 Challenger accident
also led to Columbia, said Douglas Osheroff, one of the 13 board
members wrapping up the report on the Columbia accident.

Trying to "change the culture" at NASA w.r.t. the space shuttle is like
trying to "change the culture" at the highest levels of management at
the big tobacco companies w.r.t. cigarettes.

Sorry. You cannot adopt a culture that puts the users and customers
first when you're in the business of selling an inherently highly risky
product that you're afraid will lose business if it was widely known
just how risky it is. With each catastrophic accident, NASA is forced
to reassure us that it will never happen again (whether they know how to
accomplish that or not), because who is going to volunteer to ride on a
vehicle if they thought they still had a 2% chance of getting killed?


Osheroff worries that NASA's new task force that will assess when
shuttles can return to space may feel pressure to hurry because of the
needs of the international space station.

That's the problem. That's the fundamental disconnect that NASA has
been faced with ever since they declared the shuttle operational back in
the 1980's. It should be clear by now that flying the shuttle will
never be anything close to routine. Yet they keep pretending it's some
kind of routine space truck, with civilian passengers and a schedule of
needed flights to supply the Space Station that NASA has to keep trying
to adhere to.

NASA should be given total schedule freedom. That is, the schedule of
flights to the Space Station should be scrapped, and a whole series of
test flights of the shuttle should be done to "wring it out." For
example, let's finally try one of the abort modes for real (rather than
just in simulators), and let's see if it really works.


--
Steven D. Litvintchouk
Email:

Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.