Columbia investigators work complex puzzle
Posted on 03/07/2003 2:18:31 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Columbia investigators work complex puzzle
03/06/2003
HOUSTON - In the first public hearing of the Columbia investigation board, NASA officials defended decisions that gave private contractors much of the direct responsibility for maintaining and operating the space shuttle.
Seven members of the board, searching for the cause of the shuttle's breakup, questioned space shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore and Johnson Space Center Director Jefferson Davis Howell about NASA's policies that shifted much of the responsibility for fixing and flying the shuttle to private contractors.
Both Howell and Dittemore said safety has not been compromised and remains the main focus of the spaceflight program, even though there are now fewer civil servants.
Of the 10,000 people working at the Johnson Space Center, only about 3,000 are civil servants, Howell said. The rest work for aerospace companies that hold contracts for operating and maintaining the shuttle.
Dittemore was questioned about a decision that moved key work from contractor-owned plants to facilities at Kennedy and Johnson space centers.
A contract calling for maintaining and upgrading the space shuttle fleet was moved from Palmdale, Calif., to Kennedy, while an engineering contract for shuttle flights was moved from Huntington Beach, Calif. to Johnson. For the Johnson move, only 24 percent of the skilled workers in California made the move to Texas.
Dittemore said both moves saved money and increased safety, even though they required hiring new workers, including many who lacked the skills of more experienced workers.
If some teams were found to be short of the skills needed, they were given extra supervision, Dittemore said.
In Washington, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe took a more alarmed tone, telling lawmakers at a Senate subcommittee hearing that NASA faces dangerous staff shortages because of looming retirements and fewer college graduates with the skills it needs.
"We lost some individuals with skills we couldn't afford to lose" during the past decade, O'Keefe said. "Through downsizing and the normal attrition process, we lost key areas of our institutional knowledge base."
The space agency has been lobbying for employment changes, including higher pay and bonuses, for more than a year.
The Houston hearing, the first in a series planned by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, was sparsely attended Thursday, with fewer than 100 observers seated in the 500-seat auditorium at the Clear Lake campus of the University of Houston.
The board's chairman, retired Adm. Harold Gehman, said the board would have public hearings twice a week for two out of every three weeks until the probe is concluded.
Among the four witnesses expected to testify Thursday was an engineer whose team of experts found flaws in the safety and operations of the space shuttle program.
Henry McDonald, the former head of the Ames Research Center, was expected to speak about his team's 2000 report conclusions that budget and staffing cuts had forced NASA to turn over too much of its safety oversight to outside contractors -- and that safety was being superseded by schedule and cost-cutting.
In the report by McDonald and his team, the experts said far more than half of the jobs in preparing shuttles for launch and monitoring the missions are performed by contractors.
The board also was to hear from Keith Chong, an engineer for Boeing in Huntington Beach, Calif., one of the major space shuttle contractors. Chong is an expert on foam insulation used on the external fuel tank of the space shuttle.
One theory of the accident is that Columbia's left wing was damaged during its Jan. 16 launch when pieces of foam insulation peeled off the external tank as the shuttle streaked toward orbit. A group of Boeing engineers later evaluated possible damage to Columbia's thermal protection from the insulation and concluded while the spacecraft was still in orbit that any tile damage caused by the insulation did not endanger the shuttle.
Columbia broke apart during re-entry Feb. 1, killing its seven crew members.
Experts say it appears likely that searing plasma, air heated to more than 2,500 degrees by the friction of re-entry, somehow penetrated the shuttle wing's interior and caused aluminum supports to soften and fail. In theory, broken thermal tiles could allow re-entry heat to get inside the wing. Board officials said some recovered tiles bear sooty deposits of melted aluminum
Thursday's hearing was held off NASA grounds, an apparent demonstration of the board's independence from the space agency. Other hearings are expected near the Kennedy Space Center and in Washington.
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