Posted on 06/27/2006 6:45:55 PM PDT by anymouse
His e-mail cites a conflict over his support of those who questioned flight preparation
The Johnson Space Center's director of engineering said Monday that NASA has removed him from the management team for the space shuttle flight scheduled for Saturday after he expressed support for workers who questioned preparations for the flight.
Charles Camarda, 54, a former shuttle astronaut and veteran aerospace engineer, said in an e-mail to colleagues that his removal from involvement in the scheduled launch of Discovery, on which he flew last year, was against his will. The e-mail was distributed to others, including reporters.
"I refused to abandon my position on the (mission management team) and asked that if I would not be allowed to work this mission that I would have to be fired from my position and I was," he wrote.
"I was most proud at all the (weekly shuttle meetings) and at the (June 17 review) when you stood up and presented your dissenting opinions and your exceptions/constraints for flight," Camarda said in the e-mail.
He refused to comment Monday night when a reporter visited his home in League City.
James Hartsfield, a space center spokesman, would not comment on Camarda's e-mail but noted Camarda had not been fired and that he would remain in Houston, though assigned to the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, an safety organization headquartered at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
The NESC was established after the Columbia shuttle tragedy to provide independent safety and engineering assessments on both manned and unmanned projects.
Dean Acosta, NASA director Michael Griffin's spokesman, would not comment on the action either other than to say it should not be construed as an attempt by the administrator to prevent engineers with dissenting opinions to speak out.
"The administrator is absolutely open," said Acosta.
"He expects anyone to bring any issues to the table and that's not rhetoric. That is a requirement."
At the June 17 meeting Camarda mentioned in his written message, Griffin authorized Saturday's launch after a closed-door review of the mission preparations, including opposing opinions from Bryan O'Connor, the agency's safety chief, and Chris Scolese, the chief engineer.
Discovery's liftoff from Florida, set for Saturday at 2:49 p.m., CDT, will mark NASA's second attempt to rebound from the 2003 Columbia accident that killed seven astronauts. The tragedy was blamed on damage to Columbia's heat shield caused by an impact with foam falling from the ship's external fuel tank.
Camarda was among seven astronauts aboard Discovery as the shuttle lifted off July 26 as part of NASA's first comeback attempt. The launch was accompanied by more falling foam, including a 1-pound chunk that tumbled close to the right wing.
The space agency grounded the shuttle again to remove more of the foam debris hazard. However, many engineers urged NASA to remove the foam surrounding 37 metal brackets on the tank before launching again.
As the space center's engineering director, Camarda has supervised more than 8,000 personnel who support the shuttle, international space station and a wide range of other technical programs.
The extent of any safety concerns by Camarda about the latest Discovery mission was not clear Monday. Camarda was replaced by Steve Altemus, who has served as the deputy director of engineering at JSC since November 2004. As the engineering director, Altemus will take Camarda's place on the mission management team.
space ping
NASA is just another government bureaucracy in which the glib tongued buffoons (I almost wrote baboons, but didn't want to be insulting to a higher life form than government worker) get less and less intelligent year by year and waste more and more money--and lives of others.
" The agency's safety chief and the chief engineer both said no."
But doncha' KNOW that schedules are more important than safety judgments by seasoned engineers?
Unfortunately, in bureacracies and other big organizations engineers are viewed by management as sand in the gears of a well oiled machine.
I've been exactly where this guy is on a number of occasions in my career. Say something the managers don't want to hear (even if it's true) and you're off the project.
That's your "punishment".
Thats Creepy....
I don't want to take any more pictures like These.
God forbid But I got a bad feeling about that thing What the hell would happen if we lose another one ?
We've found the higgs boson, evidentally. It's all inertia.
The fleet will be grounded permanently.
It is simply the nature of the shuttle that any reasonably competent engineer can point out a myriad of critical safety problems. Risk is a huge element of the space program, always has been and always will be as long as NASA is running things.
I don't mean that as an indictment of NASA as incompetents. Look at their biggest accomplishment. "Testing" isn't really their strong suit. "Testing" isn't "See if it works" it is "See if you can break it" AND "Break it and make sure it fails benignly."
Space vehicles work because they ought to, not because they have been tested silly. NASA says that is the way it has to be, and fire will not drive that out of them. And they are very, very good at making things work as they ought.
The problem is that with that mentality is that it puts the optimists in charge and refuses to acknowledge the pessimists, the cynics, or Murphy.
Every manned launch that has ever occured has had dozens, even hundreds of things that "have to go right or we're screwed." The two shuttle disasters are just two examples where "things didn't go right."
These sorts of things are called single point failures meaning that if this one point fails then, in simplistic terms, boom!
The public is always shocked at these things because a single point failure pretty much anywhere else in our experience screams incompetence.
We know that you are supposed to design something so that any one thing breaking isn't unavoidably fatal.
The Nixon Administration funded the shuttle like a used car deal: NASA would ask for X dollars and Nixon's staff would respond with, "What can we get for X/5, and by the way, you have to make the Air Force happy too."
The inevitable result of that sort of thing is something that never should have been built in the first place.
Challenger was lost in January and Columbia was lost in February.
the issue seems to be the FRIGGIN FOAM again. And of course if theY replaced the foam with the original CFC foam it would be a non issue.
BUT NO!!!!!!
These hacks are more interested in Algore and MANBEARPIG, than the safety of our astronauts.
despicable
They need to paint the foam again to seal it against water seepage, and lose the 500 pounds of extra payload. They never have a max weight liftoff anyway.
NASA engineers were immediately aware of the impact of the foam on the shuttle, which occurred 80 seconds after launch, but ultimately concluded that its effect would not be debilitating.
Concerns about the foam were raised in late 1997 by a NASA engineer after Columbia returned from a mission with more damage to its tiles than usual. Originally, NASA used CFC-11 (CCl3F) as the foaming agent in applying the insulation. But in response to the Montreal protocol, the agency switched to HCFC-141b (CCl2FCH3), which is less damaging to the ozone layer.
The foam's properties are critical, as the external tank can shrink when it's filled with the cold liquid fuel. This creates peel stresses at the metal-foam interface, which, combined with the dynamic stresses during liftoff, could cause the foam to de-bond and crack, notes Clem Hiel, a materials scientist who spent 12 years at NASA Ames Research Center.
Although the foam using HCFC-141b has properties similar to the original, "seemingly small changes like this may have grave consequences," Hiel says.
Chemical and engineering news.
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/8106/8106notw1.html
Unwarranted blame
When Columbia disintegrated over Texas in 2003, some blamed the environmental change. That wasn't the case. The big piece of foam that smashed the hole in Columbia's wing was made from the old foam containing the long-banned freon blowing agent. The old substance was called BX-250.
NASA and its contractors were trying to develop a freon-free version of that foam, which workers used to manually craft the aerodynamic ramps and hand-made patches of foam applied once the robots are done spraying that initial layer.
The space agency was still flying the old foam because it had won exemptions to the EPA rules and was making only progressive steps in changing the foam.
Junk science kills.
And hiring and promotions guided by the god-forsaken 'diversity' model incrementally cut off our capabilities. Combine that with your comment and I'm surprised we can fly a 1970 shuttle anymore.
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