Posted on 02/03/2003 7:06:05 AM PST by TLBSHOW
Nasa 'ignored' shuttle safety alert
Nasa 'ignored' shuttle safety alert From Tim Reid in Washington and James Doran in Norwood, Texas
Auditors said space disaster was imminent
Human remains found during search
NASA was last night accused of ignoring warnings from its own technicians and government auditors that a space shuttle disaster was imminent. As the space agency named a retired Navy admiral to head an independent investigation into Saturday’s Columbia disaster, calls to scrap the shuttle programme were increasing.
It emerged that as recently as Thursday a congressional audit report had expressed concern about monitoring of shuttle safety.
In April last year Nasa’s own safety advisers, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said that the shuttle programme raised “the strongest safety concerns” it had voiced in 15 years. That followed a report in 2000 by the General Accounting Office, Congress’s investigative arm, that said workforce reductions were “jeopardising Nasa’s ability to safely support the shuttle’s planned flight rate”.
The biggest search and recovery operation in US history was taking place across 6,400 square miles of eastern Texas and Louisiana, where thousands of fragments of the space shuttle remained strewn yesterday.
Columbia, the oldest and heaviest of Nasa’s four shuttles, disintegrated 39 miles above the Texas plains as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere for a landing in Florida, killing all seven astronauts on board, almost 17 years to the day of the explosion that destroyed the shuttle Challenger in January 1986.
At two sites in eastern Texas charred human remains were recovered yesterday, including a torso, thigh bone and skull on a rural road, in addition to a space helmet. Police and national guardsmen fanned out to guard pieces of wreckage ranging in size from a postage stamp to the bed of a pick-up truck. The main “debris belt” was about 100 miles long and ten miles wide.
Ron Dittemore, the shuttle programme director, said last night that problems with Columbia were first detected at 7.53am on Saturday, five minutes before contact was lost.
At 7.54am, he said, mission control noticed an “unusual temperature rise” on the left hand side of the spacecraft.
At 7.58 there was an “increased drag” on the left side, indicating “a rough or missing tile”. The flight control system tried to counter the leftward tilt by bringing Columbia rightwards.
Shortly afterwards contact with Columbia was lost, although there was another 32 seconds of data produced by the shuttle’s monitors that was available for analysis.
There was no evidence that the astronauts were alarmed. He emphasised that a tile knocked off the left wing during take-off was not the only focus of the investigation. “We believe the loss of a tile would not represent the loss of a vehicle,” he said, adding that Nasa was also looking at the structure of the craft and its flight control.
Emphasising that terrorism was not a factor in the disaster, Nasa named Harold Gehman, the retired admiral who helped to investigate the USS Cole bombing in Yemen harbour, to head a special commission into the Columbia’s fate.
Speculation on the cause of the disaster was intensifying over the loss of temperature sensors in the shuttle’s left wing as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere at more than 12,000mph. The area had been struck by a piece of foam-rubber insulation from an external fuel tank just after the shuttle’s launch on January 16. Ground controllers had judged it not to have damaged the critical heat shield.
The disaster has thrown a spotlight on the way Nasa’s budget has been cut by almost 40 per cent in the past decade, severely compromising the agency’s ability to maintain the ageing shuttle fleet safely, critics said yesterday.
Like the other shuttles Columbia had been flying for twice as long as its designers first envisaged. Some parts were made so long ago, in the early 1970s, that they were no longer available. Engineers said yesterday that they have had to turn to the internet auction site eBay for spare parts.
Seymour Himmel, a former Nasa rocket engineer, said: “The chief thing we were concerned about was the ageing of the beast.” He said budget constraints may have limited vital upgrades.
Don Nelson, who served at Nasa for 36 years until his retirement in 1999, and who was part of the shuttle design team, said he wrote to President Bush last summer warning him of a “catastrophic space shuttle accident”.
He listed a series of potentially disastrous problems that were routinely occurring in the fleet and urged the President to suspend flights.
Much of the shuttle programme was privatised in 1996 when Nasa turned over flight operations to a consortium run by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Four days ago the General Accounting Office sharply criticised oversight by Nasa of its private affiliates.
The report described Nasa’s management of its contractors as “weak” and “debilitating”, and accused the agency of placing “little emphasis on end results product performance”.
Boeing is Nasa’s largest space contractor. It generates about $2 billion (£1.3 billion), or about 4 per cent of its business, from its work on Nasa’s manned space operations, which includes the space shuttle and the international space station programmes. As the recovery of debris scattered across Texas got under way, residents told how their homes had been showered with burning remnants of the shuttle. Eric Couch, 11, was playing in the fields on his grandfather’s farm in Norwood, East Texas, when a charred space helmet slammed into the soft earth next to a towering oak tree.
James Couch, Eric’s grandfather, was in bed when he heard the rolling booms of the explosion 200,000ft above his farmhouse. Across his 14 acres, 15 small areas were roped off yesterday with yellow and black tape. Each site marked the spot where a piece of Columbia debris had fallen.
“We have a piece of wire from the control panel here,” Mr Couch said, pointing to an electric flex, with blue and white wires splayed from each end. “We have quite a big piece of metal up on the roof and other bits all over. But the helmet, that is very sad. There was a person in that. It is heartbreaking. There was someone who had a wife and children and now those children don’t have a father.”
Officials from Nasa arrived on Saturday night to retrieve the helmet, which Mr Couch had guarded throughout the day. “We had about 300 people come up here to look and I was told by the sheriff not to let anyone touch it, see. So I guarded it. But everyone was well behaved. I didn’t have to get my gun.”
Last night Nasa officials reported that authorities had found the remains of all seven astronauts who were on board the shuttle. In Hemp Hill, near Norwood, Mike Gibbs, a medical worker, said that he had been searching for debris with friends when he came across a a skull, a thighbone and part of the torso of one of Columbia’s crew. “I wouldn’t want anybody seeing what I saw,” he said. “It was pretty gruesome.”
Pieces of a uniform, with no identifying marks, were found near by as the remains were taken away to the area’s only medical examiner.
The accident shattered the peace of this rural backwater in what locals call Deep East Texas. Most houses are small single-floor prefabricated buildings. Many people live in trailers.
In Nacogdoches County, about 45 miles from Mr Couch’s farm, authorities had found between 850 and 1,000 pieces of debris last night, each one roped off and guarded awaiting Nasa officials to come and take it away. In San Augustine, 250 young men from the local Air and Land Emergency Rescue Volunteers gathered at the sheriff’s office eager to help the search.
There were no reported injuries on the ground, despite a foot-long metal shard smashing through a dentist’s roof in Nacogdoches and a lump of metal hitting, but not breaking, the windscreen of a car.
The local authorities sent out stern warnings to the community that none of the pieces of debris should be touched, for fear of spreading deadly contaminants.
Faron Howell, the Polk County Deputy Sheriff, said that many people had still gathered up pieces of the shuttle’s ceramic tiles.
A mid level NASA manager named Jose Garcia had warned of the adverse safety affects of coalescing operations in 1995 and 1996. Sounds like the same concern as expressed here.
If these people were around 500 years ago, Columbus wouldn't have been allowed to set sail.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.