NASA engineer wanted photos of damage to Columbia days before breakup (bordering on irresponsible)

Associated Press ^ | 3/31/2003 | TED BRIDIS

[TLBSHOW]

NASA engineer wanted photos of damage to Columbia days before breakup

WASHINGTON - NASA (news - web sites)'s chief shuttle engineer wrote in a draft e-mail days before Columbia's fiery breakup that a failure to seek photographs of possible damage to the shuttle's left wing was wrong and "bordering on irresponsible," according to internal documents.

But Alan R. "Rodney" Rocha never sent the message to his colleagues at the space agency. In the draft, Rocha cautioned that severe enough damage to delicate insulating tiles near Columbia's wheel compartment "could present potentially grave hazards."

Rocha's draft e-mail, which NASA said was written around Jan. 22, was among hundreds of pages of internal documents NASA released Monday. News organizations had sought the documents under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

In separate e-mails, which Rocha sent, he said damage to Columbia could range from acceptable to horrible.

"We do not know yet the exact extent or nature of the damage without being provided better images, and without such all the high-powered analyses and assessments in work will retain significant uncertainties," Rocha wrote, also on Jan. 22.

One day earlier, in another message, Rocha noted that experts working to analyze possible damage faced uncertainties "until we get definitive, better, clearer photos of the wing and body underside." He added, "Can we petition (beg) for outside agency assistance?"

The response the following day, from NASA's Paul Shack, was that higher-ups at NASA had decided they were "not requesting any outside imaging help."

In his draft e-mail, addressed to at least 14 NASA employees, Rocha noted safety posters throughout the agency imploring, "If it's not safe, say so." He concluded the message with a prophetic note about the seriousness of seeking images of possible damage to Columbia: "It's that serious."

"The engineering team will admit it might not achieve definitive, high-confidence answers even with additional images," Rocha wrote, "but without action to request help (and) clarify the damage visually, we will guarantee it will not."

The e-mail came days before engineers for The Boeing Co., a NASA contractor, concluded that Columbia could return safely. Investigators believe superheated air penetrated Columbia's left wing, which was struck 81 seconds after its Jan. 16 liftoff by a briefcase-sized chunk of insulating foam that broke away from the shuttle's external fuel tank.

In other e-mails, Rocha wrote on the eve of Columbia's breakup that he planned personally to monitor temperatures settings from inside mission control during the shuttle's re-entry. He noted that teams of experts from NASA, Boeing and the United Space Alliance LLC had performed "conservative analyses" that concluded there were no safety concerns.

NASA officials have previously acknowledged they turned down an offer by the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency to have its satellites take pictures of the stricken shuttle, and NASA officials withdrew another unofficial request for Air Force telescopes to take pictures.

Last week, NASA announced the satellite agency has agreed to regularly capture detailed satellite images of space shuttles in orbit, amid persistent questions about why no such pictures were taken of possible damage to Columbia's wing.

[TLBSHOW]

nasaproblems.com March 17, 2003

Space Shuttle Columbia is gone... but has the countdown already started for a third shuttle disaster? There were two reasons for the Columbia disaster: a system failure and a management failure. We may never know the exact cause for the system failure, but the reasons for the management failures are there for all to see. Unless the Office of the President and Congress address the following management failures... then indeed, the countdown has already started for the third shuttle disaster!

NASA Memo: "support a launch opportunity as early as Fall of 2003."

Comments and inputs can be sent to: nasaproblems@yahoo.com

http://www.nasaproblems.com/

[Calpernia]

Ping

[Arkinsaw]

Here is my number one recommendation to NASA. "Listen to the freakin engineers."

[isthisnickcool]

Has the word come out that NASA will have procedures in place to replace tiles while the shuttle is docked at the ISS? They started training on that last week at Johnson.

Just like before, material slooghed off and wacked another part of the system. But this time it wacked the orbiter hard enough to damage the wing which caused the failure on re-entry. Never should have happened.

[Calpernia]

Could Columbia have docked at ISS? I heard there wasn't enough fuel to get there plus no docking rings.

[RossA]

It was clear to me from day 1 of the disaster that Dettemore was a control-freak who had to go. Sure, he's bright - and, sure, he knows more than I do, more than anyone else does (just ask him!). But he won't ask for help so he is his own limit. And it's a crime to let him control billions of vital US property.

[IncPen]

ping

[TLBSHOW]

the shuttle may of been saved.......if only!!!!!

WASHINGTON - There were ways NASA engineers might have tried to save Columbia if they had known for certain that the space shuttle was in trouble from a damaged wing, NASA's chief shuttle engineer wrote in an e-mail 12 days before the craft's destruction.

snip

He said the pictures could give answers about the shuttle's problems "ranging from acceptable to not-acceptable to horrible" and could provide options that Mission Control could consider about finding a safer way for the spacecraft to return to Earth.


"Despite some nay-sayers," Rocha wrote Jan. 21 in his widely distributed e-mail, "there are some options for the team to talk about."


Among those options, he said, were thermal conditioning, which means flying the spacecraft in such a way that some parts of the craft are chilled or warmed before re-entry. Another option, said Rocha, included adjusting the angle and path Columbia would have used to return to Earth. He said there also could be constraints on the left or right turns that Columbia would have made once it was in the atmosphere.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030401/ap_on_sc/shuttle_e_mails_6

[isthisnickcool]

Could Columbia have docked at ISS? I heard there wasn't enough fuel to get there plus no docking rings.

Not enough gas, no docking ring.

[Joe Hadenuf]

Wow.....Thanks for the article.....

[Calvin Locke]

Wrong orbit/no sufficient propulsion aside, why isn't the ISS equipped with [permanent] shuttle docking capability of one sort or another?

F'ning NASA bureacracy paying weight costs EACH time the shuttle went to the ISS? Docking system isn't reusable? What?

[TLBSHOW]

This shuttle in my opinion should never of lifted off in the first place but once it did it could of been saved.

If not for Nasas Problems that had many many warnings!

[StockAyatollah]

NASA, like the defense industry is consumed by "process". Taking satellite pictures of the shuttle wasn't part of their signed-off-by-everyone-process. It required some creativity to come up with that idea. The mind-numbed robot NASA mgmt just wanted to continue with the script even though the engineers recognized that Columbia was doomed. The Apollo program never could have gotten off the ground if the current jack-asses were running things in the 60s.

[SteveH]

The problem was admitting there was a problem. The higher-ups seem to have had had a vested interest not to do that.

[eno_]

The best possibilty of rescue probably would have been to rush the next shuttle to launch. Columbia could not have reached the ISS, and if it had, there would have had to be a highly improvised space walk.

But the facts as we know them now are that there COULD have been a rescue attempt, and NASA engineers DID want to know things that NASA management apperently preferred not to know. That adds up to a serious f--- up that cost the Columbia crew their lives.

[linton59]

Living 50 miles north of the Cape, I am mindful of many delays because of weather conditions IN THE ABORT SITE OF THE AZORES. Yet, not one launch has EVER been aborted. Why not? And certainly, why not that particular one???

[KarlInOhio]

Why would they have aborted the launch? They didn't know that the insulation flaked off and hit the shuttle until they processed the film the next day.

[Jael]

PBTTT

[davisfh]

"Could Columbia have docked at ISS? I heard there wasn't enough fuel to get there plus no docking rings.

Not enough gas, no docking ring."

Columbia and ISS were in radically different orbits. ISS orbits in a 50+ degree inclination to the equator while Columbia was in an orbit 20+ degrees inclined to the equator. They probably passed within a few hundred miles of each other from time to time but it would have taken an enormous amout of fuel to match Columbia's orbit to the ISS.

The 50+ degree orbit of ISS was established early on to allow the Russians to pass over their territory which lies in a northern latitude.

[VRWC For Truth]

The ISS orbit position is favorable to Boris r.e. Russia. It could just as easily been put near the shuttles orbit path. Another case of management bravado over common sense.