Learning from Columbia

The final report from the board investigating the Columbia accident makes it clear that although a piece of foam striking the space shuttle was the technical reason for its disintegration in the skies over Texas on Feb. 1, the spacecraft was really doomed by overconfident management and inattention to safety at NASA. The 248-page report, released earlier this week, is especially blunt in its assessment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s inability to learn from its mistakes. The review board concluded that not much had changed since the 1986 Challenger explosion when fatal flaws in the craft’s O-rings were disregarded. One member of the board, former Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall, worried that this round of recommendations could be ignored too. “I wanted to make sure that we were not just the second report on a shelf to be joined by a third report,” she said.

Given NASA’s history of not learning from its mistakes, it will be up to members of Congress to ensure that the agency’s culture does change this time around so that there will not be a third accident report. It is also up to Congress to start a national debate on the merits and goals of America’s space program as called for by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. As important as insuring that spacecraft are safe, the country must decide what it hopes to achieve through space travel. If manned space flights remain a priority, it is clear that more funding for NASA is needed.

The Senate Commerce Committee, which has oversight of NASA, will hold its first hearing on implementing the changes suggested by the board in early September. Its first task should be to better define the agency’s mission. Is space exploration important for military, business or purely scientific reasons? How does the desire to know more about the universe stack up against other government missions, such as providing health care and education to citizens in a time of growing budget deficits?

If space missions remain important then committee members, including Sen. Olympia Snowe, must maintain close oversight to make sure that NASA takes the safety message to heart and implements the improvements suggested by the review panel. Like other scientific endeavors, NASA officials must engage in rigorous questioning of assumptions and scenarios. Such questioning may not have saved Columbia and its seven astronauts but at least if a thorough assessment of the damage done by the foam had been undertaken (seven opportunities to do so were missed), a discussion of safe re-entry procedures could have taken place. The end result may not have changed, but NASA officials should be more content trying to solve problems rather than denying they exist.

Finally, if space exploration remains a national priority and NASA puts safety first, the agency clearly should receive more money. In 1990, a blue ribbon panel presciently concluded that NASA “is trying to do too much and allowing too little margin for the unexpected.” It called for a decade of yearly 10 percent increases in the agency’s funding which would have meant the agency received $40 billion in 2000. It got $13 billion.

Two tragedies show what happens to an underfunded, overly confident, unquestioning agency. It is now time to see what a reinvigorated, safety-conscious NASA can achieve.