Sequence of Events During Columbia Mission

applemasker writes "Today's NYT is reporting that NASA managers actively resisted requests from vehicle engineers for on-orbit imagery. This should answer Administrator O'Keefe's question of why no engineers 'spoke up' during the flight. Seems they did; managers just ignored them."

Comments

Re:The only good news...

[twiddlingbits]

Eleven of the 14 mangers in that (in)decision making loop have been reassigned or have left NASA. No one at NASA seems to know or is allowed to say where these ex-managers have been reassigned to! Mark Dittimore who was the Manager for the Shuttle Program retired and left, but he had planned to leave[no one will say they now employ him!] and had filed for it before Columbia launched. The only other one I have heard about was Roy Bridges the head of KSC during the launch and he has been asked to head the new NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) over at Langley,VA.
Interested observers are invited to try http://nasawatch.com [good inside info, but not an offical NASA site].The NASA Safety motto that is expressed at the part of NASA I support is: "If it isn't safe, Say So....and then clean out your desk".

Re:What's new?

[laertes]

Am I the only person in the whole world who actually read the report published by the CAIB? It's incredibly painless to find, download and read (ever hear of PDF)?

Ok, I know I'm not the only person, but still.... Anyway, the report talks about what if... in section 6.4. It's the most interesting (aside from the board's version of the stuff in this article) section of the report. In this section, the options Columbia would have had had the managers (Ms. Ham, specifically) agreed to image the orbiter while on-orbit are discussed. There were two options for saving the crew, not zero.

1. Patch the hole. They considered an emergency spacewalk to "McGuyver" the wing's leading edge. The patch, as such, would require the astronaut to throw all of the titanium wrenches, wristwatches, science experiments, etc, into the hole. Interestingly, the engineers at NASA didn't think this was absurd, just that we lack data to determine if it is viable. So, it was kind of considered a "last-resort" option.
2. Send Atlantis on a rescue mission. I know a lot of people on this website are of the opinion that "There wasn't anything we could have sent Atlantis on a rescue mission, unless we wanted to throw away two orbiters." However, the board found that the consumables (oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, etc) on Columbia would have been sufficient to sustain the crew until Feb. 15. Atlantis was being processed for launch Mar. 1 (41 days later), and the board found that, working 24 hours a day, Atlantis could be readied for launch Feb. 10, with no testing skipped. Once Atlantis had rendezvoused with Columbia, the crew could be transfered with ropes. Assuming the crew were safely across, the shuttle could be ditched in the ocean, or boosted to a higher orbit for later salvage.

Really, check out the CAIB report. It's an interesting read, and while it's long and occasionally dry and technical, you can skip around, and only read the parts that interest you. If you're an American citizen, our government paid $300,000,000 to recover debris and study the accident, so you owe it to yourself (you tax-payer, you) to read the report.

Especially read about the "safty-culture" in NASA. This article does a good job of getting the general idea across, but the CAIB report goes into much more detail. The astronauts could have, should have, and were almost saved.

PS: It wasn't in the article but it's in the CAIB report that an employee at NASA actually called the DOD and got them working on a request for imagery, only to have Ms. Ham call and rescind the order 90 minutes later.