“Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality,” wrote Feynman in the commission’s final report. “NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
Seventeen years later, with the loss of another seven astronauts in the break-up of the shuttle Columbia as it tried to return to earth, there was the same kind of criticism of NASA by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
“The NASA organizational culture has as much to do with this accident as the foam,” said the board, referring to the chunk of foam that broke off on liftoff causing damage to the thermal protection system on a wing of the shuttle. “For both accidents,” Challenger and Columbia, “there were moments when management definitions of risk might have been reversed were it not for the many missing signals—an absence of trend analysis, imagery data not obtained, concerns not voiced, information overlooked or dropped,” it said. Lessons learned in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster were forgotten or ignored, the board found.
“Based on NASA’s history of ignoring external recommendations,” the report declared, “or making improvements that atrophy with time, the board has no confidence that the space shuttle can be operated safely for more than a few years based solely on renewed post-accident vigilance.”
The plan to go to a rocket now named Ares I was the brainchild of Griffin. As head of the Space Department at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, he “had written a scholarly paper proposing a rocket design similar to the Ares I,” The Orlando Sentinel has noted. In 2005 he was appointed NASA administrator by President George W. Bush and “within months, he organized a study that passed over other proven rockets and chose the Ares I as safe, simple and relatively inexpensive because it used lots of parts from the shuttle.”
Meanwhile, Griffin doesn’t want to take the blame for the at least five-year gap in the U.S. being able to send astronauts into space itself. In an August e-mail to high NASA officials which was leaked, he said: “Exactly as I predicted, events have unfolded in a way that makes it clear how unwise it was for the U.S. to adopt a policy of deliberate dependence upon another power for access to ISS [International Space Station]. In a rational world, we would have been allowed to pick a shuttle retirement date to be consistent with Ares/Orion availability, we would have been asked to deploy Ares/Orion as soon as possible (rather than ‘not later than 2014’) and we would have been provided the necessary budget to make it so.”
“My guess,” he said, “is that there is going to be a lengthy period with no U.S. crew on ISS. No additional money of significance is going to be provided to accelerate Orion/Ares, and even if it were, at this point we can’t get there earlier than 2014.”
He declared: “My own view is about as pessimistic as it is possible to be.”
Also, Griffin has begun fighting with the incoming Obama administration. The Orlando Sentinel reported on December 10 that Griffin “is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is ‘not qualified’ to judge his rocket program.”
What Obama will do about NASA also remains to be seen. In a campaign stop in March in Wyoming he commented that “NASA has lost focus and is no longer associated with inspiration.” He will most likely name a new NASA administrator.
But in any event there will be major impacts NASA-wide caused by the five-year hiatus and resulting lay-offs and loss of experienced employees.
“The Failure of NASA: And A Way Out” is the title of an essay by former NASA astronaut Philip K. Chapman which appeared in a 2005 Space Daily essay.He wrote: “In 1969, we landed on the Moon, but now we cannot leave low Earth Orbit. NASA claimed the shuttle would be fifteen times cheaper to fly (per pounds of payload) than the Saturn vehicles used in Apollo, but it is actually three times more expensive. The average cost of each flight is a staggering $760 million. After a mission, the time required to prepare a shuttle for the next flight was supposed to be less than two weeks, but in practice tens of thousand of technicians spend three to six months rebuilding each ‘reusable’ shuttle after every flight. Worst of all, the shuttle is a needlessly complex, fragile and dangerous vehicle, which has killed fourteen astronauts so far.”
“First of all,” stated Chapman, “we must recognize that NASA has bungled human space flight…The only viable solution is a new federal organization.”
I’ve had my own experiences with NASA. After learning in 1985 of plans to send a plutonium-fueled space probe up on a shuttle—indeed, that was to be Challenger’s next mission in 1986—I attempted to use the Freedom of Information Act to get information on the consequences of an accident in which the plutonium was dispersed. NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy stonewalled for nearly a year, finally providing me with reports claiming the likelihood of a catastrophic shuttle accident was 1-in-100,000—a figure promptly reduced to 1-in-76 after the Challenger exploded.
I wrote two books and did several television documentaries involving NASA and its use of nuclear power in space—encountering a defensive and closed bureaucracy.
Through the years, I have been interviewed numerous times on radio and television about my investigations into NASA and NASA has consistently refused to provide anyone to face me. I found NASA an agency with a culture that at all costs avoids questions and challenges—internal and external..
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