Robert Zimmerman has a disturbing (though not surprising, at least to me) piece at Space Daily, which reports that NASA did no analysis in support of its original decision to cancel the planned Shuttle flight to repair Hubble, and ignored more viable options in favor of its misguided robotic gambit:

NASA historian Steven Dick gave a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, in which he described the process by which that decision was made and revealed that, in fact, no formal risk analysis had been completed.

Dick had interviewed all of the NASA officials who had been involved in the decision to cancel the shuttle mission to the Hubble, a discussion that came to a head in December 2003 when those officials had been working on NASA’s fiscal year 2005 budget.

According to Dick’s interviews, risk was the major factor in the discussion, but the officials decided a formal risk analysis was unnecessary. Instead, Dick noted, “The decision was made (by O’Keefe) based on what he perceived was the risk.”

In other words, O’Keefe canceled the Hubble mission solely on his gut feeling of the situation. So, the only way NASA can provide the House Science Committee’s requested copy of that risk analysis from December 2003 is to recreate it after the fact.

I had always suspected this. I think that Sean O’Keefe was good for the agency, in terms of starting to get the books straightened out (a task that’s by no means complete), and starting to restructure it for the end of the Cold War, but I also think that he lost his nerve after having to stand on the tarmac and tell those families that their loved ones weren’t coming home two years ago. He simply didn’t want to have to risk doing that again. And that’s fine, but if so, he was no longer the man for the job, and perhaps didn’t step down soon enough, because it clearly adversely influenced the decision he made a year later. Spaceflight is inherently risky, and if we can’t accept that, as either a NASA administrator or a nation, then we have no business doing it.

And as Zimmerman concludes, that’s really what’s so disturbing about that decision, in terms of its potential implications for the future:

For NASA and the American space program, this increasingly untenable position is beginning to have a serious political cost. By refusing to reconsider their decision and reinstate the shuttle servicing mission to Hubble, NASA is undercutting its ability to persuade Congress to give it money to build spacecraft to fly humans back to the moon.

As Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., noted during those same science committee hearings, “If we’re unwilling to take the risks to go to Hubble, then what does that say about (our willingness to mount) a moon and eventual Mars mission?”

Or as Boehlert remarked, “In a budget as excruciatingly tight as this one, NASA probably should not get as much as the president has proposed.”

Unless President George W. Bush appoints a new NASA administrator with the courage to reverse the Hubble decision, he is going to find it increasingly difficult to persuade Congress – or anyone else, for that matter – that NASA has the wherewithal to handle his ambitious space initiative.

But it goes beyond the risk aversion. If the story is true, the changing stories and lack of data after the fact bring back memories of the Goldin years, in which some said that NASA stood for “Never A Straight Answer.” That was something that O’Keefe was supposed to fix, not contribute to, and it may take a further investigation with some mea culpas and credible recommendations for avoiding this sort of thing in the future, in order for NASA to gain the confidence needed, from both Congress and the public that still wonders why it’s about to lose one of the few NASA programs with genuine widespread support.