Almost half a year after its fiery destruction over the skies of Texas, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) is apparently not far from releasing its report on that tragic event.

Two significant revelations occurred this week.

First, a test on Monday graphically demonstrated that foam from the external tank, when propelled at the velocities implied by the launch films, can do severe damage to the leading edge of an orbiter wing. This test was not just a "smoking gun," but almost literally a smoking hole that left little reasonable doubt of the cause of the loss of a quarter of our fleet, suspected almost since the day it happened.

Those who have followed my commentary on this subject over the past few months (starting with the day it happened), know that I've been unhappy with the coverage and response to it, which has largely focused on the loss of the astronauts, rather than the much more important loss of a quarter of our shuttle fleet. This absurdity has resulted in proposals by some, including some in Congress, that verge on the ridiculous, such as continuing to fly the vehicle, but doing so without crew. Such a suggestion comes from a position of apparently profound ignorance as to the purpose of the shuttle--if it doesn't carry crew, there is little justification for flying it, given the high costs, because its lift capability is more cheaply satisfied by other vehicles, and there are insufficient requirements to return large payloads from orbit (its only truly unique capability) to justify a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per launch.

As long as we are going to continue to operate the shuttle, it makes sense to continue to fly astronauts on it, regardless of the risk level. I've always maintained that they're adults, and can decide for themselves what risks they're willing to take.

But given that position, I have to confess to being troubled by the most recent (and second) revelation, that only hit the wires yesterday. Apparently, almost three years ago, there was another breach of a left wing by hot plasma on entry, that time on the orbiter Atlantis. But what troubles me most is the fact that not only was this event not made public, but the astronauts themselves were not made aware of it, at the time or since, until recently.

Some, of course, will argue that the previous experience with a breach of the thermal protection system, in which the vehicle returned safely with only minor repairs necessary, indicated that it wasn't vehicle threatening, thus justifying their seeming complacence last January. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but the fact that it was not only not revealed to the public, but to the astronauts themselves, is a symptom of a severely paranoid and dysfunctional organization.

I'm a harsh critic of NASA in general, but I've withheld criticism of the agency with regard to this particular incident, because I wanted to wait until all the facts were available, as they will be when the Gehman report comes out. But though I think that astronauts should be allowed to make their own assessment of whether or not their career justified the risk, that is based on their having the information necessary to make such an assessment, and to me this represents a breach not just of gases, but of trust.

Frustratingly, I don't expect much useful to come out of the report. Yes, it will delve into the NASA culture that caused this, and yes, it will have recommendations as to how to fix it, just as did the Rogers Commission in the wake of the Challenger loss some seventeen years ago. And yes, NASA may even accept and incorporate some of those recommendations into its operations and organization.

In fact, as an employee of the shuttle contractor at the time, I remember the fallout of the Rogers Commission. It was a typical bureaucratic response, setting up "safety committees" and the encouragement of reporting of perceived "safety" violations of the shuttle system.

None of which, of course, addressed the real problem, which was the fundamental design and philosophy of the space shuttle, and indeed the manned space program itself.

Whatever recommendations Admiral Gehman has, they will never make the shuttle "safe." The safety of the shuttle was determined almost three decades ago, when budgetary constraints determined its final design, and any changes at this point are at best nibbling around the margins and, at worst, a public-relations ploy, just as the "escape pole" put in the system after the Challenger loss was. Anyone familiar with that system knows that it's a joke, and a bad one, that adds weight to the system and will be useful in only the most improbable of circumstances.

The reality that the American people must accept is that the Shuttle will never be "safe." Many decisions have been made over the decades (over three now) since the decision to start the program itself that have ensured that such a state will be an impossibility, by any reasonable definition.

That doesn't mean that space travel itself can never be safe, in the conventional sense of the word (e.g., like flying on an airliner), but in order to make it so, it will be necessary to develop the industry in much the same way that the aviation industry developed--over years and decades, and by trying many different approaches, rather than a single, government-mandated one. It will require systems that fly hundreds and thousand of times, rather than a few a year.

In other words, it will require commercial systems, after commercial markets. That's all right, though, because such systems are being developed as we write and read this column.

Despite the two-and-a-half-year standown in the late 1980s, the shuttle would have been relatively safe to fly a week after the loss of the Challenger--the only requirement would have been to not fly it in freezing weather. What brought it down was an improbable set of circumstances, unlikely to be repeated.

Similarly, the Gehman commission will come out with a set of recommendations that may slightly reduce the (improbable) likelihood of a repeat of the Columbia loss. They will be expensive, and probably further reduce the flight rate while increasing costs, and increase safety or decrease the risk of vehicle loss very little, but they'll have satisfied the political imperative.

The important thing to understand is that ultimately, until we decide what we want to actually accomplish in space (as opposed to continuing to create "jobs" in the requisite congressional districts and pump money to the Russians), to make marginal improvements in the current ways of doing NASA's business-as-usual will be the equivalent of putting bandaids on a massively-hemmorrhaging wound--or to use another metaphor, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Of course, at least the latter had a band.

I'd like to see those that decided not to debrief the astronauts to be indicted, but of course there was no significant loss in the earlier incident... so there won't be any real repercussions.

I see the behavior as more than just dysfunctional, which I agree with; I think it's criminal (although what would be the charge is a bit vague to me.)

Reading the recent story about wing failures reminded me again about the Challenger accident, and how prior to that accident NASA engineers had been busy quantifying, justifying, and trying to manage the amount of blow-by on the SRB O-rings. The fact that no blow-by at all was intended by the design was mostly disregarded. This latter incident struck me the same way, with assessments of repairs and what great shape the structure was in, but nothing in the report about what other bad things might happen under similar conditions, or whether any of these events was consistent with the expected performance of the vehicle.
The whole system (Shuttle and NASA together) is so complicated and rickety that it has to be almost impossible to know who was briefed on what and why. It's just a sad situation.

I agree with everything you say. I'm a current industry insider who is almost as tough a crtitic of NASA as you are (check out my infamous back page interview in SPACE NEWS awhile ago). You are tough, but honest, and clearly well-intentioned.

I'm sold. But (you knew there was a but coming), if you want to reach a broader, more important audience than us in the choir, you might want to state your case a little less cold-bloodedly than "...largely focused on the loss of the astronauts, rather than the much more important loss of a quarter of our shuttle fleet."

I'm afraid that some of the lay audience tuned out about there, thinking "this guy thinks machines are more important than people". It's a true statement, and it's defensible, but some folks probably need more of a build-up first before you drop the bomb.

This came out sounding more negative than I meant it, because I really am a fan, and I hope you keep doing what you do.

I'm a lay member of the audience, and I understand exactly where Mr Simberg is coming from and agree. ymmv

"Some, of course, will argue that the previous experience with a breach of the thermal protection system, in which the vehicle returned safely with only minor repairs necessary, indicated that it wasn't vehicle threatening, thus justifying their seeming complacence last January. I don't necessarily disagree with that. . . "

Well, I certainly disagree. Instead of indicating a problem of moderate severity, I see a situation where NASA was extremely lucky not to lose Atlantis, and they shouldn't have counted on their good luck to continue. That was the same thinking that brought down Challenger, and NASA didn't learn a thing from that disaster. NASA's culture remains one of pathological optimism and deliberate, willful nonrecognition of unpleasant facts. One only has to remember Ron Dittemore's utterly surreal press conferences in the first days after Columbia's loss to realize this attitude starts at the top and spreads throughout the organization.

The Shuttle is an inherently dysfunctional design with multiple points of catastrophic failure, and so is NASA. Both need to be replaced ASAP, hopefully with far more private investment and control.

The shuttle design itself was not the ideal (more reusable/less expensive to operate) design NASA would have wanted, but couldn’t afford in the early 1970’s. Political funding and interest, in this sense, waned at the most crucial, pivotal point in the space effort just after Apollo. At the point when the nation was about to set the tone for the next 30 to 50 years of space flight, NASA had to modify and revisit their ideal shuttle plans in order to get the whole system to ‘fly’ past Congress. They had to settle for a less expensive design to build, but a more expensive and complex design to operate and maintain.

As I indicated last, a congressional subcommittee's authority to liberally cancel projects - often mid stream (i.e. the particle supercolider and the Shuttle derived heavy booster) - also has a lot to do with the failings of NASA. Nasa has had to cope with a government always a penny wise and a billion dollars foolish.

> continuing to create "jobs" in the requisite congressional districts

That may seem like cynical hyperbole, but there is evidence that it is literally true. All NASA research proposals now have a standardized cover page that is generated automatically from a Web page. The PI's congressional district is prominently displayed at the top.

:-(

What mention, if any, has been prominently made about the abject surrender to the 'greenies' over the formulation of that foam insulation. Ablation of material is one thing; disintegration/rupture is a totally different matter.

Hope those "enviro-weenies" are made to suffer in unimaginable ways for this one!

Rand,

I spent nine years on the unmanned side. The mess is just as big over there. There are a hell of a lot of good people even now -- but the culture is extremely dysfunctional, especially with regard to management. The biggest difference is that the failures don't attract quite the attention.

Chris Eldridge and MommaBear: while what you state is true, it's, sadly, just another reflection on NASA's failures. NASA is supposed to be an open agency, working for all Americans. It should be connecting with the country. It's not. That's why there is the lack of funding. That's why there's so much trouble with environmental activists. That's why we have so little independent space industry. That kind of failure can be laid at the feet of people who have sought to control the field, damn the cost.

"The important thing to understand is that ultimately, until we decide what we want to actually accomplish in space..."

I know I've read it somewhere, but I can no longer find anything you've written that shows what you think we should be accomplishing in space.

A somewhat related question is exactly how do you go about building a national consensus on a topic that most people are both ignorant and unconcerned about? In my limited experience it seems that most Americans have learned more about space from Star Wars and Star Trek than any other source. How do you (i.e. we) counter something like that? I can make a computer sit up, roll over, and fetch the morning paper, but I haven't a clue how to motivate a human being.

My own long term view of what we should be doing in space is fairly nebulous and mostly a hodge-podge of other people's ideas, but the near term can probably be summed up with the phrase 'Off-Earth Industry'. For one example, see http://members.cox.net/salamon/Tech/Space/Asteroids/index.html.

Another, more commercial, example would be to assemble and test satellites on orbit before sending it on to its final destination with a low-thrust orbital transfer vehicle. That would reduce two large costs associated with most satellites: insurance and the launch environment.

Andrew, probably the closest I've come to it is this Fox column, written a couple weeks after Columbia was destroyed.

somewhat OT but:
"That would reduce two large costs associated with most satellites: insurance and the launch environment"

That would also create market for big-mass spacecraft components such as solar panels and radiators, produced off earth.
( Solar arrays manufactured on moon, not as much of a pipedream as it sounds. See works from Freundlich and Ignatiev of Space Vacuum Epitaxy Center )

Andrew Salamon:

>I haven't a clue how to motivate a human being.

I one time placed in a 25 word contest to find a statement to motivate generally uninterested people:

"To know and to learn honors the eons it took to become Conscious. To have gone through all this evolution just to say "So-what" is ignorance.
(See the Planetary Society's Report June 2002)"

Another Reader wrote in:
"The Dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. Any Questions?"

Many if not most people actually are interested in space: Space Stations and especially Mars are hot topics for them. They just don't know what the difference is between a good space station or space policy and a bad one. To them, a 'space station' is a 'space station' and they got one! Hopefully though, Alfa/Albatross-1 has gotten that out of their system now, and they'll hopefully now want to actually 'do something' up there worth the effort. We need to know what that 'something' is though before we can specifically design the next space launch vehicle to support it.

I do agree with your assessment to check satalites/probes like Gallelao before sending them off - or up higher than we can go. And then using a space based transit sled to get them there!