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NASA Blame

Authored by Michael Pate on August 27th, 2003 at 10:56 AM

NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe warned agency employees this summer that the report on the loss of the space shuttle Columbia would be “really ugly.” Yesterday’s assessment by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board lived up to his grim billing. In 248 unsparing pages, the board not only identified the physical cause of the disaster but also the deep-seated managerial and cultural problems that, panel members found, were as much to blame as the chunk of foam that hit the shuttle’s left wing 81.9 seconds after launch. These systemic problems are far more disturbing and will be far harder to fix than the insulating foam. Saddest of all is the board’s conclusion that NASA failed to learn “the bitter lessons” of the 1986 Challenger explosion and fix the “broken safety culture” identified after Challenger. The board warns that “the scene is set for another accident” if these “persistent, systemic flaws” aren’t addressed. Yet the panel’s recounting of shuttle history — the three decades of juggling “conflicting goals of cost, schedule and safety,” the backsliding into complacency after Challenger — suggests just how difficult it will be to achieve the needed transformation. - Washington Post

At this point, the single purpose that Space Shuttle Program serves is to service the International Space Station. The single purpose the International Space Station serves is to provide a justification for the continued existance of the Space Shuttle Program. Hopefully this report will serve to make a positive change in NASA, even if that means dismantling the agency and startingg over.

In 1969, the Space Program had gone further faster than any Science Fiction writer had ever dreamed. Some people like to blame all the problems since on the budget cuts of the early 1970s. I think the problem lies with the lack of vision in the NASA bureaucracy.

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NASA's 'Broken Safety Culture'

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