Officials Clash Over Shuttle Safety

[BERIGAN]

This story is a few days old, and now I see on Drudge that a small piece of foam was found to have come off a external tank after yesterday's aborted launch!!!!

Officials Clash Over Shuttle Safety

Engineer Says He Was Reassigned After Supporting Workers Wanting Launch Delay

WASHINGTON, June 27, 2006

Quote

"It's a difficult decision, highly technical, highly subtle, very subtle, involves lots of assessment of statistical risks."

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NASA administrator Michael Griffin, on why the July 1 shuttle launch is worth the aded risk

(CBS/AP) The crew of the space shuttle Discovery is at the Kennedy Space Center Tuesday to begin training for this weekend's launch. But as they prepare, the risks of their flight are coming under the spotlight.

Two top space officials are dissenting from NASA's decision to send the shuttle up, and a third, Johnson Space Center's director of engineers, says he was fired for supporting them.

The agency's safety director and chief engineer took the unusual step of dissenting from the space agency's decision to go ahead with the launch without correcting the potentially catastrophic problem of foam falling from the external fuel tank.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin decided that a July 1 launch was worth the added risk for a variety of reasons.

"It's a difficult decision, highly technical, highly subtle, very subtle, involves lots of assessment of statistical risks," Griffin said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We spent weeks on this decision."

But the Houston Chronicle reports that Charles Camarda, 54, a former shuttle astronaut and veteran aerospace engineer, said in an e-mail to colleagues that his removal from involvement in the scheduled launch of Discovery, on which he flew last year, was against his will and resulted from expressing support for the safety director and chief engineer who questioned flight preparations for this weekend's scheduled flight.

In the e-mail, printed in the Houston Chronicle, Camarda wrote: "I refused to abandon my position on the (mission management team) and asked that if I would not be allowed to work this mission that I would have to be fired from my position, and I was."

"I was most proud at all the (weekly shuttle meetings) and at the (June 17 review) when you stood up and presented your dissenting opinions and your exceptions/constraints for flight," he wrote.

James Hartsfield, a space center spokesman, would not comment on Camarda's e-mail to the newspaper, but he told the Houston Chronicle that Camarda had not been fired and that he would remain in Houston, though assigned to the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, a safety organization headquartered at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

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Space Shuttle Program Manager On Launch Plans

Former Shuttle Astronaut Pens Unconventional Memoir

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Undoubtedly there are risks of going into space. Discovery astronaut Mike Fossum described how his family is dealing with the risk: "I have to look my wife in the eye. ... We've had those discussions. It's not one she is really comfortable with. It's not one anybody really is."

Fossum's crew mate Stephanie Wilson, about to fly for the first time, joked that 1-in-100 odds are better than 1-in-99, but added: "Seriously, all of us train for our mission, and we recognize there is a risk."

Michael Stamatelatos, who as director of safety and assurance requirements at NASA is the agency's risk guru, said NASA's 1-in-100 odds for the loss a vehicle and its crew should be taken with a grain of salt, because NASA used to say the chances were 1 in 7,000 until Challenger proved that to be overly optimistic.

"Now we know that's not true," Stamatelatos said. "That was based on insufficient information."

He said there are too many uncertainties to say precisely what the odds might be this time.

The more NASA studies what goes on, the more the agency finds that the risks were really far higher than originally thought, because so much more could go wrong than engineers figured, said Paul Fischbeck, a Carnegie Mellon University engineering and decision sciences professor. At the same time, problems are being fixed, so the shuttle is getting safer to fly than before, he said.

Fischbeck, a former military pilot, said he is disturbed by NASA's decision to go ahead and launch. He said the foam hit that caused a fatal hole in the Columbia's heat-protection layer in 2003 took the agency completely by surprise. Engineers thought they had repaired that problem before Discovery's return to flight last summer, only to find another foam problem.

"Both those things should be shaking their engineers to the core," said Fischbeck, who has consulted with NASA on the shuttle heat shield risk. "You're flying with stuff you know is not going to work right."

The uncertainty about the foam worried NASA safety chief Bryan O'Connor. He dissented from the launch decision but did not appeal, because NASA has drawn up plans to send the crew to the international space station to await rescue if the shuttle skin should be damaged.

O'Connor, a former shuttle commander, helped investigate the Challenger accident and was in his safety chief job less than a year when Columbia disintegrated as it soared toward its landing.

Shuttle program chief Wayne Hale argued in favor of flying Discovery now, saying all sorts of changes that already have been made to the foam need to be tested in flight before more complicated modifications are made.

The final decision rested with Griffin, who said that because everyone agreed the crew could survive on the space station, the risk was more to the space program than to the astronauts.

He weighed what he said was the small added risk in lifting off now against the larger safety risk of rushing launches at the end of the decade. If Discovery's launch were delayed, NASA would be in hurry to complete its goal of finishing space station construction with 16 launches by 2010.

Pushing everything off, Griffin said, "would be really dumb."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/27/...in1755303.shtml