Space Forum / Shuttle / September 2003

Roger I see the chicken little phrase isnt just you. Its a NASA management tool
to overlook serious problems.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/national/nationalspecial/26ENGI.html?ex=
1065153600&en=9d319e3059b766f0&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

 

Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Rodney Rocha, a NASA engineer, conveyed the urgent message that the agency
should seek satellite images that could show possible damage to the Columbia's
wing.  




ARTICLE TOOLS


E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Format
Most E-Mailed Articles
Reprints & Permissions
 Single-Page Format  

 


     
 
 
 

 
 MULTIMEDIA

 
 
 Video: Page One: Friday, Sept. 26, 2003  
 
 
 




TIMES NEWS TRACKER
 


 Topics  
Alerts  

 National Aeronautics and Space Administration

 
 
Space Shuttle

 
 
Accidents and Safety

 





Dogged Engineer's Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage
By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: September 26, 2003

OUSTON — Over and over, a projector at one end of a long, pale-blue
conference room in Building 13 of the Johnson Space Center showed a piece of
whitish foam breaking away from the space shuttle Columbia's fuel tank and
bursting like fireworks as it struck the left wing.

In twos and threes, engineers at the other end of the cluttered room drifted
away from their meeting and watched the repetitive, almost hypnotic images with
deep puzzlement: because of the camera angle, no one could tell exactly where
the foam had hit.

It was Tuesday, Jan. 21, five days after the foam had broken loose during
liftoff, and some 30 engineers from the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration and its aerospace contractors were having the first formal
meeting to assess potential damage when it struck the wing.

Virtually every one of the participants — those in the room and some linked
by teleconference — agreed that the space agency should immediately get
images of the impact area, perhaps by requesting them from American spy
satellites or powerful telescopes on the ground.

They elected one of their number, a soft-spoken NASA engineer, Rodney Rocha, to
convey the idea to the shuttle mission managers.

Mr. Rocha said he tried at least half a dozen times to get the space agency to
make the requests. There were two similar efforts by other engineers. All were
turned aside. Mr. Rocha (pronounced ROE-cha) said a manager told him that he
refused to be a "Chicken Little."

The Columbia's flight director, LeRoy Cain, wrote a curt e-mail message that
concluded, "I consider it to be a dead issue."

New interviews and newly revealed e-mail sent during the fatal Columbia mission
show that the engineers' desire for outside help in getting a look at the
shuttle's wing was more intense and widespread than what was described in the
Aug. 26 final report of the board investigating the Feb. 1 accident, which
killed all seven astronauts aboard.

The new information makes it clear that the failure to follow up on the request
for outside imagery, the first step in discovering the damage and perhaps
mounting a rescue effort, did not simply fall through bureaucratic cracks but
was actively, even hotly resisted by mission managers.

The report did not seek to lay blame on individual managers but focused on
physical causes of the accident and the "broken safety culture" within NASA
that allowed risks to be underplayed. But Congress has opened several lines of
inquiry into the mission, and holding individuals accountable is part of the
agenda.

In interviews with numerous engineers, most of whom have not spoken publicly
until now, the discord between NASA's engineers and managers stands out in
stark relief.

Mr. Rocha, who has emerged as a central figure in the 16 days of the Columbia's
flight, was a natural choice of his fellow engineers as a go-between on the
initial picture request. He had already sent an e-mail message to the shuttle
engineering office asking if the astronauts could visually inspect the impact
area through a small window on the side of the craft. And as Mr. Rocha was
chief engineer in Johnson Space Center's structural engineering division and a
man with a reputation for precision and integrity, his words were likely to
carry great weight.

"I said, `Yes, I'll give it a try,' " he recalled in mid-September, in the
course of five hours of recent interviews at a hotel near the space center.

In its report, the independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board spoke of
Mr. Rocha, 52, as a kind of NASA Everyman — a typical engineer who suspected
that all was not well with the Columbia but could not save it.

"He's an average guy as far as personality, but as far as his engineering
skills, he's a very, very detail-oriented guy," said Dan Diggins, who did many
of the interviews for the report's chapter on the space agency's
decision-making during the flight and wrote that chapter's first draft before
it was reworked and approved by the board. Never in hours of interviews did Mr.
Diggins find a contradiction between Mr. Rocha's statements and facts
established by other means, he said.

Mr. Rocha's experience provides perhaps the clearest and most harrowing view of
a NASA safety culture that, the board says, must be fixed if the remaining
shuttles are to continue flying.

Early Love With Shuttle