NASA Culture, Shuttle Losses May Be Linked
By Irene Brown, Discovery News
Shuttle Atlantis: Next to Launch?
April 24, 2003 — NASA’s reliance on rules gets the space shuttles into orbit, but blocks engineers from pursuing intuitive initiatives, such as their unheeded desire for additional imagery of shuttle Columbia’s wing damage while the ship was in orbit, an expert in organizational structures told accident investigators Wednesday.
“That’s the power of rules,” said Boston University sociologist Diane Vaughn, author of a well-respected book about NASA and the 1986 Challenger disaster. “The things we put in to do good, also have a dark side.”
After Challenger, NASA made many personnel changes and technical fixes, yet the agency’s culture, with its reliance on hard data to back up suspected problems and allegiance to hierarchal management structures, remained intact and seems to have directly contributed to the loss of its second shuttle and another seven crewmembers, Vaughn told the panel tasked to find the cause of the Feb. 1 accident.**
“The problems that existed at the time of Challenger have not been fixed,”** said Vaughn, testifying at the end of a day-long public hearing in Houston.
In the case of the Challenger accident, some engineers felt very uncomfortable with the idea of launching with temperatures at record lows, said Vaughn. However, without data to back up their subjective assessments, the warnings were dismissed.
During Columbia’s mission, groups of engineers wanted more images of the shuttle’s wing, which had been hit by an unusually large piece of foam insulation shed from the fuel tank during launch. The request for spy satellite pictures was nixed by top managers, who said that proper channels had not been followed.
“In both situations, following normal rules and procedures seemed to take precedence,” said Vaughn. “In times of uncertainty, people do follow habits and routines. However under these circumstances that is not the time for hierarchal decision-making.”
The culture creates an environment where, in the absence of hard data, people do not bring forth their concerns, said Vaughn.
Earlier in the day, one of the shuttle’s first program managers told the board that** two accidents were not difficult to deduce.
“They barely require high-school physics” to understand the risks involved, said Robert Thompson. **“It appears to me the agency needs to make damn sure that the right people are dealing with (these issues) in a timely manner.”
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20030421/shuttle.html
