Two of many, many details. The first:
After two hours of discussing the Crater results and the need to learn precisely where the debris had hit Columbia, the Debris Assessment Team assigned its NASA Co-Chair, Rodney Rocha, to pursue a request for imagery of the vehicle on-orbit. Each team member supported the idea to seek imagery from an outside source. Rather than working the request up the usual mission chain of command through the Mission Evaluation Room to the Mission Management Team to the Flight Dynamics Officer, the Debris Assessment Team agreed, largely due to a lack of par-ticipation by Mission Management Team and Mission Evaluation Room managers, that Rocha would pursue the request through his division, the Engineering Directorate at Johnson Space Center. Rocha sent the following e-mail to Paul Shack shortly after the meeting adjourned.
From: ROCHA, ALAN R. (RODNEY) (JSC-ES2) (NASA)
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 4:41 PM
To: SHACK, PAUL E. (JSC-EA42) (NASA); HAMILTON, DAVID A. (DAVE) (JSC-EA) (NASA); MILLER, GLENN J. (JSC-EA) (NASA)
Cc: SERIALE-GRUSH, JOYCE M. (JSC-EA) (NASA); ROGERS, JOSEPH E. (JOE) (JSC-ES2) (NASA); GALBREATH, GREGORY F. (GREG) (JSC-ES2) (NASA)
Subject: STS-107 Wing Debris Impact, Request for Outside Photo-Imaging Help
Paul and Dave,
The meeting participants (Boeing, USA, NASA ES2 and ES3, KSC) all agreed we will always have big uncertainties in any transport/trajectory analyses and applicability/extrapolation of the old Arc-Jet test data until we get definitive, better, clearer photos of the wing and body underside. Without better images it will be very difficult to even bound the problem and initialize thermal, trajectory, and struc-tural analyses. Their answers may have a wide spread ranging from acceptable to not-acceptable to horrible, and no way to reduce uncertainty. Thus, giving MOD options for entry will be very difficult.
Can we petition (beg) for outside agency assistance? We are asking for Frank Benz with Ralph Roe or Ron Dittemore to ask for such. Some of the old timers here remember we got such help in the early 1980’s when we had missing tile concerns.
Despite some nay-sayers, there are some options for the team to talk about: On-orbit thermal conditioning for the major structure (but is in contradiction with tire pressure temp. cold limits), limiting high cross-range de-orbit entries, constraining right or left had turns during the Heading Alignment Circle (only if there is struc. damage to the RCC panels to the extent it affects flight control.Routing the request through the Engineering department led in part to it being viewed by Shuttle Program managers as a non-critical engineering desire rather than a critical operational need.
The second:
Within an hour, the Defense Department representative at NASA contacted U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) at Colorado?s Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station and asked what it would take to get imagery of Columbia on orbit. (This call was similar to Austin?s call to the Department of Defense Manned Space Flight Support Office in that the caller character-ized it as "information gathering" rather than a request for action.) A representative from the USSTRATCOM Plans Office initiated actions to identify ground-based and other imaging as-sets that could execute the request.
Hale?s earlier call to the Defense Department representative at Kennedy Space Center was placed without authorization from Mission Management Team Chair Linda Ham. Also, the call was made to a Department of Defense Representative who was not the designated liaison for handling such requests. In order to initiate the imagery request through official channels, Hale also called Phil Engelauf at the Mission Operations Directorate, told him he had started Defense Department action, and asked if Engelauf could have the Flight Dynamics Officer at Johnson Space Center make an official request to the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. Engelauf started to comply with Hale?s request.
After the Department of Defense representatives were called, Lambert Austin telephoned Linda Ham to inform her about the imagery requests that he and Hale had initiated. Austin also told Wayne Hale that he had asked Lieutenant Colonel Lee at the Department of Defense Manned Space Flight Support Office about what actions were necessary to get on-orbit imagery....
Mike Card, a NASA Headquarters manager from the Safety and Mission Assurance Office, called Mark Erminger at the Johnson Space Center Safety and Mission Assurance for Shuttle Safety Program and Bryan O?Connor, Associate Administrator for Safety and Mission Assurance, to discuss a potential Department of Defense imaging request. Erminger said that he was told this was an "in-family" event. O?Connor stated he would defer to Shuttle management in handling such a request. Despite two safety officials being contacted, one of whom was NASA?s highest-ranking safety official, safety personnel took no actions to obtain imagery.
The following is an 8:09 a.m. entry in the Mission Evaluation Room Console log:
We received a visit from Mission Manager/Vanessa Ellerbe and FD Office/Phil Engelauf regarding two items: (1) the MMT?s action item to the MER to determine the impacts to the vehicle?s 150 lbs of additional weight…and (2) Mr. Engelauf wants to know who is request-ing the Air Force to look at the vehicle."...
At 8:30 a.m., the NASA Department of Defense liaison officer called USSTRATCOM and can-celled the request for imagery. The reason given for the cancellation was that NASA had identi-fied its own in-house resources and no longer needed the military?s help. The NASA request to the Department of Defense to prepare to image Columbia on-orbit was both made and rescinded within 90 minutes.
The Board has determined that the following sequence of events likely occurred within that 90-minute period. Linda Ham asked Lambert Austin if he knew who was requesting the imagery. After admitting his participation in helping to make the imagery request outside the official chain of command and without first gaining Ham?s permission, Austin referred to his conver-sation with United Space Alliance Shuttle Integration manager Bob White on Flight Day Six, in which White had asked Austin, in response to White?s Debris Assessment Team employee concerns, what it would take to get Orbiter imagery.
Even though Austin had already informed Ham of the request for imagery, Ham later called Mission Management Team members Ralph Roe, Manager of the Space Shuttle Vehicle En-gineering Office, Loren Shriver, United Space Alliance Deputy Program Manager for Shuttle, and David Moyer, the on-duty Mission Evaluation Room manager, to determine the origin of the request and to confirm that there was a "requirement" for a request. Ham also asked Flight Director Phil Engelauf if he had a "requirement" for imagery of Columbia?s left wing. These individuals all stated that they had not requested imagery, were not aware of any "official" requests for imagery, and could not identify a "requirement" for imagery. Linda Ham later told several individuals that nobody had a requirement for imagery.
What started as a request by the Intercenter Photo Working Group to seek outside help in obtaining images on Flight Day Two in anticipation of analysts? needs had become by Flight Day Six an actual engineering request by members of the Debris Assessment Team, made informally through Bob White to Lambert Austin, and formally in Rodney Rocha?s e-mail to Paul Shack. These requests had then caused Lambert Austin and Wayne Hale to contact Department of Defense representatives. When Ham officially terminated the actions that the Department of Defense had begun, she effectively terminated both the Intercenter Photo Working Group request and the Debris Assessment Team request. While Ham has publicly stated she did not know of the Debris Assessment Team members? desire for imagery, she never asked them di-rectly if the request was theirs, even though they were the team analyzing the foam strike.
Also on Flight Day Seven, Ham raised concerns that the extra time spent maneuvering Columbia to make the left wing visible for imaging would unduly impact the mission schedule; for example, science experiments would have to stop while the imagery was taken. According to personal notes obtained by the Board:
Linda Ham said it was no longer being pursued since even if we saw something, we couldn?t do anything about it. The Program didn?t want to spend the resources.
Shuttle managers, including Ham, also said they were looking for very small areas on the Or-biter and that past imagery resolution was not very good. The Board notes that no individuals in the STS-107 operational chain of command had the security clearance necessary to know about National imaging capabilities. Additionally, no evidence has been uncovered that anyone from NASA, United Space Alliance, or Boeing sought to determine the expected quality of images and the difficulty and costs of obtaining Department of Defense assistance. Therefore, members of the Mission Management Team were making critical decisions about imagery capabilities based on little or no knowledge.
Kevin Drum asks somewhere whether it is the case that all bureaucracies are as dysfunctional as NASA. In my experience, it is very very unusual for a senior manager to take such aggressive action to deprive her engineers of the information that they say they need. You have to work very hard to get a request for information cancelled in less than an hour and a half, as Linda Ham did.
Posted by DeLong at August 26, 2003 10:34 PM | TrackBack
"The world looks marvelous from up here. So peaceful, so wonderful and so fragile."
Ilan Ramon January 29, 2003
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"Pictures?! We Don't Need No Stinkin' Pictures!: The Columbia Accident Report"
B.DeL. August 26, 2003
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002073.html
"...whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein possessed (and I'm sure he possessed some) are now loose..."
B.DeL. August 19, 2003
("U.S. Foreign Policy Is Fairly Unbalanced")
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002008.html
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Two of many, many details from the 'Through the Looking Glass, (Chapter VI)' files, the first:
>Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed
>February 27, 2003
>On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that "raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist," the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims.
>Until now, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed shortly after returning to Iraq in 1996, was best known for his role in exposing Iraq's deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced...
>...CIA spokesperson Bill Harlow angrily denied the Newsweek report. "It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," Harlow told Reuters (2/24/03) the day the report appeared.
>But on Wednesday (2/26/03), a complete copy of the Kamel transcript-- an internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped "sensitive"-- was obtained by Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who in early February revealed that Tony Blair's "intelligence dossier" was plagiarized from a student thesis. This transcript can be seen at http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.pdf.
>In the transcript (p. 13), Kamel says bluntly: "All weapons-- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed..."
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.html
The second:
>Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq: Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons
>By Barton Gellman
>Washington Post Staff Writer
>Sunday, May 11, 2003; Page A01
>BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.
>The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.
>Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.
>Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.
>Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month, said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time..."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40212-2003May10?language=printer
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"There's glory for you!"
Humpty Dumpty--December 1871
The space shuttle is 30 year old technology. It has not been improved or replaced with the next generation. Therein lies a big problem. With the space station, most of the work of the shuttle could be performed with unmanned vehicles and people could be ferried into space in smaller, safer vehicles. However, a shuttle replacement would cost big money. Given the small numbers of vehicles remaining and their age, it is not too soon to start on a new system to replace the shuttle.
In the not too distant future, the space station will need a boost into higher orbit to avoid the same fate as skylab. Recall the skylab orbit could not be maintained because of delays in the original shuttle program. Without the shuttle to boost its orbit, skylab fell out of the sky.
NASA had already concluded prior to launch that the problem of foam dislodging from the booster and striking the shuttle was not a problem. After all, foam strikes had occurred on several previous missions with little damage. If NASA had concluded that foam was a serious threat, they should have fixed the foam problem. To upper managers, the foam stike was no different than the previous strikes that had all been non-problems.
One should also consider the failure to communicate that the most recent strike was of a much larger order of magnitude than any of the previous strikes. Given this lack of appreciation of the magnitude of the problem and the inability of those grappling with the foam strike to definitively support a high probability for a problem, imaging would not necessarily have helped. Only an extreme breech of the shuttle could have been detected by imaging. Much smaller breeches that would have also destroyed the shuttle would have been undetectable.
Posted by: bakho on August 27, 2003 09:30 AM The following is an email I wrote on February 4. Not every speculation holds up equally well, but I still think I might have been on to something. Remember the context of the time.
" It may be that NASA checked in good faith and concluded the shuttle was probably OK. But its also possible that there was a really remarkable and tense drama going on there. What if the risk of destruction on re-entry is 10 percent, or 90, or somewhere in between? What if there is literally nothing to be done? What if there is a long shot of rescue based on going into a maximum conserve-resources mode and rushing the next shuttle launch -- succeed or fail, an anguished month-long drama? What if you are afraid that any scenario involving publicly known doomed or at-risk astronauts over an extended period of time would destroy NASA, which is the life work of everybody at the table? What if you scare the bejeebers out of everybody for an emotional two weeks with the world watching, conclude there is nothing to do but try it [normal re-entry], and it goes fine? What if you are a political appointee, or even a budget watcher, who knows that the Highest Levels simply to not want a space-flight Armageddon right this very minute? Is any of this absurdly unrealistic?"
Most frightening comment - "Linda Ham said it was no longer being pursued since even if we saw something, we couldn't do anything about it."
My experience with organizations is this type of thinking is common in management. Because it is common the days of excellence are gone.
All we will get is more and more versions of Windows - all flawed.
It is another example of how Harvard screwed the world when it invented the MBA. "You don't have to understand the detail to manage" is one of the false MBA dictims. Another one - this is quaint, "planned obsolesence is a good business practice"
Posted by: David on August 27, 2003 03:45 PMMost frightening comment - "Linda Ham said it was no longer being pursued since even if we saw something, we couldn't do anything about it."
My experience with organizations is this type of thinking is common in management. Because it is common the days of excellence are gone for America.
All we will get is more and more versions of Windows - all flawed.
It is another example of how Harvard screwed the world when it invented the MBA. "You don't have to understand the detail to manage" is one of the false MBA dictims. Another one - this is quaint, "planned obsolesence is a good business practice"
Posted by: David on August 27, 2003 03:47 PMKen D,
I had the same thoughts, that possibly the astrounauts were sacrificed to avoid a public relations disaster.
Most frightening comment - "Linda Ham said it was no longer being pursued since even if we saw something, we couldn't do anything about it."
My experience with organizations is this type of thinking is common in management. Because it is common the days of excellence are gone for America.
All we will get is more and more versions of Windows - all flawed.
It is another example of how Harvard screwed the world when it invented the MBA. "You don't have to understand the detail to manage" is one of the false MBA dictims. Another one - this is quaint, "planned obsolesence is a good business practice"
Posted by: David on August 27, 2003 03:51 PMKen D,
I had the same thoughts, that possibly the astrounauts were sacrificed to avoid a public relations disaster.
Most frightening comment - "Linda Ham said it was no longer being pursued since even if we saw something, we couldn't do anything about it."
My experience with organizations is this type of thinking is common in management. Because it is common the days of excellence are gone for America.
All we will get is more and more versions of Windows - all flawed.
It is another example of how Harvard screwed the world when it invented the MBA. "You don't have to understand the detail to manage" is one of the false MBA dictims. Another one - this is quaint, "planned obsolesence is a good business practice"
Posted by: David on August 27, 2003 03:52 PMDavid, you've fallen into the same trap most of the rest of us have -- becaue of Brad's fershlugginer setup for comment threads, you were tricked into thinking your comment hadn't successfully been sent the first time becuase it failed to appear. Just push the "Send" button once, then sign off the thread, and then sign back onto it. Your comment will (usually) be there.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on August 27, 2003 03:59 PM"Linda Ham said it was no longer being pursued since even if we saw something, we couldn?t do anything about it. The Program didn't want to spend the resources."
The MBA term for this (and I'm a Harvard MBA) is "she wrote them off" (the crew). And she did; they are gone.
She was so busy protecting the schedule, she's brought the whole program down for more than a year.
Posted by: JK on August 27, 2003 05:18 PMI think it;'s absurd to say that NASA thought there was a serious chance of disaster and were trying to cover it up -- but I think they HAD decided that there was a very small chance of disaster, that there was probably nothing that could be done about it, and that they therefore didn't want to undergo the wave of negative publicity that would occur if they ordered imagery and the press thus found out that there was ANY chance of disaster. They rolled the dice, calculating that tht odds were solidly on their side -- and they came up snake-eyes. They hve done the same thing many times before, and presumably will many times again.
Rumor is that several of the astronauts' families are now cranking up to sue NASA. If they do, the results will be interesting -- especially since CAIB concluded in an Appendix that a rescue mission WOULD have been possible if its initiation had been ordered before Day 7 of Columbia's flight.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on August 27, 2003 07:10 PMI hope Nasa will have avery good luck no more bad luck since this year 2003
Posted by: Eswary on September 13, 2003 03:11 AMSudome husame is stupid and what he is doing is wrong!!! He is jest jelouse because our country is not as bad as his!
Posted by: betty on September 18, 2003 08:15 PM