When Columbia was stripped down, his team found almost 4,000 potentially lethal anomalies in 150 miles of wiring insulation, most of it made of a material called Kapton which gets brittle with age, and has been blamed for several civil aviation disasters. In response, McDonald's independent assessment team was asked to report on all aspects of the shuttle and its management. In July 1999, Columbia came close to exploding when fuel leaked and two of its engine controllers ceased to function after a short circuit. Nasa's workforce was halved, and many of its operations privatised. Sweeping reforms were promised.īut an effective budget freeze for most of the 1990s saw those aspirations decay. After the disaster in 1986, when Challenger exploded soon after launch, the official inquiry found that knowledge of the cause, a tendency of fuel tank seals to become brittle and leak in cold weather, was widespread. It was becoming increasingly hard to say what had to be done on safety grounds because the programme was on shaky grounds financially.' 'But one could speculate I was removed because I was saying things that some people found uncomfortable. 'I cannot speak for the others,' Blomberg said.
Other senior figures involved in the shuttles have also gone, including Nasa's boss, Dan Goldin, and his Associate Administrator, Joe Rothenberg. McDonald and Blomberg were forced to leave Nasa less than a year before Columbia's final flight: Blomberg in April 2002, McDonald last November. With deep budget cuts, said Richard Blomberg, former chair of Nasa's watchdog, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, pressure on Nasa became unbearable: 'to do more with less, to make sub-optimal decisions one could not be happy with'.
#NASA SPACE SHUTTLE ACCIDENTS CRACK#
'The mentality became, "We flew it, we had a problem, we landed, so what's the big deal? So there was a crack in the wing panel, but hey, we got away with it when's the next mission?"' 'We are talking about a systemic failure,' said Professor Henry McDonald, former director of Nasa California and the chairman of a wide-ranging space shuttle inquiry team which reported in March 2000. Deep cuts in the shuttle's budget when the Bush Administration took office deprived it of essential upgrades, leaving safety and inspection procedures outmoded and inadequate. Now, as the Columbia disaster Accident Investigation Board under Admiral Harold Gehman prepares its report for publication at the end of next month, The Observer has learnt the previous cases of wing damage, and the underlying reasons for Nasa's failure to heed their ominous warnings, have emerged as two central issues.įormer top Nasa engineering and safety staff in close touch with Gehman's team say the accident was preventable. The seven astronauts aboard had no chance. Debris from the craft fell across the southern United States.
As Columbia, the oldest vessel in the shuttle fleet, began to descend into the atmosphere at a speed of five miles per second, a jet of ionised air burnt through the crack, through the substrate, into the wing, incinerating control and sensor wires and melting metal. Perhaps the fissure was a little wider this time, Nasa's luck ran out.
#NASA SPACE SHUTTLE ACCIDENTS CRACKED#
On 1 February 2003, investigators believe another space shuttle had a cracked left wing. Another crack was in the wing of the shuttle Atlantis. They were not given any specialised equipment, but told to look for cracks with their naked eyes and to prod the vital leading edges with their fingers, to look for soft spots. On this occasion, Nasa ordered its engineers to check the wings of all four shuttles. A couple of flights later, when Discovery went back into orbit to visit the International Space Station in March 2001, the same thing happened again. The official 'inflight anomaly report' filed by the engineer records no resolution. Unsure what had caused this potentially lethal problem, Nasa did nothing.
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