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This is intended to reinforce the public's belief
that a broken off chunk of insulation caused the Columbia disaster. The
real evidence says otherwise. This is false bravado about a non-existent risk. -
JR
 Despite Concerns, NASA Is Planning to Go Ahead With Shuttle LaunchingNASA got some unexpected and unsettling news on Monday, when its own advisory panel said the agency had not fulfilled all of the safety goals it had promised to meet before returning the shuttle fleet to orbit. But it is planning to go ahead anyway, launching the Discovery in as little as two weeks. "I think, based on what I know now, we're ready to go," Michael D. Griffin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told the House Science Committee yesterday. It may sound like a recipe for trouble, or worse, especially since the work left undone includes three of the most critical recommendations of the board that investigated the loss of the Columbia in 2003, including elimination of the kind of launch debris that doomed the Columbia and the development of on-orbit repair techniques. Yet few experts, even some of those who have been critical of the space agency, seemed troubled by the failure to fulfill those recommendations completely. The consensus of these experts is that while missions are inherently risky, the remaining shuttle fleet has been made much safer over all. "Our goal in the return-to-flight recommendations was to break the causal chain between debris shedding and killing astronauts," said John M. Logsdon, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, who was a member of the investigative board. NASA's actions, he went on, "have broken the chain in enough places that the spirit of the recommendations has been accomplished." Another board member agreed. "In some cases, it wasn't 'solve this problem completely,' it was 'get started on this problem,' " said James Hallock, an aviation safety official at the Department of Transportation. On Capitol Hill yesterday, Dr. Griffin told lawmakers that the board's recommendation were "admirable goals," but that "we have reduced the level of risk due to debris damage to an acceptable level." That is a different tone than had been expressed by Dr. Griffin's predecessor, Sean O'Keefe. Before he retired this year, Mr. O'Keefe repeatedly said NASA would, as he put it in June 2003, "comply fully without any equivocation" with the recommendations. Members of the independent investigation board and of the group that monitored NASA's progress in meeting the recommendations said that the agency had made impressive progress in upgrading safety, and that missing the high mark did not mean that the shuttle was too risky to fly. Moreover, they said, things had changed considerably since the Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued its scathing final report in August 2003. Five months later, President Bush announced that NASA would retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, so recommendations that would have taken many years to fulfill, like toughening the brittle carbon composite panels that line the leading edges of the wings and nose of the shuttle, were abandoned. Richard O. Covey, the former astronaut who served as co-chairman of the advisory panel, said in an interview yesterday that "those things that remain undone are not a reason to consider the space shuttle unsafe." The investigation board, he said, had "set a high standard," and his advisory group had decided early on to interpret the recommendations strictly - a decision that he said put the panel "in a box." NASA, he said, has done "an extraordinary amount" to reduce risk. And although some of the presentations from NASA on the chance of catastrophic damage from ice falling from certain areas could be as high as 1 in 180, the overall risk appeared to be acceptable, and he did not doubt the methods used to determine the risk level. The decision to fly, he said, must rest with NASA. Dr. Logsdon, of the Space Policy Institute, said risks were an inevitable part of human spaceflight. For example, he noted that when a shuttle blasts off, "you're detonating the equivalent of a small nuclear weapon, in terms of explosive power." In an interview this month, Dr. Griffin, the NASA administrator, said the risks were much on his mind. "We understand the shuttle a lot better than we ever did before," he said. "To our chagrin, but we do." Mr. Covey said that if he were an astronaut today, he would no longer be concerned about the risks of foam and ice. Instead, he said, "I'd be focusing on those other things that have traditionally been concerns," like the shuttle's main engines, "and those things that we do not know about yet." Plans for the Space Station By The New York Times WASHINGTON, June 28 - The Bush administration will ask Congress to amend a law that prevents the country from buying spacecraft and other services from Russia for the International Space Station, Dr. Griffin announced Tuesday. In testimony before the House committee, Dr. Griffin said the administration was working on language for an amendment that would allow the United States to purchase Russian equipment needed to assure a continued American presence on the orbiting station. An agreement that requires Russia to supply Soyuz rescue ships for international crews on the station expires in April. The Iran Nonproliferation Act prohibits payments by the United States to Russia for goods and services for the space station because Russia had helped Iran develop rocket and nuclear technology. Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM
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