They didn't happen because "space is hard," as NASA apologists repeatedly proclaimed. They weren't out-of-the-blue surprises, striking without warning. This was a dramatic moment: NASA itself could have done the diagnosis and come up with the get-well prescription without the cost of seven lives.Īs it turned out, neither the 2003 Columbia disaster, nor the 1986 Challenger disaster, nor the robotic Mars mission failures of 1999, nor the cascade of near-death experiences of American astronauts aboard the Russian Mir space station in 19, were "accidents" in any traditional sense of the word. “Maybe three-quarters of it,” he acknowledged. Gehman paused, thought deeply, and then sighed. "How much of your 'NASA safety culture' assessment," I asked, "could have been written before the accident?" I attended those briefings as a newly hired space analyst for NBC News, and I had a tough question on my mind. Over the ensuing months, as investigators developed these deeper insights through extensive interviews and document reviews, they regularly conducted news briefings to answer questions about what they were discovering. Convenient, unverified assumptions of goodness had led to the loss of Challenger and its crew - and Gehman wanted to find out if the same kind of lapse had led to Columbia's loss. To assume that all was well unless there were visible hazards was imprudent and irresponsible. Safety was a quality that had to be explicitly verified. The fundamental safety rule had been to base no belief purely on hope. He wanted them to find out why, just 17 years after operational errors and bad engineering decisions doomed the space shuttle Challenger and its seven astronauts, the same types of management flaws had reinfected NASA's culture and struck again with equally hideous results. Harold Gehman, set his team an even more profound task. Or, as the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel, wrote, "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."Īfter the Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts were lost, an independent investigation board delved deeply into the immediate causes of the disaster. Rather, the disaster was a harsh reminder of what NASA had forgotten. As an organization and as a team, the agency learned nothing new from the 2003 disaster. Will the new teams now stepping forward into the American spaceflight arena have to relearn the same bitter lesson?īeyond the tragic loss of life, the greatest tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia was that NASA should have known better. HOUSTON - Ten years ago, the Columbia tragedy showed that not everyone at NASA had learned the most important safety lesson from the shuttle Challenger disaster, more than a decade earlier. Investigators say the damage led to the shuttle's destruction 16 days later during atmospheric re-entry. A NASA video focuses on a piece of debris falling from the external tank, then striking the left wing of the space shuttle Columbia during its launch on Jan.
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