On 6/3/2003 in Houston, the Commission of Inquiry into the Columbia disaster held its first public meeting and the testimony was chilling
Senior NASA and government officials testified Thursday before a panel investigating the Columbia crash that they had serious questions about the wisdom of replacing skilled civil servants with less skilled private contractors in shuttle maintenance.
In the first public hearing, the commission of inquiry into the Columbia disaster decided to focus on NASA's culture - both the organizational one and in the field of safety arrangements, thereby hinting at the possible direction in which the investigation will focus.
The 13 crew members were tasked with finding out why Columbia, NASA's veteran space shuttle, disintegrated on February 1 over Texas, killing the seven astronauts 16 minutes before it was scheduled to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
One of the witnesses who appeared before the committee is an engineering professor named Henry MacDonald, who worked as a slave at NASA. He said that the system used by NASA personnel to assess flight risks was flawed, and that some of the problems he pointed out in the past probably played a part in the Columbia disaster.
He pointed out that NASA uses an outdated method of collecting data and recording problems in the shuttle, so it is difficult, if not impossible, for senior managers to detect problems in advance. MacDonald testified that he had previously warned of communication problems on the shuttle, but they had not been fixed, making it difficult for the engineers to estimate the extent of the damage to the shuttle's left wing. The Voice of Israel reported that about three years ago McDonald published his report on the subject. He hoped that as part of the renovation plan, amounting to more than one and a half billion dollars, the malfunctions would be fixed, but the plan was considerably reduced, and the problems remained.
McDonald, a former director of research at NASA's Ames Research Center, told members of the investigative committee that he and others had concerns in a 2000 report about shuttle safety. MacDonald said safety has been "eroded" by the replacement of civil servants with less-skilled workers from private companies after NASA began privatizing shuttle maintenance in a money-saving move a few years ago. The transfer to private contractors was accompanied by an emphasis on time at the expense of safety in preparing the ferry for flight. said.
Retired admiral Harold Gehman, chairman of the commission of inquiry, said that MacDonald's report predicted the future in an amazing way, and it is a good start that will help the people of the commission of inquiry to focus their efforts.
The director of the shuttle program, Ron Ditmore defended NASA's safety regulations, but he also commented that he had concerns about the brain drain the agency has been suffering since it replaced civil servants with contractor workers.
"I am concerned that there has been a large drop in the number of our direct employees supporting the program for over a decade," he said. NASA's workforce at the end of the nineties was divided equally between civil servants and contractor workers. This is a significant decrease and it involves a significant loss of experience and knowledge," Ditmore said.
The team gathered at the University of Houston campus near the Johnson Space Center also heard from Jefferson Howell, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, and Keith Chung, a Boeing engineer who worked on maintaining the foam that insulates the from the shuttle's huge external fuel tank. The experts believe that pieces of this foam that hit the shuttle during takeoff caused damage to the tiles on the left wing and through cracks that formed in the heat chamber during reentry into the atmosphere.
Gehman told reporters after the hearing that another hearing will focus on the licensing procedures for the launch and possibly also on the launch itself.
