Aloft

by William Langewiesche

  Nonetheless, over the years foam strikes had come to be seen within NASA as an ‘in-family’ problem, so familiar that even the most serious episodes seemed unthreatening and mundane. Douglas Osheroff, a normally good-humored Stanford physicist and Nobel laureate who joined the CAIB late, went around for months in a state of incredulity and dismay at what he was learning about NASA’s operational logic. He told me that the shuttle managers acted as if they thought the frequency of the foam strikes had somehow reduced the danger that the impacts posed. His point was not that the managers really believed this but that after more than a hundred successful flights they had come blithely to accept the risk. He said, ‘The excitement that only exists when there is danger was kind of gone – even though the danger was not gone.’ And frankly, organizational and bureaucratic concerns weighed more heavily on the managers’ minds. The most pressing of those concerns were the new performance goals imposed by Sean O’Keefe, and a tight sequence of flights leading up to a drop-dead date of February 19, 2004, for the completion of the International Space Station’s ‘core.’ O’Keefe had made it clear that meeting this deadline was a test, and that the very future of NASA’s human space-flight program was on the line.

  From Osheroff’s scientific perspective, deadlines based on completion of the International Space Station were inherently absurd. To me he said, ‘And what would the next goal be after that? Maybe we should bring our pets up there! “I wonder how a Saint Bernard urinates in zero gravity!” NASA sold the International Space Station to Congress as a great science center – but most scientists just don’t agree with that. We’re thirty years from being able to go to Mars. Meanwhile, the only reason to have man in space is to study man in space. You can do that stuff– okay – and there are also some biology experiments that are kind of fun. I think we are learning things. But I would question any statement that you can come up with better drugs in orbit than you can on the ground, or that sort of thing. The truth is, the International Space Station has become a huge liability for NASA – expensive to build, expensive to fly, expensive to resupply. ‘Now members of Congress are talking about letting its orbit decay – just letting it fall into the ocean. And it does turn out that orbital decay is a very good thing, because it means that near space is a self-cleaning place. I mean, garbage does not stay up there forever.’

  In other words, completion of the Space Station could provide a measure of NASA’s performance only in the most immediate and superficial manner, and it was therefore an inherently poor reason for shuttle managers to be ignoring the foam strikes and proceeding at full speed. It was here that you could see the limitations of leadership without vision, and the consequences of putting an executive like O’Keefe in charge of an organization that needed more than mere discipline. This, however, was hardly an argument that the managers could use, or even in private allow themselves to articulate. If the Space Station was unimportant – and perhaps even a mistake – then one had to question the reason for the shuttle’s existence in the first place. Like O’Keefe and the astronauts and NASA itself, the managers were trapped by a circular space policy thirty years in the making, and they had no choice but to strive to meet the timelines directly ahead. As a result, after the most recent Atlantis launch, in October of 2002, during which a chunk of foam from a particularly troublesome part of the external tank, known as the ‘bipod ramp,’ had dented one of the solid rocket boosters, shuttle managers formally decided during the post-flight review not to classify the incident as an ‘in-flight anomaly.’ This was the first time that a serious bipod-ramp incident had escaped such a classification. The decision allowed the following two launches to proceed on schedule. The second of those launches was the Columbia’s, on January 16.

  The videos of the foam strike reached Houston the next day, January 17. They made it clear that again the off ending material had come from the area of the bipod ramp, that this time the foam was larger than ever before, that the impact had occurred later in the climb (meaning at higher speed), and that the wing had been hit, though exactly where was not clear. The astronauts were happily in orbit now, and had apparently not felt the impact, or been able to distinguish it from the heavy vibrations of the solid rocket boosters. In other words, they were unaware of any trouble. Responsibility for disposing of the incident lay with engineers on the ground, and specifically with the Mission Management Team, or MMT, whose purpose was to make decisions about the problems and unscripted events that inevitably arose during any flight. The MMT was a high-level group. In the Houston hierarchy it operated above the flight controllers in the Mission Control room, and just below the shuttle program manager, Ron Dittemore. Dittemore was traveling at the time, and has since retired. The MMT meetings were chaired by his protégé, the once rising Linda Ham, who has come to embody NASA’s arrogance and insularity in many observers’ minds. Ham is the same hard-charging manager who, with a colleague, later had to be forcefully separated from the CAIB’s investigation. Within the strangely neutered engineering world of the Johnson Space Center, she was an intimidating figure, a youngish, attractive woman given to wearing revealing clothes, yet also known for a tough and domineering management style. Among the lower ranks she had a reputation for brooking no nonsense and being a little hard to talk to. She was not smooth. She was a woman struggling upward in a man’s world. She was said to have a difficult personality.

  As the head of the MMT, Ham responded to news of the foam strike as if it were just another item to be efficiently handled and then checked off the list: a water leak in the science lab, a radio communication failure, a foam strike on the left wing, okay, no safety-of-flight issues here – right? What’s next? There was a trace of vanity in the way she ran her shows. She seemed to revel in her own briskness, in her knowledge of the shuttle systems, in her use of acronyms and the strange, stilted syntax of aerospace engineers. She was decisive, and very sure of her sense for what was important and what was not. Her style got the best of her on day six of the mission, January 21, when at a recorded MMT meeting she spoke just a few words too many, much to her later regret.

  It was at the end of a report given by a mid-ranking engineer named Don McCormack, who summarized the progress of an ad hoc engineering group, called the Debris Assessment Team, that had been formed at a still lower level to analyze the foam strike. The analysis was being done primarily by Boeing engineers, who had dusted off the soon to be notorious Crater model, primarily to predict damage to the underwing tile. McCormack reported that little was yet resolved, that the quality of the Crater as a predictor was being judged against the known damage on earlier flights, and that some work was being done to explore the options should the analysis conclude that the Columbia had been badly wounded. After a brief exchange Ham cut him short, saying, ‘And I’m really… I don’t think there is much we can do, so it’s not really a factor during the flight, since there is not much we can do about it.’ She was making assumptions, of course, and they were later proved to be completely wrong, but primarily she was just being efficient, and moving the meeting along. After the accident, when the transcript and audiotapes emerged, those words were taken out of context, and used to portray Ham as a villainous and almost inhumanly callous person, which she certainly was not. In fact, she was married to an astronaut, and was as concerned as anyone about the safety of the shuttle crews. This was a dangerous business, and she knew it all too well. But like her boss, Ron Dittemore, with whom she discussed the Columbia foam strike several times, she was so immersed in the closed world of shuttle management that she simply did not elevate the event – this ‘in-family’ thing – to the level of concerns requiring action. She was intellectually arrogant, perhaps, and as a manager she failed abysmally. But neither she nor the others of her rank had the slightest suspicion that the Columbia might actually go down.

  The frustration is that some people on lower levels were actively worried about that possibility, and they understood clearly that not enough was known about the effect
s of the foam strike on the wing, but they expressed their concerns mostly to one another, and for good reason, because on the few occasions when they tried to alert the decision-makers, NASA’s management system overwhelmed them and allowed none of them to be heard. The question now, of course, is why.

  The CAIB’s search for answers began long before the technical details were resolved, and it ultimately involved hundreds of interviews and 50,000 pages of transcripts. The manner in which those interviews were conducted became a contentious issue, and it was arguably Gehman’s biggest mistake. As a military man, advised by military men on the board, he decided to conduct the interviews according to a military model of safety probes, in which individual fault is not formally assigned, and the interviews themselves are ‘privileged,’ meaning forever sealed off from public view. It was understood that identities and deeds would not be protected from view, only individual testimonies to the CAIB, but serious critics cried foul nonetheless, and pointed out correctly that Gehman was using loopholes to escape sunshine laws that otherwise would have applied. Gehman believed that treating the testimony as privileged was necessary to encourage witnesses to talk, and to get to the bottom of the story, but the long-term effect of the investigation will be diminished as a result (for instance, by lack of access to the raw material by outside analysts), and there was widespread consensus among the experienced (largely civilian) investigators actually conducting the interviews that the promise of privacy was having little effect on what people were willing to say. These were not criminals they were talking to, or careful lawyers. For the most part they were sincere engineering types who were concerned about what had gone wrong, and would have been willing even without privacy to speak their minds. The truth, in other words, would have come out even in the brightest of sunshine.

  The story that emerged was a sad and unnecessary one, involving arrogance, insularity, and bad luck allowed to run unchecked. On the seventh day of the flight, January 22, just as the Air Force began to move on the Kennedy engineers’ back-channel request for photographs, Linda Ham heard to her surprise that this approach (which according to front-channel procedures would have required her approval) had been made. She immediately telephoned other high-level managers in Houston to see if any of them wanted to issue a formal ‘requirement’ for imagery, and when they informed her that they did not, rather than exploring the question with the Kennedy engineers she simply terminated their request with the Department of Defense. This appears to have been a purely bureaucratic reaction. A NASA liaison officer then e-mailed an apology to Air Force personnel, assuring them that the shuttle was in ‘excellent shape,’ and explaining that a foam strike was ‘something that has happened before and is not considered to be a major problem.’ The officer continued, ‘The one problem that this has identified is the need for some additional coordination within NASA to assure that when a request is made it is done through the official channels.’ Months later one of the CAIB investigators who had followed this trail was still seething with anger at what had occurred. He said, ‘Because the problem was not identified in the traditional way – “Houston, we have a problem!” – well, then, “Houston, we don’t have a problem!” Because Houston didn’t identify the problem.’

  But another part of Houston was doing just that. Unbeknownst to Ham and the shuttle management, the low-level engineers of the Debris Assessment Team had concluded that the launch films were not clear enough to indicate where the foam had hit, and particularly whether it had hit the underside tile or a leading-edge RCC panel. Rather than trying to run their calculations in the blind, they had decided that they should do the simple thing and have someone take a look for damage. They had already e-mailed one query to the engineering department, about the possibility of getting the astronauts themselves to take a short spacewalk and inspect the wing. It later turned out that this would have been safe and easy to do. That e-mail, however, was never answered. This time the Debris Assessment engineers decided on a still simpler solution – to ask the Department of Defense to take some high-resolution pictures. Ignorant of the fact that the Kennedy group had already made such a request, and that it had just been peevishly canceled, they sent out two requests of their own, directed, appropriately, to Ron Dittemore and Linda Ham, but through channels that were a little off-center, and happened to fail. Those channels were ones they had used in their regular work as engineers, outside the formal shuttle-management structure. By unfortunate circumstance, the request that came closest to getting through was intercepted by a mid-level employee (the assistant to an intended recipient, who was on vacation), who responded by informing the Debris Assessment engineers, more or less correctly, that Linda Ham had decided against Air Force imagery.

  The confusion was now total, yet also nearly invisible – and within the suppressive culture of the human space-flight program, it had very little chance of making itself known. At the top of the tangle, neither Ron Dittemore nor Linda Ham ever learned that the Debris Assessment Team wanted pictures; at the bottom, the Debris Assessment engineers heard the ‘no’ without suspecting that it was not an answer to their request. They were told to go back to the Crater model and numerical analysis, and as earnest, hardworking engineers (hardly rebels, these), they dutifully complied, all the while regretting the blind assumptions that they would have to make. Given the obvious potential for a catastrophe, one might expect that they would have gone directly to Linda Ham, on foot if necessary, to make the argument in person for a spacewalk or high-resolution photos. However, such were the constraints within the Johnson Space Center that they never dared. They later said that had they made a fuss about the shuttle, they might have been singled out for ridicule. They feared for their standing, and their careers.

  The CAIB investigator who asked the engineers what conclusion they had drawn at the time from management’s refusal later said to me, ‘They all thought, “Well, none of us have a security clearance high enough to view any of this imagery.” They talked about this openly among themselves, and they figured one of three things:

  ‘“One: The ‘no’ means that management’s already got photos, and the damage isn’t too bad. They can’t show us the photos, because we don’t have the security clearance, and they can’t tell us they have the photos, or tell us the damage isn’t bad, because that tells us how accurate the photos are – and we don’t have the security clearance. But wait a minute, if that’s the case, then what’re we doing here? Why are we doing the analysis? So no, that can’t be right.

  ‘“Okay, then, two: They already took the photos, and the damage is so severe that there’s no hope for recovery. Well… that can’t be right either, because in that case, why are we doing the analysis?

  ‘“Okay, then, three: They took the photos. They can’t tell us they took the photos, and the photos don’t give us clear definition. So we need to do the analysis. That’s gotta be it!”’

  What the Debris Assessment engineers could not imagine is that no photos had been taken, or ever would be – and essentially for lack of curiosity by NASA’s imperious, self-convinced managers. What those managers in turn could not imagine was that people in their own house might really be concerned. The communication gap had nothing to do with security clearances, and it was complete.

  Gehman explained the underlying realities to me. He said, ‘They claim that the culture in Houston is a “badgeless society,” meaning it doesn’t matter what you have on your badge – you’re concerned about shuttle safety together. Well, that’s all nice, but the truth is that it does matter what badge you’re wearing. Look, if you really do have an organization that has free communication and open doors and all that kind of stuff, it takes a special kind of management to make it work. And we just don’t see that management here. Oh, they say all the right things. “We have open doors and e-mails, and anybody who sees a problem can raise his hand, blow a whistle, and stop the whole process.” But then when you look at how it really works, it’s an incestuous, hierarchical s
ystem, with invisible rankings and a very strict informal chain of command. They all know that. So even though they’ve got all the trappings of communication, you don’t actually find communication. It’s very complex. But if a person brings an issue up, what caste he’s in makes all the difference. Now, again, NASA will deny this, but if you talk to people, if you really listen to people, all the time you hear “Well, I was afraid to speak up.” Boy, it comes across loud and clear. You listen to the meetings: “Anybody got anything to say?” There are thirty people in the room, and slam! There’s nothing. We have plenty of witness statements saying, “If I had spoken up, it would have been at the cost of my job.” And if you’re in the engineering department, you’re a nobody.’

  One of the CAIB investigators told me that he asked Linda Ham, ‘As a manager, how do you seek out dissenting opinions?’

  According to him, she answered, ‘Well, when I hear about them…’

  He interrupted. ‘Linda, by their very nature you may not hear about them.’

  ‘Well, when somebody comes forward and tells me about them.’

  ‘But Linda, what techniques do you use to get them?’

  He told me she had no answer.

  This was certainly not the sort of risk-versus-risk decision-making that Michael Bloomfield had in mind when he described the thinking behind his own shuttle flights.

  At 7:00 AM on the ninth day, January 24, which was one week before the Columbia’s scheduled re-entry, the engineers from the Debris Assessment Team formally presented the results of their numerical analysis to Linda Ham’s intermediary, Don McCormack. The room was so crowded with concerned observers that some people stood in the hall, peering in. The fundamental purpose of the meeting would have been better served had the engineers been able to project a photograph of a damaged wing onto the screen, but, tragically, that was not to be. Instead they projected a typically crude PowerPoint summary, based on the results from the Crater model, with which they attempted to explain a nuanced position: first, that if the tile had been damaged, it had probably endured well enough to allow the Columbia to come home; and second, that for lack of information they had needed to make assumptions to reach that conclusion, and that troubling unknowns therefore limited the meaning of the results. The latter message seems to have been lost. Indeed, this particular Power-Point presentation became a case study for Edward Tufte, the brilliant communications specialist from Yale, who in a subsequent booklet, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, tore into it for its dampening effect on clear expression and thought. The CAIB later joined in, describing the widespread use of PowerPoint within NASA as one of the obstacles to internal communication, and criticizing the Debris Assessment presentation for mechanically underplaying the uncertainties that remained. Had the uncertainties been more strongly expressed as the central factor in question, the need to inspect the wing by spacewalk or photograph might have become obvious even to the shuttle managers. Still, the Mission Management Team seemed unprepared to hear nuance. Fixated on potential tile damage as the relevant question, assuming without good evidence that the RCC panels were strong enough to withstand a foam strike, subtly skewing the discussion away from catastrophic burn-through and toward the potential effects on turnaround times on the ground and how that might affect the all-important launch schedule, the shuttle managers were convinced that they had the situation as they defined it firmly under control.