Engineer Sounded Warnings for Columbia

July 7, 2003 -- — As NASA engineers scrambled to assess the damage to the space shuttle Columbia after its launch this January, Rodney Rocha knew what should be done: get better pictures.

The Jan. 16 launch had seemed "picture-perfect," in the words of senior shuttle manager Linda Ham, but the next day a routine review of the launch tapes had revealed a 20-inch piece of hardened insulation foam breaking off the huge main fuel tank and hitting the shuttle's left wing.

The problem was the shots of the incident were either blurry or taken from a bad angle, so the engineers could not assess the danger to the orbiting shuttle and its seven-member crew.

Rocha, the chief structural engineer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, was on a team of engineers assigned to assess the damage. The team wanted to see if the military could get some better pictures from one of its satellites as it passed by the shuttle.

Read Rocha's e-mail asking for better images.

So Rocha sent an e-mail to engineering management to initiate the photo appeal. Knowing he'd need permission from the top shuttle managers to request the use of secret military hardware, he put one line in bold face: "Can we petition [beg] for outside agency assistance?"

He sent a follow-up the next day — seven days into the shuttle's 16-day mission — and received a reply 26 minutes later. To his astonishment, he learned that shuttle managers were not taking steps to photograph Columbia.

Read Rocha's e-mail in which he "begs" for outside agency assistance.

"I was flabbergasted," Rocha says. "I was stunned." He remembers thinking, "Why? It doesn't say why."

After more consultations and an official report compiled by Boeing, one of NASA's primary contractors, the shuttle managers concluded the foam hit posed no "safety of flight" concerns and the Columbia should continue its mission.

Eight days later, Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, scattering debris over hundreds of miles. Click here to see a minute-by-minute map of Columbia's path.

Largest Foam Chunk Ever

NASA engineers routinely scrutinize every aspect of a shuttle launch to determine whether there is any potential risk to the safety of the mission. So when image analysts at the Kennedy and Johnson centers spotted the foam hit the day after the Columbia launch, they immediately alerted the engineers.

E-mails circulated immediately within NASA, but attached computer movies of the incident provided few answers. The images came from high-tech still and motion cameras placed at multiple different angles, but there was no single, clear shot of the area struck by the foam. Analysts were left guessing. Where exactly did the debris strike happen? How big was the piece of foam? Was this a serious event?

Despite the many uncertainties, several engineers arrived at the same conclusion: The piece of foam, measuring 20 inches at its widest point, appeared to be the largest debris hit of its kind in the space shuttle program's 113-flight history.

Begging for More

NASA assembled a damage assessment team made up of 37 specialists from the agency and its contractors: Boeing, United Space Alliance, Lockheed Martin, and Science Applications International Corp. Their assignment was to determine if the foam hit had punctured a hole in the shuttle's wing, and if so, whether that hole was a threat to Columbia.

On Jan. 21, day six of the mission, Rocha sent the first e-mail asking his superiors to make the request to the military for satellite images. "We will have big uncertainties," the e-mail read, "until we get definitive, better, clearer photos of the wing."

He included the bold face line about "begging" because he wanted the e-mail to be "an attention-getter," Rocha told ABCNEWS. "I wanted engineering to press the request, and push it up to space shuttle management."

At Kennedy Space Center in Florida a separate effort was under way to obtain better images. Wayne Hale, a launch integration manager, decided to ask for help from the Air Force. The request was passed to officials at the military's U.S. Space Command in Colorado. Military personnel with the ability to task photo-capable spy satellites began initial preparations.

Catch-22

The next day, shuttle managers sent an e-mail asking if it's safe to assume there are no "safety of flight" concerns.

Rocha sent a second e-mail, saying it was crucial for the team to get a close-up view of the shuttle before they could make any determination about the damage. "There are good scenarios [acceptable and minimal damage] to horrible ones," the e-mail read, "depending on the extent of the damage."

But the shuttle managers turned down all photo requests, and NASA never asked the military for clearer satellite images.

The damage assessment team was suddenly faced with a Catch-22 proposition, according to Rocha: to get fresh photos of the shuttle's wing, engineers felt they had to prove Columbia was in danger. But no one could prove there existed any real danger without first having clearer images.

Columbia's flight director LeRoy Cain says there is no excuse for not speaking up, "You stand up and you say, "Here's my concern. Here's why it's my concern and I'm not comfortable.' "

Protocol Problem

But NASA never received sharper images from the military. Engineering managers never sent Rocha's request to shuttle managers who could act on it. The other request was cancelled.

According to Harold Gehman, the head of the board investigating the Columbia disaster, NASA managers squashed the photo requests not because the requests lacked merit, but because they weren't made according to proper procedure. In other words, NASA's preoccupation with protocol allowed real safety concerns to be passed over.

"The professional system by which professional engineers express, express legitimate safety concerns up the chain a command, that system broke," Gehman told ABCNEWS. "To me, that's the failure."

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe told reporters in May that the agency has a safety-reporting system in which employees can easily raise "red flags" and, if necessary, halt a mission.

"You don't need to demonstrate why you think you're right. All you need to do is send up a flare and everything's going to stop," he said. "That's what the system is for, and obviously, its use or disuse is something we're going to have to look at more carefully."

The Boeing Report

Soon after the foam hit was discovered, Boeing was enlisted to write the official damage assessment report. Boeing had conducted foam impact tests in the past; its engineers were the natural choice in evaluating possible damage to Columbia.

About the same time the photo requests were killed, Boeing e-mailed its preliminary findings to NASA. The report predicted a "potential" for damage to the shuttle's tiles and even to the panels — known as the RCC panels — that protect the front of the wing, but Boeing was conclusive in foreseeing a "safe return" of Columbia and its crew.

Woven into the Boeing analysis were admissions of uncertainty. On page two the report said, "No SOFI on RCC test data available," which ABCNEWS has learned meant Boeing didn't have any engineering data on foam impacts to the RCC panels, the spot on the wing where the foam might have hit.

On page 6 the report read, "Flight condition is significantly outside of test database." Boeing's test database was based on a 1979 study in which pieces of foam the size of ping-pong balls were fired at shuttle parts. The block of foam that hit Columbia, the report showed, was some 600 times larger.

The MMT

On Jan. 24, nine days into the mission, the managers assigned to run the Columbia mission held a meeting to assess the shuttle condition. Rocha and other engineers attended.

According to sources, none of the charts, graphs or other visual aids produced by Boeing were presented during the meeting.

At the meeting, Ham, the chairwoman of the mission management team, said there was "no safety of flight [issue], and no issue for this mission … Nothing that we are going to do different."

Rocha kept his reservations to himself. "I remember a pause, and her looking around the room, like, 'It's OK to say something now,' " he says. "But no one did. That made me feel very uncomfortable because I felt we should have said something … I just couldn't do it … I was too low down here in the organization, and she is way up here."

Gehman contends that shuttle managers didn't ask probing questions of the Boeing report.

"They didn't ask for technical papers," he told ABCNEWS. "They had already made their minds up that the foam didn't damage the [shuttle]."

ABCNEWS' Eric Avram, Deborah Katz and Teri Whitcraft contributed to this report.