- Fears of a catastrophic shuttle accident were raised
last summer with the White House by a former Nasa engineer who pleaded
for a presidential order to halt all further shuttle flights until safety
issues had been addressed.
-
- In a letter to the White House, Don Nelson, who served
with Nasa for 36 years until he retired in 1999, wrote to President George
W. Bush warning that his 'intervention' was necessary to 'prevent another
catastrophic space shuttle accident'.
-
- During his last 11 years at Nasa, Nelson served as a
mission operations evaluator for proposed advanced space transportation
projects. He was on the initial design team for the space shuttle. He participated
in every shuttle upgrade until his retirement.
-
- Listing a series of mishaps with shuttle missions since
1999, Nelson warned in his letter that Nasa management and the Aerospace
Safety Advisory Panel have failed to respond to the growing warning signs
of another shuttle accident. Since 1999 the vehicle had experienced a number
of potentially disastrous problems:
-
- * 1999 - Columbia's launch was delayed by a hydrogen
leak and Discovery was grounded with damaged wiring, contaminated engine
and dented fuel line;
-
- * January 2000 - Endeavor was delayed because of wiring
and computer failures;
-
- * August 2000 - inspection of Columbia revealed 3,500
defects in wiring;
-
- * October 2000 - the 100th flight of the shuttle was
delayed because of a misplaced safety pin and concerns with the external
tank;
-
- * April 2002 - a hydrogen leak forced the cancellation
of the Atlantis flight;
-
- * July 2002 - the inspector general reported that the
shuttle safety programme was not properly managed;
-
- * August 2002 - the shuttle launch system was grounded
after fuel line cracks were discovered.
-
- White House officials rejected Nelson's plea for a moratorium.
He tried to talk again to Nasa's administration about his worries in October
but was again rebuffed.
-
- Yesterday Nelson told The Observer that he feared the
Columbia disaster was the culmination of 'disastrous mismanagement' by
Nasa's most senior officials and would inevitably lead to the moratorium
he was calling for.
-
- 'I became concerned about safety issues in Nasa after
Challenger. I think what happened is that very slowly over the years Nasa's
culture of safety became eroded.
-
- 'But when I tried to raise my concerns with Nasa's new
administrator, I received two reprimands for not going through the proper
channels, which discouraged other people from coming forward with their
concerns. When it came to an argument between a middle-ranking engineer
and the astronauts and administration, guess who won.
-
- 'One of my biggest complaints has been that we should
have been looking for ways to develop crew escape modules, which Nasa has
constantly rejected.'
-
- His claims emerged against a background of growing concern
over the management of safety issues by Nasa.
-
- They followed similar warnings last April by the former
chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory panel, Richard Bloomberg, who
said: 'In all of the years of my involvement, I have never been as concerned
for space shuttle safety as now.'
-
- Bloomberg blamed the deferral or elimination of planned
safety upgrades, a diminished workforce as a result of hiring freezes,
and an ageing infrastructure for the advisory panel's findings.
-
- His warning echoed earlier concern about key shuttle
safety issues. In September 2001 at a Senate hearing into shuttle safety,
senators and independent experts warned that budget and management problems
were putting astronauts lives at risk. At the centre of concern were claims
that a budget overspend of almost $5 billion (£3bn) had led to a
culture in Nasa whereby senior managers treated shuttle safety upgrades
as optional.
-
- Among those who spoke out were Democratic Senator Bill
Nelson of Florida, who warned: 'I fear that if we don't provide the space
shuttle programme with the resources it needs for safety upgrades, our
country is going to pay a price we can't bear.
-
- 'We're starving Nasa's shuttle budget and thus greatly
increasing the chance of a catastrophic loss.'
-
- Although Nasa officials said that improvements were being
made they admitted that more needed to be done.
-
- A year earlier, a General Accounting Office report had
warned that the loss of experienced engineers and technicians in the space
shuttle programme was threatening the safety of future missions just as
Nasa was preparing to increase its annual number of launches to build the
International Space Station.
-
- The GAO cited internal Nasa documents showing 'workforce
reductions are jeopardising Nasa's ability to safely support the shuttle's
planned flight rate'.
-
- Space agency officials discovered in late 1999 that many
employees didn't have the necessary skills to properly manage avionics,
mechanical engineering and computer systems, according to the GAO report.
-
- The GAO assembled a composite portrait of the shuttle
programme's workforce that showed twice as many workers over 60 years of
age than under 30. It assessed that the number of workers then nearing
retirement could jeopardise the programme's ability to transfer leadership
roles to the next generation to support the higher flight rate necessary
to build the space station.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
r.
-
- The op-ed pages of US newspapers have been full of sceptical
pieces about Bush and the looming war. Here's Frank Rich writing in The
New York Times on Pearl Harbor Day, last 7 December: "History will
eventually tell us whether Pearl Harbor Day 2002 is the gateway to a war
as necessary as the Second World War, or to a tragedy of unintended consequences
redolent of the First World War. A savage dictator is delivering a 'full'
accounting of his weapons arsenal that only a fool would take for fact,
and a President of the US is pretending (not very hard) to indulge this
UN rigmarole while he calls up more reserves for the confrontation he seeks."
-
- Yet many in media and political Britain have failed to
grasp this reality. Transfixed by the machinery of diplomacy, they have
not understood the opposite ambitions of Saddam Hussein and his nemesis
in waiting, George Bush.
-
- Over the past year numerous journalistic colleagues have
told me Bush didn't want to go to war, or that wiser counsel in Washington
would prevent the inexorable move towards conflict we are now witnessing.
Get real, my friends. If Saddam isn't on a plane to somewhere sunny soon,
then war is inevitable.
-
- I have been warned against writing a piece that howls
"I told you so"; but allow me just the smallest bit of space
to restate what I've been saying for 18 months. The game has always been
to get rid of Saddam. Regime change has never meant containing the threat
of Saddam or changing his behaviour. As Ari Fleischer, the White House
spokesman, put it: "Saddam disarming is the mother of all hypotheticals."
-
- Bush knew that he could depend on Saddam screwing up
the inspections and delivering a plausible justification to oust him. While
we can argue all day and night about the motives for ousting Saddam, don't
ever doubt the goal.
-
- Even if Tony Blair believed that disarmament is the goal,
President Bush has never had any doubts. When the White House talks of
ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, it means overthrowing Saddam
or forcing him into exile.
-
- We haven't been told the truth by Washington because
the White House believes, in the immortal words of Jack Nicholson in A
Few Good Men, we "can't handle the truth". According to this
world view, hard men must make ruthless choices so that we can sleep easily
in our beds. The choices made and the actions that flow from them will
be justified in the lofty rhetoric of human rights. Get ready for a new
generation of heart-wrenching images. Now Iraq's torture victims are poster
of the month, then it will be the inmates of North Korea's gulags. But
you can rest easy if you are a friend like General Dostum, the murderous
warlord in Afghanistan ö we won't embarrass you with denunciations
from the White House or disagreeable prosecutions or investigations.
-
- According to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike,
Saddam is a potential threat and is weak enough to be attacked. North Korea,
on the other hand, is also a threat but is not yet weak enough to be attacked.
The US may adopt different strategies, but it has determined that the political
system in North Korea is itself a weapon of mass destruction. The dear
leader in Pyongyang is also being sized up for the long drop. What Mr Bush
has in mind is nothing less than a reshaping of the world. He wishes to
turn it into a place without enemies. Part of his strategy will be to use
military as well as economic power. If he wins in Iraq with an "acceptable"
level of death and destruction, the President will be emboldened and we
will enter what is potentially a more dangerous period than any in the
last half century. Dangerous because military success too often invites
hubris and is never an automatic guarantor of a stable political order.
-
- In the aftermath of 11 September, America showed admirable
restraint. It did not lash out but worked to identify its targets and sought
international support for action. It has had unprecedented co-operation
from the rest of the international community in its pursuit of al-Qa'ida.
People can see a clear danger and need little persuading that tough measures
are needed.
-
- But on Iraq, the world knows it is has been told too
little, and often too late. Set aside the reflexive anti-Americanists,
who howl at every foreign policy move Washington makes, and analyse what
has happened to the so called middle-ground. These are the people who supported
the interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan and East Timor; they did so
because they were convinced of a moral case. They also broadly supported
America's right to pursue Bin Laden and his operatives and to overthrow
the Taliban. When these people feel they haven't been given the full story,
then the proponents of war have a potentially serious problem. Yet that
swath of public opinion that opposes or is sceptical about war hasn't yet
actively pressed the politicians. The sceptical have decided to wait and
see. They will not rise up at the start of war, but will watch how it unfolds.
-
- They will wait to see if the invading armies discover
secret stocks of banned weapons. Stand by for pictures of secret underground
chambers stocked with nerve gas and other delights. These will be used
to provide retrospective justification for military action. But the war
leaders must hope that conflict will be swift and the civilian and military
casualties light. They must pray that the dominant image is of Iraqis dancing
in the street at Saddam's overthrow, and not Baghdad as Sarajevo or, worse
still, Stalingrad. And even if it all seems to take place without too much
bloodshed, we will still not know how the guns of March will be heard across
the globe. Who will they frighten into submission and who will they inspire
to hatred of America and its friends? Not just for Bush and Blair or Saddam,
but for all of us, the stakes are unimaginably high.
-
- The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent
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- http://argument.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=374440&host=6&dir=154
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