"It sounds to me like
they're ready to go,'' retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr. said in an interview
with The Associated Press. ''As far as what I know, they have taken all the
steps necessary to be ready to fly in July.''
Gehman said the accident
investigators never meant NASA had to carry out to the letter the changes
recommended for the shuttle. "We didn't want it to be a poison pill,'' he said
of one of the especially vexing improvements.
Like the astronauts and
others at NASA, Gehman seems to accept that not all risk can be removed. "I
would not use the word 'safe''' to describe spaceflight, he said, even with all
the shuttle improvements of the past 2 1/2 years.
"I think the American
people and I think most of Congress do not realize how risky these flights
are,'' said the man who oversaw nearly seven months of investigation and debate
about why Columbia fell from the sky on Feb. 1, 2003.
It was the first public
comment on the subject by the chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation
Board since an advisory group concluded Monday that NASA had not fulfilled
three of the board's most critical recommendations. Gehman spoke by telephone
from Georgia, where he is at work on his latest assignment, serving on
President Bush's military base-closing commission. The job may keep him from
attending the upcoming launch of shuttle Discovery.
The return-to-flight
oversight group found that despite considerable progress by NASA, three of 15
recommendations had not been fully met. The external fuel tank is still not
immune from falling foam and ice at liftoff, the shuttle itself is still not
hardened enough against launch damage, and the astronauts still lack the means
of reliably fixing gashes in their orbiting ship.
A hole in Columbia's left
wing, put there by a 1.67-pound chunk of fuel-tank foam insulation during
launch, led to the spacecraft's destruction on its return and the deaths of all
seven astronauts.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said
Tuesday the space agency has done the best it can to remedy all the problems
that existed when Columbia went down. Unless something new comes up, NASA is
pressing toward a launch as early as July 13, he said.
"At this point, we must say
that we have reduced the level of risk due to debris damage to an acceptable
level ... or we must say that we don't want to fly the shuttle again because we
do not have a better technical approach to dealing with it,'' Griffin told the
House Science Committee.
Griffin and top shuttle
managers gathered at Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday to assess Discovery's
flight status. They hope to set an official launch date Thursday at the
conclusion of the two-day review.
Gehman said he and his
fellow investigators never meant for the space agency to eliminate all debris
from the fuel tank, or to be able to fix a hole of any size. "Some of the
wording we left vague and open-ended on purpose,'' he explained.
The best NASA can come up with
is a plug for a 4-inch-wide hole, and it's uncertain how well the device will
work in space. The gash that doomed Columbia was believed to be about 6 to 10
inches.
The investigation board
spent hours struggling over the wording of the recommendation involving orbital
repair.
"We tried to word it that
would require them to start an enormous effort to develop an on-orbit repair
capability,'' Gehman said. "At the same time, we didn't want it to be a poison
pill that would cause the program to be shut down.''
The board's underlying
message was, he said, "Do the best you can.''
The fact that NASA now has
the ability to look for gashes in the shuttle's thermal shielding and analyze
the damage - and, thanks to management cultural changes, has the keen desire to
do so - is the kind of progress Gehman was hoping for two years ago.
"If they do find something
that's terribly wrong, they have alternative plans, none of which they had
before,'' he said.
NASA's ultimate directive, from Gehman,
is to continuously strive for improvement between now and 2010, when the three
remaining shuttles are retired to make way for a new spacecraft intended to fly
into orbit and then on to the moon and Mars.
It's not the next mission
Gehman worries about - it's the 10th one from now.
"The next flight will be as
safe as they can make it,'' he said. "But I'm worried that pressure of schedule
and manifest and complete cost and all that kind of stuff will sneak back in
and then, lo and behold, efforts at risk assessment, risk management and safety
will once again pay the price."
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