Released Aug. 26, the CAIB report is considered a brutally honest assessment of NASA's organizational shortcomings. Poor communication among the workforce, faulty engineering judgment and insufficient quality control all were cited as contributing causes to the Feb. 1 loss of Columbia and the deaths of seven astronauts.

With return to flight still at least a year away, it's clear the space agency is in a period of major transition. Fixing NASA will take time. And while the process has begun in many quarters, officials now want to make sure everyone has a chance to contribute to the recovery.

To that end, starting Monday, the employees at all of NASA's 10 field centers have been directed to spend quality time reviewing the CAIB report and discussing how its findings and recommendations apply to their specific work area. To support the action NASA printed and distributed nationwide some 60,000 copies of the report.

"The whole idea behind this week is to bring that relevance home to the every day worker and determine what things do they think they can do to improve safety and mission success," said Jeanne Watkins, the Kennedy Space Center's coordinator of Safety and Mission Success Week, as it is being called.

The week will begin with the airing at each center of a message from NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe on closed circuit television.

Each center will then handle the week in their own way. But despite the way some have described it, the Safety and Mission Success effort is not a stand down in which no work is performed and all attention is given to the one topic.

Instead, managers and workers will participate by talking about the CAIB report during normally scheduled staff meetings. Workers will compare the specific findings and recommendations written with the shuttle program in mind, and discuss how the underlying concern may be present and/or solved within the individual work areas.

"It's just a great opportunity for employees to be able to give their insight on how to improve safety and mission success," Watkins said.

At the Florida launch site, all suggestions for changing the culture or solving a technical issue raised by the CAIB will be gathered via online Web forms, and those that may have national significance will be presented to a team lead by Al Diaz on Dec. 4. Locally pertinent results will be discussed at a KSC all-hands meeting targeted for Dec. 12, Watkins said.

KSC news chief Bruce Buckingham said Thursday he wasn't sure yet if the report to Diaz or the collection of employee suggestions to be discussed here Dec. 12 would be made public.

During the past week SPACE.com has talked on the record and off with a variety of people representing NASA and its contractors, from senior managers to technicians on the floor, and everyone agreed that the idea for a Safety and Mission Success Week was a good one and that only positive change will result from the meetings.

Moreover, it's clear from what people are saying with their words, and demonstrating by their actions, that the grieving process begun the day of the tragedy has mostly run its course. The vast majority of the workforce is looking forward with determination and enthusiasm toward doing whatever needs to be done to get the shuttle fleet safely flying again.

"Yes, something tragic happened. We lost the vehicle and we lost the crew. But I think the people here feel they have maintained the integrity of the work they do and the understanding we're flying people in space and we have to do it right every time," said Roberta Wirick, the United Space Alliance (USA) manager in charge of shuttle Atlantis.

"I think morale is great. People are very focused to make sure we succeed," Hawkins said.

If sincere, the positive sentiment is remarkable given the incredible amount of change and adversity heaped on the shuttle program, and NASA in general, since Columbia broke apart over Texas. Among them:

• New center directors have taken the reigns at KSC, Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Langley Research Center in Virginia and Glenn Research Center in Ohio. Each of these centers also now have new deputy center directors, including the Ames Research Center in California (See inset).

• A number of new faces have taken on jobs at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Affected titles include chief of staff, chief financial officer, chief scientist, chief of external relations, chief information officer, historian and several assistant and associate deputy administrators for various offices including the Office of Space Flight.

• Within the shuttle program itself, Bill Parsons has replaced Ron Dittemore as program manager. Wayne Hale was moved back to Houston from Florida to become the deputy shuttle manager. New people also were brought in as manager and deputy manager of the orbiter project office, a manager of flight operations was named and there is a new manager of the space systems integration office.

• The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel resigned en-masse after it was labeled ineffective by the CAIB report, NASA's future plans for a shuttle replacement in the form of an Orbital Space Plane has come under fire and threat of cancellation by Congress, and the White House has yet to offer a cohesive vision for the future that NASA can build its programs around.

Despite all that, officials at KSC and the Johnson Space Center in Houston insist the workforce remains in good spirits and ready to contribute to future success.

"I don't think we're ever going to forget Columbia, anymore than we've ever forgotten Challenger. It's always going to be part of our memories in everything that we do, but we are pressing forward," Buckingham said.

"We've got a pretty hard core 'can do' culture out here, which is great," added Greg Crews, an orbiter operations engineering manager for USA. "And at the same time we want to be cautious of that. We need to be careful not to take on too much with that 'can do' culture."