WASHINGTON (AP) -- Despite a "massive disgorging" of e-mails from worried engineers during space shuttle Columbia's doomed flight, no one called a safety hot line or alerted high-ranking officials that the orbiter may have been mortally damaged during liftoff, the head of NASA says.
Administrator Sean O'Keefe said he wants to find out whether "folks just didn't know about" the safety reporting system or something held them back.
The reporting system was put in place after the 1986 Challenger disaster to provide a way for space program employees to "raise a red flag" without fear of retribution.
"You don't need to demonstrate why you think you're right. All you've got to do is send up a flare and everything's going to stop. That's what that system was for, and obviously, its use or disuse is something we're going to have to look at more carefully," O'Keefe said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.
"There was nothing to suggest that folks in this process felt like they weren't being heard so therefore (they) went and used this system," he added.
NASA now knows that a large chunk of fuel-tank foam insulation slammed into the vulnerable leading edge of Columbia's left wing during the January liftoff from Florida and, along with the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, suspects the debris led to the ship's destruction two weeks later.
If he had known the severity of the damage, O'Keefe said he would have done everything possible to save the seven astronauts, possibly even mounting a risky rescue mission with another shuttle and another crew. As it turns out, a hole in Columbia's left wing let in scorching atmospheric gases and led to the shuttle's disintegration over Texas on Feb. 1. All seven aboard were killed.
"I freely admit, guilty as charged, I'm a Pollyanna," O'Keefe said. "There is no way we would have ever, if we'd known what happened or had any idea that there was a problem on orbit, that we would have ever abandoned them. There's no way."
O'Keefe noted that during the Apollo 13 mission, flight controllers did not have a rule book for how to safely bring back astronauts aboard a crippled ship that was hurtling toward the moon.
"Even if the possibility would have been a slim percentage, we would have tried anything possible in order to make this happen, even to include the prospect of sending another orbiter," he said.
Accident investigators have learned that Columbia could have remained in orbit for days longer than officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration initially thought. Shuttle Atlantis was about to go to the launch pad for an early March flight, and its schedule could have been accelerated for a possible rescue attempt.
O'Keefe said NASA is also looking to change the decision-making process used by its shuttle mission management team, which accepted an engineering assessment while Columbia was still in orbit that a chunk of flyaway foam had not endangered the spaceship. The same management team turned down requests by engineers for satellite images of the shuttle's left wing to assess the potential damage.
"We want to capitalize on what is clearly part of the culture, which is to communicate, communicate often and communicate with lots of verve," O'Keefe said, referring to all the e-mails among flight controllers and other engineers during Columbia's flight about possible damage. "Let's try to figure out how we can organize that in a way that really makes it as useful and as meaningful and considered as it needs to be."
On the technical front, NASA is looking at ways to strengthen the space shuttle wings. Each leading edge is covered with 22 carbon-composite panels separated by narrow seals made of the same heat-resistant material. One possibility might be to cover the leading edges with one solid, continuous piece, rather than individual panels, O'Keefe said.
In the meantime, all of the carbon wing panels will be removed from NASA's three remaining shuttles for a thorough inspection. Engineers are trying to devise a way to perform nondestructive tests on the panels in the future without having to remove them, a challenge because that technology does not currently exist, O'Keefe said.
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