SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) -- The NASA official who led Columbia's mission management team during the doomed flight swiftly dismissed as a safety threat the launch-day foam strike to the left wing, transcripts released Tuesday show.
"Really, I don't think there is much we can do about it," Linda Ham said on Jan. 21, five days after a 1 1/2-pound chunk of foam insulation smashed into Columbia's left wing during liftoff.
Referring to a foam strike two flights earlier, during Atlantis' launch in October, she said, "maybe this is foam from a different area. I'm not sure." That foam strike had caused only minor damage.
The remarks were part of transcripts of five management team meetings held during the flight that were released by NASA on Tuesday.
"I'm not sure if the area is exactly the same where the foam came from that, but the material properties and density of the foam wouldn't do any damage," Ham told the team.
"I hope we had good flight rationale then," she added, referring to the decision to continue flying even with the problem of foam breaking off.
As it turns out, the foam strike to Columbia almost certainly created a 6- to 10-inch hole in the vulnerable leading edge of the wing, allowing hot gases to enter the spaceship during re-entry on Feb. 1. The shuttle broke apart over Texas, just 16 minutes short of its Florida homecoming. All seven astronauts were killed.
The chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., said in May that NASA could have launched Atlantis to rescue the Columbia astronauts if it had known early in the flight about the severity of the wing damage. Unknown to the mission management team at the time, it was the largest piece of foam insulation to ever strike a shuttle.
An official close to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said Ham's comments point out NASA's assumption that "there was nothing they could do."
"Nobody thought she was being reckless," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It comes out as being very cold. There was no discussion."
One of the engineers who briefed Ham on the potential damage caused by the foam impact, Don McCormack, said on the transcript that there could be "significant tile damage" but stressed: "We don't see a safety of flight issue." The conversation indicates that Ham and the others considered the problem to be more of a maintenance issue for the next flight.
The foam impact was considered so trivial by managers, in fact, that the astronauts aboard Columbia were not informed about it until a week into their flight. Mission Control sent up a 16-second video clip of the foam strike "just so they are armed if they get any questions in the press conferences," said Phil Engelauf, a mission operations representative.
"We made it very clear to them, no concerns," Engelauf told the mission management team Jan. 24.
The mission management team met five times during Columbia's 16-day science research mission, much fewer than usual. The team, which has about 15 members, is supposed to meet daily.
Accident investigators say NASA management failure will share equal blame with the foam strike in their final report, to be released at the end of August.
Some of the key decision-makers in Columbia's doomed flight -- Ham, shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore, and Lambert Austin, manager of the systems integration office -- already have been moved into other positions or will move on.
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