press ahead with the launch of Discovery next
month without fixing a potentially catastrophic foam-shedding problem, but said
he won't appeal - and won't resign in protest - because he does not believe the
shuttle astronauts' lives are in danger.
"It's a done deal,'' NASA
chief safety officer Bryan O'Connor said in a Monday night interview with The
Associated Press.
O'Connor, a former shuttle
commander, said he was uncomfortable with going ahead with the launch
on July 1 but accepted the decision because NASA has plans in place to have the
crew take refuge
in the International Space Station and wait for a rescue mission if foam
punches too big a hole in the shuttle's heat protection system.
He and shuttle program
manager Wayne Hale, who have spent decades in the program, said they could not
recall a previous instance in which a launch proceeded over the objections of
the safety office.
Ten years ago, O'Connor
quit his job as chief of the space shuttle program over a reorganization that
he said would threaten crew safety. But he said this disagreement was not
nearly as worrisome: "I wasn't anywhere close to that.''
O'Connor, who along with NASA
Chief Engineer Christopher Scolese voted against a launch during the
flight-readiness meeting held over the weekend at Kennedy Space Center, said he
and Scolese could have made one last-ditch private appeal to NASA Administrator
Michael Griffin, who made the ultimate decision. But they did not.
O'Connor said he told
Griffin he would have appealed had he thought the crew's lives were in danger.
"It's a real close call,''
O'Connor said, adding that his own office was split, with some safety officials
thinking that it wasn't as big a problem as he thought.
In 2003, a chunk of
insulating foam broke off from Columbia's big external fuel tank at liftoff and
punched a hole in the shuttle's heat-protecting skin, leading to the breakup of the spacecraft
during its return to Earth and the deaths of all seven astronauts.
Despite extensive
modifications to the fuel tank over the 2 1/2 years that followed, large pieces
of foam broke
off again when Discovery lifted
off last summer on the first flight since the disaster.
More modifications
followed, but NASA decided to move ahead without removing foam from some
particularly troublesome spots called the ice
frost ramps.
That decision adds risk to
the flight, O'Connor said. But he and Hale said they couldn't estimate how much
added risk.
"It should have not gotten
to the point where we'd say this is something we could fly with,'' O'Connor
said. "We wish we understood the physics a little better.''
O'Connor worked with the
independent board that investigated the 1986
Challenger explosion and became the agency's safety chief eight months
before Columbia was lost in February 2003.
O'Connor said he worried
that NASA's tight schedule - trying to complete
construction of the space station and retire
the shuttles in 2010 - could be interfering with safety.
"There's definitely
schedule pressure. You can't make it go away,'' O'Connor said.
But on Tuesday, in a series
of satellite television interviews, Hale disputed that. "There is no
consideration of schedule pressure in the safety arena,'' he said.
NASA's public affairs office - which
earlier this year was accused by
top global warming scientist of trying to muzzle his media interviews - said on
Monday that O'Connor and Scolese would not talk to the media about their
objections. NASA chief spokesman Dean Acosta said it was a decision by the two
men. He released a two-paragraph
statement and said O'Connor and Scolese "composed it together.''
O'Connor, who readily
agreed to a 20-minute phone interview, said the statement was actually written
by the public affairs office and approved by the two officials.
advertisement
