Dr. Douglas Osheroff, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996 and current faculty member of Stanford University, spoke Monday about serving on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
Space shuttle Columbia embarked on its final mission on Jan. 16, 2003. Two weeks later, Columbia disintegrated over Texas killing all 7 astronauts on board.
Osheroff started the talk with a video of Columbia’s last launch, which showed a piece of foam falling and hitting the leading edge of the left wing.
“The engineers caught the piece of foam, the third time they saw the video,” Osheroff said. “Using basic high school physics they concluded the foam weighed about 1.65 pounds. The engineers were deeply concerned, but the management dismissed the claims.”
The CAIB was formed after the disaster to determine the cause of the crash. It faced the task of sifting through over 40,000 pieces of the shuttle, collected from more than 700,000 acres.
One of the first things that concerned the CAIB was NASA’s firm belief as an organization that foam, with density a fraction of that of water, could not damage the shuttle, Osheroff said.
“We all knew that the foam had something to with [the disaster],” Osheroff said. “But then you did not want to get too aligned with one idea. You started thinking, ‘what if you’re wrong?’ Seven other astronauts could die. That is why we knew we needed to get to the truth.”
After carefully studying the data, CAIB saw several in-flight anomalies that indicated problems as early as the re-entry into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. The sensors indicated severe heat and burned out somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
“Our findings were confirmed by the evidence we collected,” Osheroff said. “The [Reinforced Carbon Carbon – the thermal protection] on the left wing was covered with slag [molten aluminum]. Only very high temperatures could melt the aluminum structure inside the wing.”
He said that the foam had ripped through the thermal protection on the wings that let hot gasses and debris channel through the wing, which destroyed the wing and the shuttle. However NASA only accepted the CAIB’s findings after a ballistics test.
The CAIB found several blind spots in NASA’s organization and management. The management was empowered to ignore safety inputs from engineers, who were mandated to “be loyal to the company,” Osheroff said.
“The incidences of foam falling off shuttles became routine,” Osheroff said. “Everyone at NASA started treating it as an accepted risk.”
Osheroff said that although NASA had not learned from the earlier Challenger disaster but has improved its practices after the Columbia mishap. These changes included new launch cameras and in-orbit inspection of the thermal protection system.
“NASA needs to continue to change its culture and the way it treats risks,” Osheroff said. “It needs to replace the shuttle system with two new vehicles – one optimized for safety and the other for delivering large payloads.”
Osheroff said that President Obama’s intervention in the space program will help NASA by giving it more time and money to develop – something that it lacked while developing the space shuttle system.
He concluded the speech by stressing the need to send out robotic probes, saying that they made more economic sense, as human travel to Mars was unfeasible.
“In another ten to twenty years, when it is affordable to send humans to Mars, thanks to sophisticated probes, there might be little exploration left to do.”