NYTimes.com Article: Dogged Engineer's Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage

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Rohit "Politeness is Overrated" Khare

khare at alumni.caltech.edu

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Dogged Engineer's Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage

September 26, 2003
 By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN SCHWARTZ 



 

HOUSTON - Over and over, a projector at one end of a long,
pale-blue conference room in Building 13 of the Johnson
Space Center showed a piece of whitish foam breaking away
from the space shuttle Columbia's fuel tank and bursting
like fireworks as it struck the left wing. 

In twos and threes, engineers at the other end of the
cluttered room drifted away from their meeting and watched
the repetitive, almost hypnotic images with deep
puzzlement: because of the camera angle, no one could tell
exactly where the foam had hit. 

It was Tuesday, Jan. 21, five days after the foam had
broken loose during liftoff, and some 30 engineers from the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its
aerospace contractors were having the first formal meeting
to assess potential damage when it struck the wing. 

Virtually every one of the participants - those in the room
and some linked by teleconference - agreed that the space
agency should immediately get images of the impact area,
perhaps by requesting them from American spy satellites or
powerful telescopes on the ground. 

They elected one of their number, a soft-spoken NASA
engineer, Rodney Rocha, to convey the idea to the shuttle
mission managers. 

Mr. Rocha said he tried at least half a dozen times to get
the space agency to make the requests. There were two
similar efforts by other engineers. All were turned aside.
Mr. Rocha (pronounced ROE-cha) said a manager told him that
he refused to be a <object.title class="Movie"
idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="195942;143145">"Chicken
Little."</object.title> 

The Columbia's flight director, LeRoy Cain, wrote a curt
e-mail message that concluded, "I consider it to be a dead
issue." 

New interviews and newly revealed e-mail sent during the
fatal Columbia mission show that the engineers' desire for
outside help in getting a look at the shuttle's wing was
more intense and widespread than what was described in the
Aug. 26 final report of the board investigating the Feb. 1
accident, which killed all seven astronauts aboard. 

The new information makes it clear that the failure to
follow up on the request for outside imagery, the first
step in discovering the damage and perhaps mounting a
rescue effort, did not simply fall through bureaucratic
cracks but was actively, even hotly resisted by mission
managers. 

The report did not seek to lay blame on individual managers
but focused on physical causes of the accident and the
"broken safety culture" within NASA that allowed risks to
be underplayed. But Congress has opened several lines of
inquiry into the mission, and holding individuals
accountable is part of the agenda. 

In interviews with numerous engineers, most of whom have
not spoken publicly until now, the discord between NASA's
engineers and managers stands out in stark relief. 

Mr. Rocha, who has emerged as a central figure in the 16
days of the Columbia's flight, was a natural choice of his
fellow engineers as a go-between on the initial picture
request. He had already sent an e-mail message to the
shuttle engineering office asking if the astronauts could
visually inspect the impact area through a small window on
the side of the craft. And as Mr. Rocha was chief engineer
in Johnson Space Center's structural engineering division
and a man with a reputation for precision and integrity,
his words were likely to carry great weight. 

"I said, `Yes, I'll give it a try,' " he recalled in
mid-September, in the course of five hours of recent
interviews at a hotel near the space center. 

In its report, the independent Columbia Accident
Investigation Board spoke of Mr. Rocha, 52, as a kind of
NASA Everyman - a typical engineer who suspected that all
was not well with the Columbia but could not save it. 

"He's an average guy as far as personality, but as far as
his engineering skills, he's a very, very detail-oriented
guy," said Dan Diggins, who did many of the interviews for
the report's chapter on the space agency's decision-making
during the flight and wrote that chapter's first draft
before it was reworked and approved by the board. Never in
hours of interviews did Mr. Diggins find a contradiction
between Mr. Rocha's statements and facts established by
other means, he said. 

Mr. Rocha's experience provides perhaps the clearest and
most harrowing view of a NASA safety culture that, the
board says, must be fixed if the remaining shuttles are to
continue flying. 

Early Love With Shuttle 

Alan Rodney Rocha loved the Columbia long before it was
lost. In August 1978, as a young NASA engineer, he took his
first business trip for the agency to Palmdale, Calif.,
where the still unfinished Columbia sat in a hangar among
the Joshua trees, awaiting its first mission. 

Working from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. each night, he had the job of
climbing into the orbiter's wheel well, through the
fuselage and among the labyrinth of tubes, wires, struts
and partitions in the right wing, to check that each of 200
strain gauges were just where the plans said they should
be. And the Columbia took its place in his heart. 

"I felt so privileged to be there," he said. 

The Columbia
took its maiden flight in 1981; five years later its sister
vessel the Challenger was lost with its crew of seven when
O-ring seals in one of the solid rocket boosters failed in
the launching, severing a strut connecting the booster to
the shuttle's external fuel tank. 

For Mr. Rocha, the Columbia disaster began on the eve of
its final liftoff. That afternoon, he and other engineers
were stunned to learn of new tests at a NASA laboratory
showing that a ring attaching the rocket boosters to the
external tank had not met minimum strength requirements. As
he watched, managers hastily considered the problem at a
prelaunching meeting beginning at 12:10 a.m. on Jan. 16. 

Instead of halting the launching on the spot, Mr. Rocha
said, the shuttle manager, Linda Ham, granted a temporary
waiver that reduced the strength requirements, on the basis
of data that the investigation board later found to be
flawed. Mr. Rocha would draw on an old rocketry term -
"launch fever" - to describe what had happened at the
meeting. 

The launching went ahead that Thursday morning. The ring
held, but an unrelated problem turned up when insulating
foam tore away from an attachment to the external tank 81.7
seconds after liftoff and struck the orbiter's left wing. 

Mr. Rocha said that when he learned of the foam strike in a
phone call on Friday afternoon, he gasped. All weekend he
watched the video loop showing the strike, and at 11:24
p.m. on Sunday, he sent an e-mail message to the manager of
the shuttle engineering office, Paul Shack, suggesting that
the astronauts simply take a look at the impact area. 

Mr. Shack never responded. But by Tuesday afternoon, Mr.
Rocha was showing the loop to the so-called debris
assessment team at the meeting in Building 13, where he had
his own office. As arresting as the images were, the team
agreed, they were too sketchy to draw conclusions without
new images. 

To engineers familiar with the situation, the request was
an easy call. "We all had an intense interest in getting
photos," said Steven Rickman, a NASA engineer whose staff
members served on the assessment team. "As engineers,
they're always going to want more information." 

In his second e-mail appeal for satellite imagery, Mr.
Rocha wrote in boldface to Mr. Shack and other managers,
"Can we petition (beg) for outside agency assistance?" 

But Mr. Rocha did not know that the strange politics of the
NASA culture had already been set in motion. Calvin
Schomburg, a veteran engineer who was regarded as an expert
on the shuttle's thermal protection system - though his
expertise was in heat-resisting tiles, not the reinforced
carbon-carbon that protected the wings' leading edges - had
been reassuring shuttle managers, Mr. Diggins said. Mr.
Schomburg either "sought them out or the managers sought
him out to ask his opinion," Mr. Diggins said. 

Whether because of Mr. Schomburg's influence or because
managers simply had no intention of taking the
extraordinary step of asking another agency to obtain
images, Mr. Rocha's request soon found its way into a
bureaucratic dead end. 

On Wednesday, an official Mr. Schomburg had spoken to - Ms.
Ham, the chairwoman of the mission management team -
canceled Mr. Rocha's request and two similar requests from
other engineers associated with the mission, according to
the investigation board. Late that day, Mr. Shack informed
Mr. Rocha of management's decision not to seek images. 

Astonished, Mr. Rocha sent an e-mail message asking why.
Receiving no answer, he phoned Mr. Shack, who said, "I'm
not going to be Chicken Little about this," Mr. Rocha
recalled. 

"Chicken Little?" Mr. Rocha said he shouted back. "The
program is acting like an ostrich with its head in the
sand." 

Mr. Shack, Mr. Schomburg and Ms. Ham declined to comment
for this article or did not respond to detailed requests
for interviews relayed through the space agency's public
affairs office. 

On the day he talked with Mr. Shack, Mr. Rocha wrote an
anguished e-mail message that began, "In my humble
technical opinion, this is the wrong (and bordering on
irresponsible) answer." He said his finger hovered over the
"send" key, but he did not push the button. Instead, he
showed the draft message to a colleague, Carlisle Campbell,
an engineer. 

"I said, `Rodney, that's a significant document,' " Mr.
Campbell said in an interview. "I probably got more
concerned or angry than he did at the time. We could not
believe what was going on." 

But Mr. Rocha still decided he should push his concerns
through official channels. Engineers were often told not to
send messages much higher than their own rung in the
ladder, he said. 

Taking the Issue Higher 

The next day, Mr. Rocha spoke with Barbara Conte, a worker
in mission operations, about spy telescopes. In a written
response to reporters' questions, Ms. Conte said her
colleague "was more keyed-up and troubled than I had ever
previously encountered him." 

That day, she and another NASA employee, Gregory Oliver,
took the issue to Mr. Cain, the Columbia's flight director
for landing, at an unrelated meeting. 

"We informed LeRoy of the concern from Rodney" and offered
to help arrange an observation by military satellites, Mr.
Oliver wrote on March 6 - a month after the accident - in a
previously unreleased e-mail chronology of shuttle events.
The message continued, "LeRoy said he would go talk to
Linda Ham and get back to us." 

About two hours later, at 12:07 p.m. that day, Mr. Cain
sent out his own e-mail message saying he had spoken with
management officials, who had no interest in obtaining the
images. Therefore, Mr. Cain wrote, "I consider it to be a
dead issue." 

It was not over for Mr. Rocha, though. On Thursday
afternoon, Jan. 23, he encountered Mr. Schomburg, the
expert on the heat-resisting tiles, on the sixth floor of
Building 1, where most of the managers had offices. They
sat down in the anteroom of an office and began arguing
about the need for imaging, said Mr. Rocha and the
investigative board's report. 

Mr. Schomburg insisted that because smaller pieces of foam
had broken off and struck shuttles on previous flights
without dire consequences, the latest strike would require
nothing more than a refurbishment after the Columbia
landed. Mr. Rocha maintained that the damage could be
severe enough to allow hot gases to burn through the wing
on re-entry and threaten the craft. 

As their voices rose, Mr. Rocha recalled, Mr. Schomburg
thrust out an index finger and said, "Well, if it's that
bad, there's not a damn thing we can do about it." 

On Jan. 24, eight days into the mission, engineers and
managers held a series of meetings in which the debris
strike was discussed. At a 7 a.m. meeting, Boeing engineers
presented their analysis, which they said showed that the
shuttle probably took the hit without experiencing fatal
damage. 

Those results were hastily carried into the 8 a.m. meeting
of the mission management team, led by Ms. Ham. When a NASA
engineer presented the results of the Boeing analysis and
then began to discuss the lingering areas of uncertainty,
Ms. Ham cut him off and the meeting moved along. The wing
discussion does not even appear in the official minutes. 

Mr. Diggins, the accident board investigator, said it
should not be surprising that such a critical issue
received short shrift. A mission management meeting, he
said, is simply "an official pro forma meeting to get it on
the record." The decision to do nothing more, he said, had
long been made. 

By then, Mr. Rocha said, he decided to go along. "I lost
the steam, the power drive to have a fight, because I just
wasn't being supported," he said. "And I had faith in the
abilities of our team." 

He waited through the weekend until the Boeing engineers
closed out the last bit of their analysis, and on Sunday,
Jan. 26, he wrote a congratulatory e-mail message to
colleagues, saying the full analysis showed no "safety of
flight" risk. "This very serious case could not be ruled
out and it was a very good thing we carried it through to a
finish," he wrote. 

But his anxiety quickly spiked again. He slept poorly. Mr.
Diggins said, "I think that what was gnawing away at him
was that he didn't have enough engineering data to settle
the question he had in his mind." With days to go in the
mission, Mr. Rocha continued to discuss the possibility of
damage with Mr. Campbell, the expert in landing gear. 

"He started coming by my desk every day," Mr. Campbell
recalled. "He was trying to be proper and go through his
management," he said, but "he was too nice about it,
because he's a gentleman; he didn't get nasty about the
problem." 

Being There for Re-entry On Feb. 1, the last day of the
Columbia's flight, Mr. Rocha rose before dawn. He wanted to
be in the mission evaluation room, an engineering
monitoring center on the first floor of NASA's Building 30,
by 6:45 a.m., well before the shuttle fired its rockets to
drop out of orbit. Normally, he would just watch the
landing on NASA-TV, the space agency's channel, but he said
he wanted to see the data from the wing sensors. 

The room was jammed with people and computers. There was a
pervasively upbeat mood. 

Before long, things began to go wrong - and in the ways
that Mr. Rocha had feared. The scrolling numbers giving
temperature readings for the left and right wings began to
diverge. Then, at 7:54 a.m., four temperature sensors on
the left wing's wheel well failed. 

In fact, the hole that the foam had punched into the wing
16 days before had been allowing the superheated gases of
re-entry to torch through the structure for some several
minutes, and observers on the ground had already seen
bright flashes and pieces shedding from the damaged craft. 

As the number of alarming sensor readings quickly mounted,
"I started getting the sick feeling," Mr. Rocha said,
pointing to his stomach. He looked up from the fog of fear
and saw another engineer, Joyce Seriale-Grush, in tears. He
approached her and she said, "We've lost communication with
the crew." 

Mr. Rocha did the only thing he could think of: He called
his wife. "I want you to say some prayers for us right
now," he said. "Things aren't good." Finally, they got word
that observers on the ground had seen the shuttle break up
over Texas. 

Emergency plans came out of binders; engineers locked their
doors to outsiders and began to store data from the flight
for the inevitable investigation. Frank Benz, the Johnson
Space Center director of engineering, and his assistant,
Laurie Hansen, came in. Mr. Rocha recalled that Ms. Hansen,
trying to console him, said, "Oh, Rodney, we lost people,
and there's probably nothing we could have done." 

For the third time in two weeks, Mr. Rocha raised his voice
to a colleague. "I've been hearing that all week," he
snapped. "We don't know that." 

He was instantly ashamed, he said, and thought, "I'm being
rude." 

Troubled Sleep, Late Thanks 

The next days passed in a blur. Mr. Rocha was assigned to
the team to investigate the mission. At the same time, he
was working with the team that was looking into the
attachment ring problem that nearly scuttled the mission
the night before liftoff, while handling his other duties. 

At one point he got to ask Ralph Roe, a shuttle manager,
why the photo request had been denied. He got no direct
answer, he recalled. Instead, Mr. Roe replied: "I'd do
anything now to get a photo. I'd take a million photos." 

Mr. Rocha's sleep was still troubled - now, by nightmares,
he said, describing some: he was in the shuttle as it broke
up; his relatives were on the shuttle; "Columbia has
miraculously been reassembled, and we're looking at the
wiring and it's got rats in there." 

Since the accident, Mr. Rocha said, engineers and other
colleagues have thanked him enthusiastically for speaking
up, saying things like, "I can't imagine what it was like
to be in your shoes." His immediate supervisor has been
supportive as well, he said, But from management, he said:
"Silence. No talk. No reference to it. Nothing." 

Except, that is, from the highest-up higher-up. One day Mr.
Rocha read an interview with the NASA administrator, Sean
O'Keefe, who wondered aloud why engineers had not raised
the alarm through the agency's safety reporting system.
This time, Mr. Rocha broke the rules: he wrote an e-mail
message directly to Mr. O'Keefe, saying he would be happy
to explain what really happened. 

Within a day, he heard from Mr. O'Keefe, who then
dispatched the NASA general counsel, Paul G. Pastorek, to
interview him and report back. In a recent interview, Mr.
O'Keefe said Mr. Rocha's experience underscored the need to
seek the dissenting viewpoint and ask, "Are we talking
ourselves into this answer?" 

NASA, following the board's recommendation, has reached
agreements with outside agencies to take images during
every flight. And 11 of the 15 top shuttle managers have
been reassigned, including Ms. Ham, or have retired. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/national/nationalspecial/26ENGI.html?ex=1065614463&ei=1&en=05f3246833ae1a06


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