Space agency was prioritizing shuttle safety upgrades
WASHINGTON - NASA managers were moving to draft a comprehensive set of shuttle safety upgrades before Columbia was lost over Texas on Saturday.
Michael Kostelnik, a retired Air Force major general who runs the space agency’s shuttle and space station programs, initiated the sweeping review last fall.
Recommendations from the exercise dubbed “Shuttle Life Extension Summit” were likely to be incorporated into future funding requests.
The fact that NASA was moving to implement shuttle safety and performance improvements should not be misinterpreted as a signal that managers had misgivings about shuttle safety before Columbia’s most recent mission, Kostelnik said.
“We really had the opinion that the shuttle was safe to fly in the near term,” said Kostelnik, former commander of the U.S. Air Force Air Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.
Nevertheless, the shuttle safety summit comes on the heels of last year’s scalding assessment from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, an independent organization that monitors NASA’s safety concerns.
The advisory panel reported to NASA that “the current and proposed budgets are not sufficient to improve or even maintain the safety risk level of operating the space shuttle.”
"I have never been as worried for space shuttle safety as now," Richard Blomberg, the panel’s former chairman, told a congressional subcommittee last year.
After NASA sent its 2003 budget request to Congress last February, the spending blueprint was stripped of about $500 million in planned improvements to the reusable orbiters as well as badly needed upgrades to Kennedy Space Center buildings and systems essential to preparing for each shuttle launch.
NASA officials disagreed with that assessment but have since put in motion the effort to assess what fixes are necessary to the shuttle fleet that will provide the most safety and performance improvements within certain budget constraints.
Top managers from several space centers had been assigned to evaluation teams and recently held a meeting in Galveston, Texas, Kostelnik said.
The group was to meet again next month in New Orleans to draft a final list of near- and long-term improvements to keep the orbiters running smoothly and more safely through the end of the decade, at least.
The meeting is still on the calendar, even though many NASA officials involved in setting shuttle safety priorities are involved in the Columbia investigation, Kostelnik said.
In the budget request sent to Congress Monday, the Bush administration requested $379 million for the Space Shuttle Service Life Extension program in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Over the next five years, spending on shuttle improvements is now projected to be $1.7 billion, if Congress approves.
The agency’s priorities could change following the Columbia investigation, but it is too soon to speculate on what the impact will be, said Kostelnik, deputy associate administrator for the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle.
Spending on shuttle safety upgrades has been a point of disagreement in recent years as lawmakers on Capitol Hill have pushed for more aggressive funding.
In fiscal 2002, Congress gave NASA $207 million for high-priority safety upgrades, $20 million more than the agency requested.
Just two months ago, the Bush administration received approval from Congress to amend NASA’s budget. The change included increasing shuttle program funding by $407 million over five years.