Posted on 09/29/2003 6:59:08 PM PDT by anymouse
NASA defended the International Space Station on Monday from a stinging rebuke by a safety expert who said the same inattention to safety that doomed the shuttle also lurked in the orbital platform.
"I do not consider the space station an accident waiting to happen," said Bill Gerstenmaier, the space station program's manager. But he acknowledged mistakes had been made on both the Russian and U.S. sides of the station.
Last week, a departing member of the NASA Safety Advisory Board, Arthur Zygielbaum, said the space station program had safety problems equal to that of the breakaway foam that doomed the space shuttle Columbia last February.
The entire safety board resigned last week after coming under harsh congressional criticism and being singled out for ineffectiveness by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
Shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas, killing all seven astronauts on board. Independent investigators blamed wing damage caused by foam insulation that fell from an external tank on liftoff.
Gerstenmaier portrayed the mistakes made under the station program as a learning process more than a failure of process because the 200-ton orbiting station is unique and has had to integrate components from the U.S., Russian, European and Canadian space agencies.
"You know, every day we can send some command that has results not desirable for us," he said. "We make thousands of decision every day.
He specifically denied that the U.S. program was overly sensitive to offending the Russians, who he said brought tremendous engineering expertise and a long history of space-station operations to the table.
"The complexity of our spacecraft is such that we need to be aware that errors will occur and we need to make sure that we've taken advantage of the errors that we have and look at them for linkages to other errors," Gerstenmaier said.
Astronaut Jim Halsell, who is heading NASA's return-to-flight program for the shuttle program, told Reuters the space station program had initiated a self-review to find whether findings from the Columbia accident report can be applied to the station.
"They want to go back through their decision and look at both those and the hardware itself to see what can be applied from the accident report," said Halsell.
That was endorsed by astronaut Ed Lu, who is currently living aboard the station.
"Of course, the culture at NASA is the same culture that is involved in space shuttle and space station, so probably some of the lessons learned there will apply to the station," Lu said in an Earth-to-orbit exchange with reporters.
Why should he be trusted now?
The only valid reason to do that is if resupply and crew-exchange launches are suspended for an indefinite period. Of course politics is a reason, too, even if not particularly valid.
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