PIECING IT TOGETHER: Osheroff conducted his own experiments to help determine how and why a chunk of insulating foam fell off the shuttle’s external tank. Glenn Matsumura

Physics professor Douglas Osheroff served on the 13-member Columbia Accident Investigation Board that probed last February’s crash of the space shuttle Columbia. (Astronaut Sally Ride, ’73, MS ’75, PhD ’78, also served on the panel.) The CAIB report, issued August 26, attributed the breakup of the shuttle on its descent to structural weakness in the craft’s left wing, which had been damaged two weeks earlier when a piece of insulating foam struck the wing during takeoff. Osheroff, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1996, has been busy interpreting the report for the public and commenting on the future of NASA and manned spaceflight.

Should it have been clear to the people at NASA that the foam hitting the wing represented a potentially catastrophic problem?

The point is, they didn’t understand how badly the wing had been damaged, and when some of the engineers tried to figure out exactly how bad the damage was, they were rebuffed. If you look at the e-mails and correspondence that took place after the foam strike, it sort of reminds you of the Challenger disaster [in 1986]. I mean, structurally the two events were very different. But this business about NASA not listening to its engineers was similar in both cases. The managers at NASA were willing to accept a risk that they did not understand at all.

There have been earlier instances involving foam coming off that didn’t result in accidents, correct?

There actually have been several instances where the foam came off, and in five of those seven cases the orbiter involved was the Columbia. The probability of that being a random event is pretty small. NASA had not tracked how many times or how often each orbiter had had a problem with the foam, and, if they had, I think they would have behaved differently.

What surprised you most during the investigation?

Very early in the investigation, Hoot Gibson [who flew on five shuttle missions] described how an ablator [a heat dissipation device] came off the nose of one of the solid rocket boosters during one of his flights and broke into a bunch of pieces that peppered the wings. He said it looked like somebody had gone wild with a shotgun. One of the heat tiles [on the underside of the orbiter] had come completely off. I was just amazed that something like that could have happened. If that shuttle had had a slightly different trajectory during re-entry, we might have lost that spacecraft.

So safety oversights have been a problem for some time?

I can’t remember when I first heard this term “normalization of deviance” used. Things that weren’t supposed to happen were happening over and over and eventually they were considered to be normal. These guys just got used to seeing these things. After the Challenger accident an independent safety office was established, but by the time of the Columbia accident, that was a silent office.

The CAIB report criticizes NASA’s managerial style for valuing efficiency more than safety. Did it go far enough in prescribing changes?

I wanted a recommendation that said NASA’s culture has to change. The board in general felt that we had made a very compelling case and NASA had to recognize this, but that we couldn’t tell them how to change their culture. Setting up an independent safety office is the most important thing, but my personal feeling is that that will not change some of the more fundamental problems that led to the Columbia accident. Part of it has to do with the fact that a lot of money has been taken out of NASA’s budget, and the culture became one of dealing with clear and obvious dangers, whereas problems that didn’t necessarily look hazardous could go on and on and on. Every time we identified a problem and suggested a remedy, NASA would say, “We can’t do that.” And then, magically, they’d find a way to do it. I think when they say, “We can’t do it,” that is in fact a manager saying they don’t want to spend the time and resources to do it.

The report also contends that the U.S. space program needs a “national mandate and a compelling mission.” What might that mission be? Mars?

We need to have a national debate about the purpose of human spaceflight. The Apollo program did an awful lot for our national image, our national ego. I don’t know whether the fact that the Chinese are getting into manned spaceflight means that we should stay in it. The idea of understanding the Martian planet is a great thing, but we’re a long way from being able to get human beings there and back. The Apollo program at its peak was consuming 4 percent of the federal budget. It’s much harder to get to Mars, and I don’t see those sorts of budgets being available in the future. I think most people who support the idea of sending people to Mars do so with the expectation that we’re going to colonize it. I personally find that hard to believe. I don’t see it being a cheap place to live.

Some people argue that human space exploration is unnecessary from a strictly scientific point of view. Where do you stand?

The problem is we keep going to the same place, and not really accomplishing much. The space station has done a few interesting things, but a lot of it is more like science outreach than serious science. It appeals to kids. The people at NASA who have participated in building the space station are very proud of what they have done and I think they should be. The question is whether they were given the right project. A shuttle flight costs about $500 million. It’s hard to come up with science [conducted on the space station] that justifies spending that much money and putting people’s lives at risk.

What should happen going forward?

There either has to be more money put in the program or NASA has to change the way it’s doing things. You could certainly imagine increasing NASA’s budget for a period of time and allowing them to create a new delivery vehicle or something like that. NASA needs to be in the business of innovative engineering, but it’s basically spending everything it has on a program that is not getting it very far.

One of the recommendations mandated a procedure for repairing the shuttle while in orbit. Can you elaborate on that?

It’s a very complex thing to do, but the rationale is obvious. There is a good possibility that we’re going to have further damage to the thermal protection system on future flights. In fact, if history is any indication, we can’t avoid it. So the ability to assess the level of damage before the shuttle comes down and to do something about it—it seems crazy not to do that if we can. Some repairs would be pretty difficult to do in space, and NASA doesn’t have a lot of spare parts for some things. It’s a serious issue.

Are the Russians doing something right that we’re not?

The Russians’ safety record is not very different from ours, but when they lose a craft, they lose one or two astronauts. We lose seven.

Should we abandon the International Space Station and start over?

My attitude is that as long as it’s up there, we ought to do what we can with it—it is a valuable resource. As it is, though, we have three astronauts there and it takes roughly 2 1/2 to run the place. That doesn’t leave much time for science.

What kind of science are they doing?

You could say the best science is the study of humans living in space; that’s useful knowledge. And there have been some interesting experiments, for example, on how various organisms respond to microgravity. On the other hand, a lot of stuff they do up there, like tracking the dust over the Sierra, is very simple and doesn’t even require humans to perform.

How confident are you that the report will influence policymakers?

Our report wasn’t designed to take sides in the debate about human space flight. We come close to saying that human space flight should end unless we can make it safe. There’s some difference between what the report says about the shuttle system and the way I feel about it. The report says that we do not consider the shuttle as being inherently unsafe, and I would certainly agree with that, but safety is not an inherent thing. There is always going to be risk at some level, there’s no absolute safety, and this is a very expensive system to maintain a high level of safety.

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