They had gotten the Shuttle narrowly approved by the government, and had kept it going, only by making wildly excessive claims about the frequency and the low cost with which it would be flown. They felt they had to come as close as possible to those original promises, or Congress might cancel the program.

So NASA's administrators gambled on continuing to fly until disaster actually did strike -- and compelled the engineers working under them to agree -- on the grounds that, if it did strike, there was still a chance that Congress still might not cancel the program completely. They lost their first gamble, but won their second one.

In the case of foam impacts, what seems to have motivated NASA toward fatalism was the simple fact that the problem COULD NOT be eliminated, or even more than mildly alleviated. NASA foam specialist Scott Sparks told the Board on April 8: "You've got go back to the beginning, as far as the design of the tank.

"I'm not so sure that the [Shuttle's Thermal Protective System] processors were in the same room when they designed the tank, because it was designed structurally to be optimized [solely for its function as a fuel tank]. It's not designed for the TPS to be processed on there.

"If you were to redesign completely the tank, you would make the external [surface] a bit smoother -- you would have those people [responsible for designing the external tank and the Shuttle's reentry thermal protection system] in the same room -- and you would do those trades."

On March 6, Adm. Gehman even raised the possibility of radically redesigning the external tank to be made of two separate layers of metal, with the foam layer between them -- although the Board has not since mentioned this possibility in its hearings.

But because this wasn't done at the very start of Shuttle design, it is now (as at least two witnesses have said) simply impossible to rework the existing external tank such that bits of foam can be kept from falling onto the tiles.

The most that can be done is to try to mildly alleviate the problem -- and so, once again, NASA has had a strong institutional motivation for wishful thinking where the possible dangers of a repeated physical phenomenon are concerned.

To so radically redesign the external tank, they would have had to ask Congress for a major new infusion of money at exactly the time when the Space Station's steadily rising demands are stretching NASA's budget and Congress' patience to the limit.

Moreover, another institutional factor may have come into play: the fact that, when Boeing's group of engineers declared during Columbia's last flight that the foam impact presented no danger, the company may have had a strong financial motive for downplaying the danger.

As the Washington Post said on March 2: "In some ways, Boeing was a natural choice [for the appraisal of possible danger from the foam impact]. Its technicians were intimately familiar with the Columbia, having overseen all maintenance and modifications to it since 1996.

"But the decision to put them in charge of assessing the tile damage also placed them in the awkward position of passing judgment, in effect, on whether the company had taken adequate care to prevent such a potentially serious problem. Boeing has said since the accident that its only consideration was crew safety. But its fee arrangement with NASA includes layers of penalties if a mission is truncated or lost, inescapably giving the team's conclusions financial implications, as well."

Richard Blomberg, former chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, told the Board on Apr. 8: "When I read the Statement of Work for the contract to USA [the "United Space Alliance", the consortium of Boeing and Lockheed Martin which has managed Shuttle mission planning, training and operations since 1996], I had great concerns.

"I was concerned, for example, about the incentive fee for meeting launch on time. I thought that was ill advised because the last thing you want to do is tie some money to a launch decision. That has to be made purely on risk grounds. I was also concerned that the safety measures against which the contractor was going to be evaluated were defined by the contractor, and so you could end up with a situation where you managed to the metrics rather than to the safety of the vehicle."

Blomberg went on to say that his actual study of USA's activities had later alleviated his concerns -- but the possibility still remains that Boeing's engineers had some institutional motivation not to deliver bad news to their bosses, and that this explains the cockeyed optimism of their report which has otherwise puzzled virtually everyone who has examined it since the accident.

Long-time NASA critic John Pike and at least one engineer inside NASA have suggested that the deciding factor was simply that the engineers were aware that, as Shuttle manager Ron Dittemore said on the day of the accident, even if the problem really was discovered to be dangerous "there was zero we could do about it" -- there was nothing that could be done to improve the crew's chances.

This would explain why, when the Boeing report described various possible consequences of the impact, the spaces on the report intended to describe consequences of an impact on the most vulnerable parts of the Shuttle were simply left blank.

The Board, to its credit, has now made it entirely clear that it intends to look into such bigger institutional questions in detail, and that it will not produce a whitewash of NASA any more than the Challenger Commission did. Indeed, most members of this panel are already voicing the same kinds of questions about NASA that were initially limited to Richard Feynman on the Challenger panel.

But all these questions lead us to even bigger questions which the Board may ultimately shy away from: Is it impossible to ever make the Shuttle acceptably safe, by its basic design? Should it be simply cancelled completely and the Space Station along with it (since the latter absolutely depends on the Shuttle to complete its construction and properly supply it afterward) -- and replaced by a radically new type of manned orbital craft which would be safer and cheaper? Indeed, is there any need for manned spaceflight at all in any significant numbers for the next two decades or so?

I have already expressed my own belief that the answer to the first and second questions is 'yes', and that the answer to the last question is 'no' But in my last installment of this series, I'll try to look in more technical detail into the proper design of a manned orbital spacecraft if we do decide to keep making manned spaceflights in the near future.

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