In it, I flatly accused NASA of a constant 30-year stream of deliberate, methodical and outrageous "claims" about the supposed low cost, high safety and high usefulness first of the Shuttle and then of the Space Station - in order to maintain as much as possible of the freakishly bloated funding it had received during the days of the Apollo program and the Moon Race.

And I said that those claims amounted to a gigantic swindle of the American taxpayers amounting to some $150 billion - and that another direct result of those claims was a total of 14 unnecessarily dead astronauts.

Needless to say, such a piece kicked up a fuss. Some readers both strongly agreed with my editorial and defended its timing. Others, to put it mildly, feel differently.

I've been attacked by some people for supposedly accusing NASA's engineers of being "cold-blooded murderers". Other people have said that, while my arguments might be valid, it was in extremely bad taste to mention them on the very night of the accident, and that it was outrageous for me not to take the families' feelings into consideration. Still others, as you'll see, have had other objections.

During the days since then, I've carefully reexamined that piece, to see whether any of these readers' objections seem to me to hold water. With one exception, I still stand by everything I wrote and my timing in writing it.

The exception is my statement that, in officially gauging the chances of a fatal reentry accident at one in 350 when it actually happened after 112 Shuttle reentries, NASA was guilty of "an estimate of Shuttle safety...as psychotically inaccurate as its pre-Challenger estimates", and just as likely to be deliberate claims to the public and to Congress.

At the time I originally wrote that phrase, I was working off the fact that NASA's estimate of the chance of a fatal launch accident is currently one in 450 - combined with the fact that virtually all writers up to now have said that a Shuttle reentry, spectacular though it is, is actually a good deal safer than the launch.

So have the astronauts themselves: Mike Mullane, in a recent Newsweek article, says that on launch "I wasn't scared, I was terrified...On reentry you have some elevated apprehension, but nowhere near what you feel on launch."

My assumption was therefore that NASA's official estimate of a fatal reentry accident was somewhere around one in a thousand - which would mean that such an accident during the first 88 flights after Challenger proved that that estimate was utter and dishonest hooey.

How could I think NASA capable of such a thing?

Because, as I said, they've done it before. Anyone who thinks it outrageous that I could accuse NASA's officials of ever knowingly and seriously overstating the Shuttle's safety seems to have forgotten NASA's official estimate, before Challenger, that there was only "one chance in 100,000" of a fatal accident on a Shuttle flight.

Nor was it just the safety of astronauts that NASA was willing to risk to keep the funds flowing in during the days before Challenger. Never forget that NASA used that same 1-in-100,000 estimate of the chances of failure to argue to the Pentagon that there was no need to continue constructing any more expendable boosters to launch this country's military satellites - including all of our reconnaissance satellites, and even our network of ICBM-launch warning satellites - and that the assembly lines for such boosters could safely be shut down.

The Air Force, fortunately, smelled a rat - especially since its own engineers put the chances of a catastrophic Shuttle launch failure at more like one in 43 - and in June 1985, they persuaded the White House to allow them to buy ten more Titan 4D boosters.

Only seven months later, it became crystal clear that those Titans would all be needed fast. Had the Pentagon believed NASA's claims on both the reliability of the Shuttle and the rate at which it could be launched (still set by NASA, at the start of 1986, at 15 launches per year) and had it duly shut down and dissolved the Titan assembly line in the mid-Eighties as NASA wished, the entire American population - all 270 million of us - would have been at significantly greater military risk for years.

How could NASA do such things? None of its officials were homicidal psychopaths. But neither are the officials of most private companies which are guilty of homicidal negligence.

None of them actually WANT their customers to injured or killed - their consciences aside, they know full well that if this happens and it really is their fault, the company will almost certainly be sued.

But when your income depends on keeping that money rolling in to your organization, there is a tremendous temptation to lie both to other people and to yourself - to conclude that, even if you are secretly cutting corners on safety while concealing that fact from your customers, your product is still "acceptably" safe.

Where one's job is concerned, the line between wishful self-deception and deliberate dishonesty to others becomes very fuzzy. Moreover - as observers have pointed out for centuries - large groups of people are regularly willing to do things more dishonest than they would do so as individuals, simply because in a group it's always easier to shrug off your own culpability by arguing that it was really mostly the fault of other people.

All this is the reasoning that the managers of ValueJet used before the fatal Florida airliner crash which was a direct result of their serious negligence, and it's the reasoning NASA used before Challenger.

As physicist Richard Feynman discovered during his invaluable tenure on the Challenger review panel, the project's own engineers had actually estimated the odds of a fatal Shuttle estimate at one percent - but NASA's managers, during their public and Congressional testimony, decided to tack an additional three zeroes on the end of that figure just to be able to sell the program better to Congress, the White House and the Pentagon.

But, as Feynman wrote, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature [unlike Congressmen] cannot be fooled."

Had NASA, by the start of 1986, admitted that they had to stop the Shuttle program dead in its tracks for a year or two to fix its growing accumulation of known serious safety problems, they would have called into serious question their continuing claim to Congress that they could fly the craft at least a dozen times a year (the 1986 manifest called for 15 flights), and that it was a totally reliable substitute for America's stable of expendable boosters - and thus they would have led an already increasingly skeptical Congress to consider cancelling a large part of the program, and with it NASA's funding.

Nor, despite NASA's claims, is there much evidence that the organization's fundamental attitudes and motives have changed all that much since Challenger.

Certainly, in order to gain and retain funding for the Space Station, they have been willing to give Congress and the White House exactly the same type of outrageous underestimates of its price and overestimates of its utility - by factors of ten to one and more - that they used to gain and retain funding for the Shuttle.

This made it hard for me to believe that they wouldn't also still be willing to continue peddling serious overestimates of the Shuttle's safety.

After all, how willing would Congress have been to continue funding the Shuttle and the Station had its members known that the chances of another Shuttle accident were several times higher than NASA was stating?

In particular, how willing would they have been to continue funding the Station had they known that there was a very good chance of one - or more - Shuttle accidents during its construction and operating lifetime, each of which would very likely force a delay of up to two years before flights resumed?

Such a delay would not only cut critically into the Station's useful lifetime, but produce a very serious chance that it might break down, or even reeenter - before Shuttle flights could resume. And, ever since the Challenger tragedy exposed NASA's original rationale for the Shuttle as pure hype, its own survival as a program has also depended mostly on the fact that it is needed to build and support the Station.

But in no flight - at least until now - has tile damage taken place in a fatal area, just as no previous solid booster burn-through problem before Challenger had been fatal.

Moreover, any conclusive fix to the problems of the craft's intrinsically brittle tiles might be totally impractical, and would certainly delay the program's schedule for so long that Congress might start having serious doubts about whether the two programs were worthwhile overall.

So, once again, the strong temptation for NASA would be to take relatively weak palliative measures - and otherwise simply look the other way and kept flying. With luck, nothing disastrous would ever happen - and if it did, the agency could simply rattle its begging bowl at Congress yet again.

After all, the worst thing that could possibly happen to anyone at the agency in that case was that the program would end up getting canceled anyway. Unless, of course, you happened to be on the Shuttle when it happened.

Reentry Risks
However, immediately after my piece was first published, I learned that NASA had actually set the risk of a fatal reentry accident at one in 350 - making it actually MORE likely than a fatal launch accident.

Presumably the reason is that the Shuttle - unlike the blunt capsules that have always been used to reenter before, which to a very large degree stabilize themselves on reentry - requires super-precise active attitude control during reentry. If this errs even slightly, the result is an immediate and fatal tumble, as apparently happened on Columbia.

While it still looks likely that NASA's reentry accident risk estimate was actually a serious underestimate - it isn't quite as outrageous as I made it out to be. Unfortunately, while I quickly revised my article immediate after publication to state the correct risk estimate, I didn't properly modify that one phrase.

But I'm not willing to make any other retractions at all, and my main points still stand solidly. Indeed, I'm far from willing to completely concede my initial belief that NASA was continuing to seriously overstate Shuttle safety.

At this point, it seems virtually certain that the Columbia disaster was due to failure of tiles and/or the "carbon-carbon" material on the left wing's leading edge - leading either to a burn-through in a fatal place, or to serious and growing aerodynamic roughness on the vehicle's surface that finally made it too unstable for even a perfectly functioning flight control system to manage.

The only real question now is what caused that failure.

It seems increasingly likely that it was that big detached piece of external tank foam, despite Shuttle Program Director Ron Dittemore's downplaying of the idea at his Feb. 5 news conference.

As the New York Times pointed out, after Challenger exploded "engineers responsible for the design of the solid rocket booster played down the possibility that faulty O-ring seals could have leaked to cause the accident - only to reverse themselves weeks later."

And a story in the Feb. 6 Orlando Sentinel quotes several Shuttle engineers as saying that the danger of fatal tile damage from the impact on Columbia's last launch was seriously underplayed by the teams that appraised the problem during the days after launch: "Unlike Challenger, there was no way to prevent this, but the same scenario played out. A problem was identified, but by the time it got to management, it was sugar-coated."

"There were holes in the presentation [by the appraising engineers]. They said, 'Well, we'll get to that later', but they never did." "I got the feeling everyone's minds already were made up before the Mission Management team meeting. Maybe they felt it was the only conclusion they could reach because, otherwise, what could they do? Do you tell the crew their vehicle might break up?"

A Feb. 8 article by the Washington Post elaborates: "The conclusion by NASA engineers that Columbia probably did not suffer serious damage from debris during its Jan. 16 launch was based on two key assumptions that no one can confirm as true, according to details in a pair of reports produced for NASA by Boeing Co. engineers during the flight... that the shuttle was hit by a piece of insulating foam and not ice, and that the leading edge of the wing was not damaged by the impact".

The Post quotes a former shuttle engineer who looked at the report as saying, "This looks like a case of people trying to fool themselves into not being worried."

And the Post article continues: "[E]ven if the debris were just a piece of foam, it might have inflicted serious damage and undermined flight safety if the impact were just a few inches further forward than the engineers assumed, said two independent engineers and a former NASA flight controller who looked at the reports for the Post...

"One report, for example, acknowledges that as engineers tried to predict the effects of a 1200-cubic-inch to 1920-cubic-inch piece of foam hitting the shuttle, they had to rely on data relating to an impact with a 3-cubic-inch piece of foam - a degree of extrapolation so extreme as to make prediction very difficult.

" 'Oh, my gosh,' one aeronautical engineer said when shown that element of the report. 'You have to be very cautious when you're extrapolating that much.'...

"One detail about the Jan. 23 report struck several engineers as especially odd. It is a section that describes six different scenarios in which tiles are lost from various parts of the wing within the predicted area of impact.

"Under the 'Results' column, the conclusion is 'No issue' for the first four, meaning 'not of concern'. For the last two scenarios, one involving damage to tiles in the lower wing area and another involving a loss of tiles near the landing gear door, the 'Results' column is left blank."

The now-famous 1990 and 1994 appraisals of tile failure risk by Professors Elizabeth Pate-Cornell and Paul Fischbeck actually do estimate the chance of Shuttle loss specifically due to tile failure (as opposed to failure of other systems during reentry) at one in a thousand - but this estimate was based on the fact that up until then only small bits of debris from the insulation on the external tank and the solid boosters had ever struck the Shuttle.

As Fischbeck now says, the moment it became clear that the recent redesign of the tank foam composition had started to make much larger pieces come off during the last few Shuttle flights, NASA should immediately have paid urgent attention to the problem - but by then their original report (having been acted on to some degree by NASA when it was first released) had been so thoroughly forgotten by NASA management that they had trouble even finding a copy of it!

The Post quotes Fischbeck as saying that "the [Columbia post-launch] reports left him shaken when he viewed them yesterday. 'This says that if only a single tile is lost, you're already on the edge' under the conditions scientists think existed during the debris hit... 'And it also shows that, in fact, multiple tile damage is likely. Looking at this did not exactly make my day.' "

Much more shocking is the glaring disparity between NASA Administrator O'Keefe's Feb. 12 testimony before Congress and the detailed statement by Shuttle program manager Dittemore during his Feb. 5 briefing.

O'Keefe told Congress that he was very confident that the foam fragment could not have caused significant damage to the Shuttle: " 'The circumstances were it came off of the external tank as the entire Shuttle orbiter system was traveling at 3600 miles an hour. The piece [weighing about 2.7 pounds, if it was dry and thus only 4% as dense as water] came off [and] dropped roughly 40 feet at a rate of something like 50 miles an hour".

And he described this as the equivalent "of a Styrofoam cooler blowing off of a pickup truck ahead of you on a highway."

But Dittemore, six days earlier, had stated - in detail - that, in trying to estimate the possible damage from the impact during Columbia's flight and before its landing, the Shuttle's engineers had estimated its likely impact speed at over ten times that - about 750 feet per second, or 510 mph! He added that the engineers, in order to err on the side of caution, had based their conclusions on the assumption that the fragment had actually hit twice that fast - over a thousand miles per hour.

(Such high relative speeds would have been because the foam fragment was almost instantly braked by air resistance after coming loose; it would be more accurate to say that the Shuttle ran into IT at that high speed.)

Dittemore also said that, at the time of the impact, the Shuttle was traveling at only 2300 feet per second - about 1570 mph - less than half as fast as O'Keefe told Congress it was going.

The implications of such a clash of statements is extremely disturbing. One of these two men made a major misstatement of technical fact.

Dittemore himself had said on Feb. 5 that it was unlikely that the foam fragment, even moving at such high speeds, could have caused fatal damage to the Shuttle - but this is also open to very serious question.

When Columbia had come home from its STS-87 flight in Dec. 1997, it had suffered serious tile damage. Shuttle systems engineer and safety inspector Gregory Katnik wrote: "308 hits were counted during the inspection; 132 were greater than one inch. Some of the hits measured 15 inches long with depths measuring up to 1.5 inches. Considering that the depth of the tile is 2 inches, a 75% penetration depth had been reached. Over 100 tiles [were] removed from the Columbia because they were irreparable."

These marks turned out to be due to impacts from bits of dry detached foam only a few cubic inches in volume that had come loose and struck the Shuttle while it was traveling at speeds of 1500 to 3000 mph - bits so small that ground tracking cameras saw no sign of them, and it took the astronauts' own photos of the external tank after separation to discover what had happened.

As Dittemore said, even taking this incident into effect, the engineers for STS-107 concluded (on the basis of computer simulations, rather than any actual material tests) that the much bigger fragment couldn't have done fatal damage - especially since they were confident that the foam, being waterproof, could not possibly have soaked up any water during the 39 days Columbia had been sitting on the pad during frequent torrential rains.

But, as we've seen, many engineers call this conclusion into serious question even if the foam was dry. And, by a particularly cruel twist of fate, it may be that the corrective measures taken after STS-87 actually caused the fatal accident of STS-107.

As Dittemore said, that earlier foam detachment had been due to "popcorning" of small bits of foam - due to the new, Freon-free kind of tank foam, air was being trapped inside the foam during the Shuttle's wait on the pad, and expanding as it soared into the thinner reaches of the atmosphere.

"And it turned out the root cause there was the makeup of the foam itself.

We had changed the foam mixture because of environmental considerations. And it turned out as we went into space, as we get higher in altitude, we were out-gassing in such a way that foam was exploding out, a little popcorning out in material. And we fixed that by machining the foam differently...

"And then we went in and actually vented the foam by basically taking a tool... [like] a brush with 100 needles on it and you just shoved it into the foam and it penetrates some nominal area and you then pulled it out, [so that] you've basically provided some venting relief for the surface.

"And instead of outgassing and developing pressure underneath the surface to the point where it would burst out, the holes, provided us an escape path for the pressure...keeping the surface of the foam intact. And that's how we solved that problem."

But - as University of Hawaii planetary geologist Jeffrey Bell told this reporter on Feb. 6, and as reporter Michael A. Dornheim also pointed out in his piece for the Feb. 10 Aviation Week - this raises the real possibility that those same vent holes ruined the foam's waterproof ability. As Dornheim says, "[W]ill an escape path for gas become an entrance path for water?"

And as Bell points out, during some of those same 39 days on the pad, Columbia was also exposed to some of "the coldest East Coast winter weather in living memory" - meaning that any water soaking into the foam might very well have frozen repeatedly in and underneath the foam layer, loosening it and producing more cracks for more water to infiltrate it.

Such a waterlogged foam layer would show no external ice to the inspection team before liftoff - but its water would probably freeze as soon as the underlying tank was filled with cryogenically cold liquid hydrogen.

And so that detached 20 by 16 by 6-inch chunk of foam may not only have been considerably heavier than its dry 2.7-pound weight - it may have been infused with enough ice to make it much harder than dry foam. And if Dittemore is right, this fragment would have hit the Shuttle's wing at several hundred miles per hour.

Moreover, as Bell and Dornheim point out, we will never know whether more (and perhaps bigger) pieces of foam might have come loose and hit the Shuttle later, after it was too high for the ground tracking cameras to see the impacts.

By contrast, the theory that the damage was caused by a small bit of "space garbage" hitting the Shuttle at several thousand km/hour while it was in orbit has the odds very much against it.

Space garbage - as I'll point out in a later segment of this report - will soon become a very real and serious danger to both manned and unmanned satellites as it continues to accumulate; but it hasn't reached that point yet.

Even given the large number of satellites that have orbited Earth for years, only one - a French satellite that had an instrument boom clipped off by a fragment - has ever suffered significant damage.

It is greatly stretching coincidence to conclude that Columbia - even given the fact that it was covered in vulnerable tiles - became the second satellite to suffer serious space-garbage damage, during a flight of only 16 days. And it is stretching it still more to assume that this impact just happened to be on the same part of the Shuttle that had also been hit by that foam fragment.

As I say, it seems increasingly likely - not just to me, but to other observers - that NASA may have used exactly the same disastrously misguided reasoning about detached foam that it had used about partial O-ring burn-throughs before Challenger.

Sociologist Diane Vaughan - who recently wrote about NASA's institutional culture in her book "The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA" - told the New York Times: "There are eerie parallels with what is unfolding right now."

In the case of the O-rings, "They kept fixing it, but they never stopped to redesign it altogether because they didn't think [or didn't want to think] it was serious enough to cause a catastrophic disaster" - and because they falsely assumed that the absence of a disaster so far was actual evidence that the risk from the problem was less than they had thought. "They became desensitized to the possibility of failure."

It seems increasingly likely that, despite its solemn pledges of reform after Challenger, NASA - like the French Bourbon kings - has actually learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

However - whether or not it turns out that NASA is indeed still seriously underestimating the risk of fatal Shuttle accidents, as it did before Challenger - that is not even the main scandal in this case. That scandal involves two other facts: NASA's deliberate and grotesque exaggeration of the number of manned spaceflights necessary at all, and its methodical concealment of the fact that - when they are necessary - they can be flown with manned vehicles both cheaper and tremendously safer than the Shuttle is as an unavoidable result of its basic design.

NASA's concealment of these facts, once again, is motivated by its desire to maintain the huge amount of unjustified public funding that flows to it because of the Shuttle and the Space Station.

In the remaining two parts of this report, I'll examine those other two aspects of this critical issue, which will determine the future of America's manned space program.

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