"It is difficult to be objective based on hindsight, but it appears to us that lessons that should have been learned have not been. Perhaps we expected or hoped for too much," seven of the Flight Task Force's 26 members wrote.

The seven panelists conceded that quality people were employed in the shuttle program and that improvements had been made, but found leadership of the agency lacking.

"NASA leaders must break this cycle of smugness substituting for knowledge," the minority report said.

The full group, known as the Stafford-Covey Task Group after the two astronauts in charge, was set up to ensure that NASA had met the requirements of the investigation into the Columbia tragedy in 2003.

The Task Force released a summary of its final report in June which found that NASA had made the shuttle fleet safer, but had not met three of the 15 return to flight recommendations.

Those requirements included the problem of ice and foam detaching from the fuel tank during liftoff with the potential to damage the shuttle's protective reentry shield.

Discovery's mission was marred during launch last month when a piece of foam flew off the tank, but fortunately missed the orbiter.

A piece of foam from the fuel tank was blamed for inflicting critical damage on the heat shield on the left wing of Columbia, which broke up on reentry killing all seven astronauts on February 1, 2003.

In the minority report, the seven detected an air of insularity in NASA management inappropriate for such a high risk operation.

"The recurrence of apparently preventable accidents and the seeming unwillingness to learn, should be sufficient to install some humility to temper what often looks like arrogance," the dissenters warned.

"During the past two years, we have not witnessed very much of such humility."

Leaders of the Task Force report downplayed the dissent, saying other members of the group were not disturbed by the safety and management culture at NASA.

"I personally did not find the process as it played out unusual," co-chairman Richard Covey was quoted as saying by the New York Times. NASA did a "competent job," he said.

NASA said on August 11, a day after Discovery's safe return home, that it was unlikely to meet a September target for its next space shuttle flight as engineers try to figure out why foam fell off the orbiter 30 months after the similar problem doomed Columbia.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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