Questions remain about safety at NASA

[Spazito]

SPACE CENTER, Houston — In the years leading up to the Columbia tragedy, the habit of NASA managers was to hammer employees into agreement at meetings or get them so exasperated they walked out, creating a last-stand consensus.

It was just as brutal during Columbia's doomed flight: Managers dismissed engineers' concerns about the now-infamous piece of foam insulation that flew off and knocked a hole in the shuttle's wing; they downplayed the problem at meetings and, from beginning to grisly end, insisted nothing could be done.

What about after Columbia? Has NASA's safety culture changed since the spacecraft and seven astronauts crashed over Texas?

It depends on whom you ask.

"Everything is about return to flight and nothing is about return to right ... return to the right culture," says Dr. Jon Clark, a NASA neurologist who lost his astronaut-wife aboard Columbia.
"NASA is making solid progress," notes the behavioral science company hired to improve the space agency's culture.
"We haven't really changed the way we're doing business and making decisions, so we're headed down the same road we've been on," says former space shuttle commander James Wetherbee, who quit NASA out of frustration in January.
"We've made great strides. Now, it is one of those things that you never reach perfection and you've got to continue to work on every day," says deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale, who perhaps more than anybody at NASA has confronted its long-lived, deep-rooted culture.

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