Will NASA Ever Learn?

I'm still trying to figure out what made Mike Griffin, the new head of NASA (who, by the way had one of the shortest confirmation hearings ever) say that the decision to launch the next shuttle mission would be his, regardless of what the Return to Flight board says. Does he want NASA to be run out of the space-faring business? Has he forgotten Challenger and Columbia, and even the Apollo 1 fire? (well, he may have forgotten the Apollo fire, since NASA refers to it as the Apollo 204 fire, as part of the forgetting process) Maybe he failed to read Diane Vaughns book, "The Challenger Launch Decision," an extremely detailed examination of the flaws in the decision making system at NASA. Maybe he failed to read "Comm Check," by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, where if you aren't a careful reader, one could conclude that no serious efforts were made to determine the damage to Columbia since there was "nothing we could do anyways, why make them suffer." Even the watered down Rodgers commision report (well, except for Richard Feynmans rather scathing appendix) showed that NASA needs to listen to their engineers. And of course, there is the CAIB report, which emphasizes again and again the NASA ignored evidence of a serious problem, that the need to launch outweighed safety concerns, and that there were several items that had to be addressed before launching the next shuttle. Did you miss that one too, Mike?

The obsession with returning the shuttle to flight has a name - "go fever" and boy, does NASA have a bad case. They as much as admit to the CAIB that they don't have a good understanding of foam shedding, yet allow the the shuttle to rollout with a crack in the external tanks foam! They have modified the analysis software for evaluating launch debris strikes, the same software that said that Columbia was in no danger. Well, that's a good thing then, right? Except they are modifying the software in the OPPOSITE direction of safety! That being the case, what is Griffin going to base his decisions on, his 7 degrees, management opinion, or Kentucky windage? How foolish of me to expect him to listen to the experts who have been selected to approve the return to flight. How foolish of me to doubt the Mike Griffin knows best. How foolish of me to expect a government agency, in this administration, to do a patient review of all the facts instead of acting rashly. And lastly, how foolish of me to expect logic and reason to prevail over ego and emotions. Now, the crew of Discovery are unwittingly risking theirs lives for the furtherance of the political careers of bureaucrats, and I can only hope they survive.