Columbia Investigator: Obama Plan Sets Stage For Tragedy

President Obama's push to cancel NASA's moon program and rely on commercial companies to ferry astronauts into space is putting the nation on course to repeat past mistakes and "setting the stage for another major space-related tragedy," a Columbia accident investigator said.

"America's path to space is now threatened by decisions being proposed in the NASA budget," retired aerospace executive Roger Tetrault said in a May 27 letter to U.S. Rep. Pete Olsen, R-Texas, who represents a district that includes NASA's Johnson Space Center south of Houston.

"We are canceling a program built around the findings and lessons learned from Columbia. There is no clear mission or direction given to NASA and the use of proven technologies is being shunned," he said. "Further, the choice to commercialize our launch capability provides insufficient safety for the brave men and women that will be asked to ride these rockets. Surely they deserve the best that we can provide."

Tetrault is one of 13 safety experts from the nation's aviation, naval nuclear propulsion, medical, scientific and academic communities to investigate the 2003 Columbia accident, which killed seven astronauts.

Two other members -- former astronaut Sally Ride and John Logsdon, a space policy expert -- both have voiced strong support for the president's plan.

In his letter to Olsen, Tetrault noted that the Columbia accident was blamed in part on organizational problems "deeply rooted in the lack of national leadership" from successive administrations and Congresses "that had habitually withheld a clear mission and the required resources from NASA since the waning days of the Apollo moon landings."

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommended a clear mission be defined and properly funded. The investigators also said the shuttle fleet should be retired as soon as practical and that safety -- rather than cost, performance, advanced space capabilities or other factors -- should be the primary consideration in the design of next-generation piloted spacecraft.

A former chief executive officer of Mcdermott International, a worldwide energy services company, Tetrault said the recommendations of the board served as the genesis for NASA's Project Constellation, which aims to return American astronauts to the moon and then voyage outward to Mars.

Safety was the number one factor in the design of the Ares rockets and Orion spacecraft, Tetrault said. But Tetrault noted that as in the development of the shuttle and other past programs, Congresses and administrations failed to provide adequate funding to complete the job.

"To me, the appropriate fix is not throwing away the significant dollars that already have been invested to develop the valuable new architecture, but rather enforcing the management and programmatic chances that are necessary to get the program back on track," said Tetrault, also a veteran vice president of General Dynamics' Electric Boat Division.

"Meanwhile, the entrepreneurial space transportation companies can continue to develop their vehicles and provide their cargo capabilities. Only after they have proven that they are mature and safe enough, should they be allowed to step up to the much harder task of carrying humans," he said.

"Otherwise America is on a spiraling path of just repeating the mistakes of the past, and we are setting the stage for another major space-related tragedy. We are abandoning every lesson that we are supposed to have learned from history."