My first real taste of space journalism came on the morning of February 1, 2003. An editor at the Houston Chronicle telephoned me at home on a Saturday morning and asked me to hurry to Johnson Space Center to help cover the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia.
At the time, I did not realize this tragedy would set the course for the rest of my professional life, that of thinking and writing about spaceflight. This would become the consuming passion of my career.
I've naturally been thinking a lot about Columbia in recent weeks. While the parallels between that Space Shuttle mission and the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft are not exact, there are similarities. Most significantly, after the Space Shuttle launched, there were questions about the safety of the vehicle's return home due to foam striking the leading edge of the spacecraft's wing.
Two decades later, there are many more questions, both in public and private, about the viability of Starliner's propulsion system after irregularities during the vehicle's flight to the space station in June. NASA officials made the wrong decision during the Columbia accident. So, facing another hugely consequential decision now, is there any reason to believe they'll make the correct call with the lives of Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the line?
A poor safety culture
To understand Columbia, we need to go back to 1986 and the first Space Shuttle accident involving Challenger. After that catastrophic launch failure, the Rogers Commission investigated and identified the technical cause of the accident while also concluding that it was rooted in a flawed safety culture.
This report prompted sweeping changes in NASA's culture that were designed to allow lower-level engineers the freedom to raise safety concerns about spaceflight vehicles and be heard. And for a time, this worked. However, by the time of Columbia, when the shuttle had flown many dozens of successful missions, NASA's culture had reverted to Challenger-like attitudes.
Because foam strikes had been seen during previous shuttle missions without consequence, observations of foam loss from the external tank during Columbia's launch were not a significant cause of concern. There were a few dissenting voices who said the issue deserved more analysis. However, the chair of the Mission Management Team overseeing the flight, Linda Ham, blocked a request to obtain imagery of the possibly damaged orbiter from US Department of Defense assets in space. The message from the top was clear: The shuttle was fine to come home.
The loss of Columbia resulted in another investigatory commission, known as the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. One of its members was John Logsdon, an eminent space historian at George Washington University. "We observed that there had been changes after Challenger and that they had gone away, and they didn’t persist," Logsdon told me in an interview this weekend. "NASA fell back into the pattern that it had been in before Challenger."
Essentially, then, antibodies within the NASA culture had rebounded to limit dissent.
Advantages for decision-makers today
If it does not precisely repeat itself, history certainly echoes. Two decades after Columbia, Starliner is presently docked to the International Space Station. As with foam strikes, issues with reaction-control system thrusters are not unique to this flight; they were also observed during the previous test flight in 2022. So once again, engineers at NASA are attempting to decide whether they can be comfortable with a "known" issue and all of its implications for a safe return to Earth.
NASA is the customer for this mission rather than the operator—the space agency is buying transportation services to the International Space Station for its astronauts from Boeing. However, as the customer, NASA still has the final say. Boeing engineers will have input, but the final decisions will be made by NASA engineers such as Steve Stich, Ken Bowersox, and Jim Free. Ultimately, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson could have the final say.
Decision-makers today have some decided advantages over their predecessors for Columbia. Whereas the shuttle had made dozens of successful flights by 2003, Starliner remains very much in its test and development phase. Therefore, it's difficult to fall into the "we've seen this before" trap. Additionally, whereas the shuttle had a limited lifetime in orbit due to fuel cells and other consumables, mission managers have the luxury of studying Starliner's issues not over a matter of days but over weeks and even months.
Finally, in a massive change from 2003, NASA managers have a readily available back-up option to get the crew home: the reliable Crew Dragon spacecraft.
There are significant downsides to not flying Wilmore and Williams home on Starliner. It will be a significant blow to Boeing's efforts to develop Starliner, which is already $1.6 billion in the hole and rising, and it could harm NASA's aim of having two lifelines to the space station. It will also create a significant logistics mess on the space station. But the engineers at NASA cannot make their call based on these reasons. Rather, they have to make a determination based on crew safety. I believe they will do just this.
Has the culture changed?
The question I've been asking myself in recent weeks is if the safety culture has changed since Columbia.
And the answer, after speaking with many people inside the agency—from senior managers to astronauts, down to lower-level engineers—is yes. The fundamental problem after the Columbia accident was that NASA engineers did not feel empowered to speak up about their concerns. I no longer believe that is the case.
From my discussions with people inside NASA, there is plenty of opportunity for dissent. People are encouraged to raise their concerns, and they are taken seriously. They are being duly considered. As someone who has watched NASA very closely over the last two decades, I truly believe the agency has a much healthier safety culture. Last week, during a news conference, NASA's Ken Bowersox acknowledged this, saying, "It can be painful having those discussions, but it's what makes us a good organization."
As of last week, there were significant elements within the agency, including engineering, parts of flight operations, and the crew office, who were speaking up against flying astronauts home on Starliner. My sense is that their concerns are being heard, and if they ultimately can't be addressed by data from myriad tests of Starliner's thrusters, NASA will make the correct call.
I asked Logsdon, who has observed NASA for far longer than I have, and with much keener eyes, whether he agreed that the space agency's safety culture had finally changed.
"I think it very definitely has," he said. "Twenty years after Challenger came Columbia, and our assessment was that NASA was in the same kind of dysfunctional patterns that preceded Challenger. Today, there’s nobody accusing NASA and Boeing of being in a closed shop and not listening. I think the lessons of Challenger got forgotten, but the lessons of Columbia have not been forgotten."
