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Shuttle email misinterpreted Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/5360820.htmhttp://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/5360820.htm
Posted on Mon, Mar. 10, 2003
NASA engineer says shuttle e-mails 'being misinterpreted'
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The engineer whose e-mails during Columbia's fated flight prophetically raised the possibility of a landing disaster said Monday that "my words are being misinterpreted."
"They certainly weren't warnings; they were simply, be ready for anything," said Robert Daugherty, a senior NASA researcher whose Jan. 27 e-mail started a string of 32 often frantic notes about potential problems with Columbia's upcoming landing.
The NASA-organized teleconference with Daugherty - designed to quell the controversy over his e-mails - stood in contrast to the blunt language of his shuttle messages.
On Monday, a cautious and subdued Daugherty, accompanied by his boss at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., said the difference was that he never expected his e-mail to be made public.
A landing-issues specialist for nearly 23 years, Daugherty said he agreed with what the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been saying about the e-mails: They were engineers preparing for the worst but not expecting it.
Prompted by potential heavy damage to the shuttle's delicate heat protection system because of external fuel tank foam that hit the shuttle's left wing 82 seconds after launch, the text of the e-mails raised ominous possibilities: belly-landings, loss of crew and astronauts bailing out of a doomed shuttle.
At one point Daugherty e-mailed: "Are people just relegated to crossing their fingers and hoping for the best?"
The context of the e-mail was merely engineers coming up with "a myriad of Plan Bs," figuring they would not be needed and using colorful language of buddies impatiently waiting for a test to be done, Daugherty said.
When NASA released the e-mails in February after the shuttle crashed it caused a firestorm because those concerns were never elevated to senior managers responsible for major decisions during Columbia's flight.
About 22 hours before Columbia's demise, the associate research director at Langley asked whether Daugherty's concerns should be sent to NASA's director of human spaceflight. Langley's acting director, Del Freeman, decided not to involve top NASA brass.
Even though NASA's spaceflight chief, Bill Readdy, said he would have investigated the issue further had he known about Daugherty's concern, Daugherty repeatedly said his concern, which got no higher in Mission Control than the mechanical systems chief, was "absolutely handled at the level I intended."
The e-mails stayed between midlevel engineers at Johnson Space Center's Mission Control and researchers at Langley.
"We thought that the experts had been engaged in (Johnson Space Center) and they were on top of it," said Mark Shuart, Daugherty's boss and the director of structures and materials at NASA Langley.
Daugherty conceded the e-mails were unusual and not as routine as NASA portrays it.
Daugherty started the e-mails when a Johnson Space Center engineer called him, sent him a video of the foam hit and asked for his advice - something that had never happened. Daugherty said his first reaction when seeing the foam hit delicate tile was "wow."
Daugherty then read a note from a JSC thermal engineer who disagreed with an everything-is-safe analysis by contractor Boeing. He said he then realized it was "an unusual problem, difficult to get your arms around it."
While Columbia prepared to land Feb. 1, Daugherty watched from his office with "some natural uneasiness on my part, but again I certainly believed that everything would be perfectly fine."
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