Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...thousands of space-related jobs and, less tangibly but still importantly, the loss of national pride. "The management is much different than it was four years ago," Florida Sen. Bill Nelson assured TIME. "I think they have the toughness if they have to make the tough decisions." The old NASA style, harshly critiqued by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and summed up by Nelson as "arrogant," was susceptible to scheduling and political pressures, but easily and disastrously shrugged off safety concerns from engineers on the line, leading directly, Nelson says, to the two shuttle losses...
...improved NASA is restructured in an attempt to insulate technical and safety decision makers from the budget and schedule keepers. In practice, Johnson Space Center spokesman James Hartsfield says the new mission management team looks a lot like the old team, but with more people included in the inner circle, more freewheeling communication, and more hard data collected on each launch on which to base decisions. Indeed, a scenario similar to the current one with Endeavour was more or less envisioned in the "Return to Flight" (RTF) report that was issued following the 2003 loss of Columbia and her crew...
This time, the buck stops with mission team chairman and shuttle program deputy manager Shannon, 42, a 19-year NASA veteran who served as deputy manager of NASA's Columbia task force in regular communication with the investigative board. Initial internal resistance to the new management structure noted by the RTF task force is gone, Hartsfield says. "I think it is embraced by everyone. It improves with each flight. The more you do it, the more it becomes the culture that we follow...
...NASA plans to announce today whether it will send the astronauts outside to repair the damage - something they could do by attaching a protective plate, dabbing on insulating paint, or squeezing on a layer of epoxy-like insulation. None of the fixes is perfect, though all of them do help - and all of them entail the added danger of an unscheduled spacewalk. (Two astronauts went out on a scheduled spacewalk this morning to replace equipment on the international space station, and two more walks are scheduled for Wednesday and Friday...
...majority of those ships came home with scarred, pitted and missing tiles. Indeed, the early shuttles often shed tiles like dead leaves and landed safely all the same. Endeavour will almost surely do so too. But the anxiety this mission is causing is one more reason that so many NASA employees and astronaut families are simply marking time until shuttles' scheduled retirement in 2010, when the snakebit ships will fly no more...