Painful Legacies of a Lost Mission

As the investigation of the shuttle disaster continues, evidence is piling up that NASA might have been a victim of some managers' can-do spirit. To justify congressional support, NASA officials felt compelled to prove that the shuttle program could be made self-supporting by launching as often as every two weeks. But in internal NASA memos that have leaked out, Chief Astronaut John Young charges that safety was sacrificed to "launch-schedule pressure." Young, 55, a highly respected veteran of shuttle or bits and Apollo moon flights, warned of an "awesome" list of safety problems, including a runway at Florida's Kennedy Space Center that is too short, too rough and subject to erratic weather. While gliding the 100-ton shuttle into Kennedy rather than onto the dry lake beds at Ed wards Air Force Base in the California desert "may be a wonderful political policy," Young wrote his NASA bosses in January, "it is not an intelligent technical policy." Shuttle Inquiry Commission Member Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate, charged last week that the shuttle blew up because of "hopeless" design flaws in the booster. He blamed "attitudinal problems" in NASA's management.

Some NASA officials have scrambled to pass off blame for the Challenger disaster. The brass at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., have been trying to point the finger at Kennedy Space Center for botching the assembly of the solid rocket booster. Marshall's bureaucrats are accused of ignoring the warnings of engineers at Morton Thiokol, maker of the solid rocket booster, to postpone the launch because the cold weather could have damaged the O rings that sealed the segments of the booster. The evasions and backbiting have shocked members of the presidential panel. "A whole new NASA has got to come out of this mess, not only a new solid rocket booster design," says a commission member.

Despite the disclosures of flawed judgment and mismanagement, the families of the dead astronauts have tried to keep faith. Said Astronaut Mike Smith's brother Tony: "I still think NASA knows what it's doing." But the growing evidence that Challenger should not have been sent aloft can be rendered only more painful by the recovery of the astronauts' remains. "It just brings it all back again," says Dr. Marvin Resnik, father of Judith Resnik. The Resniks want no funeral service; they have asked NASA to cremate their daughter's remains and scatter them over the ocean, where Challenger met its end. --By Evan Thomas. Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral