Shuttle should be grounded

Editor’s note: The following editorial appeared in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times:

The space shuttle should never fly again.

As Times staff writer Robert Lee Hotz showed in a series explaining why Columbia exploded during reentry this year, the $1.8-billion spacecraft was a miracle of ingenuity constructed from “the raw material of the American character It was America rising.” But as Hotz went on to point out, it also was by design as unsafe as a white butterfly bolted to a bullet.

Seventeen years ago, an eccentric Caltech-physicist named Richard Feynman dropped a rubber O-ring seal into a glass of ice water and discovered what an army of NASA experts had not: The cold-induced brittleness of the seal had led to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger just after launch in 1986.

Back then, the space agency listened respectfully to Feynman. But in a reflection of how rigid, defensive and arrogant NASA has become, it brushed off scientists who conducted similarly ingenious experiments on their own to figure out the Columbia disaster. …

The shuttle’s ascent and survival despite its design problems — not to mention the inherent risk of human spaceflight — are a testament to American resourcefulness. But NASA continues to be governed by an autocratic culture that stifles ingenuity. That’s not only the strong feeling of engineers at NASA’s subcontractors, it’s also the conclusion of NASA’s inspector general, Robert W. Cobb, who recently cautioned NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe that agency hierarchies still discouraged independent engineering and safety….

Robot probes such as NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity, landers scheduled to arrive on Mars next month, can accomplish much more science more cheaply than human space missions. As for servicing the international space station, there is no shame in leaving it to the Russian Soyuz for as long as the project continues.

It’s too glib to blame NASA alone for the shuttle disasters. Congress relentlessly demanded cost cuts, and the public expected too many things of NASA — that it provide inspiration, science and commerce faster, better and cheaper each year. In the end, a creaky, fearful bureaucracy bowed to its political masters and turned a blind eye to disaster in the making.

The space shuttle romance is over.