Washington ? A serious accident is waiting to happen on the International Space Station due to poor communications between American and Russian engineers, says one of the nine members of a NASA safety panel who resigned Tuesday.

There have been three separate incidents that could have led to accidents aboard the space station and all were linked to a lack of coordination between the Russians and Americans who operate the orbiting lab, said Arthur Zygielbaum, a former member of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.

Zygielbaum said safety flaws on the space station were being brushed aside in the same way that NASA ignored problems with foam insulation on the space shuttle. A suitcase-sized chunk of foam insulation that flew off a fuel tank during the launch of Columbia is blamed for breaking a heat shield and causing the loss of the space shuttle and seven astronauts.

“We think we see a trend on the space station that is as significant as the foam,” said Zygielbaum. “We have had three incidences of miscommunications or different purposes between the Russians and the Americans that have endangered the space station.”

Zygielbaum, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Nebraska and a 30-year veteran manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, was one of nine members to resign Monday from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.

He said the resignations came after the panel came under sharp criticism from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and from the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The board members unanimously voted last week to resign, he said, because it was felt NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe needed to reconstitute the ASAP so it was more independent and adequately funded.

The ASAP was established by Congress after the 1967 Apollo 1 fire, which killed three astronauts.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board report last month said the ASAP lacked influence in NASA’s top ranks. CAIB chairman Ret. Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr. called for the safety panel to be reconstituted. A report from the Senate Appropriations Committee said the ASAP was “asleep” and failed to notice dangerous cultural issues in NASA that were spotted by the Columbia board.

“Many of the cultural issues identified by the CAIB are in our annual reports” but were ignored, said Zygielbaum. “That underscores our lack of influence.”

Zygielbaum said the Senate committee report “basically said that we were culpable for the death of seven people (on Columbia). That is a hard thing to take.”