Apr 23 2003

From The Space Library

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Current revision

NASA announced the resignation of Space Shuttle Program Manager Ronald D. Dittemore. A 26-year veteran of NASA, Dittemore had supervised the Space Shuttle Program for more than four years. Dittemore had joined NASA in 1977 as a propulsion-systems engineer, working on orbital maneuvering and reaction-control systems for the Space Shuttle before his selection as a Space Shuttle Flight Director in 1985. In 1993 NASA had appointed him Deputy Manager for the Space Shuttle Program Integration and Operations Office in the Space Shuttle Program Office. He had also served as Manager of Space Shuttle Program Integration and as Chairperson of the Space Shuttle Mission Management Team before his selection in 1996 to manage the Space Shuttle Vehicle Engineering Office. He had become Space Shuttle Program Manager in 1999, assuming responsibility for the overall management, integration, and operation of the program. In announcing his departure, Dittemore remarked that, before the Columbia tragedy, he had been struggling over whether to leave NASA and had decided to resign in the spring of 2003. However, after the Columbia accident, he had immediately postponed his departure. Deputy Associate Administrator for the Space Shuttle Program Michael C. Kostelnik and NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe credited Dittemore with keeping communications open between NASA and the public in the wake of the tragedy. Dittemore planned to remain in his position until the CAIB had finished its work and established a return-to-flight program, to enable NASA to make a smooth management transition. (NASA, “Space Shuttle Program Manager Decides To Leave Post,” news release 03-149, 23 April 2003, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2003/apr/HP_news_03149.html (accessed 19 September 2008); Paul Recer for Associated Press, “Shuttle Director Dittemore To Leave NASA,” 23 April 2003.

A panel of five retired NASA and contractor managers, whose expertise dated to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, testified in a public hearing before the CAIB that engineers had never designed orbiters' wings to sustain strikes from any form of debris. The panel members agreed that engineers had known in the 1 970s that the RCC panels along the leading edge of the orbiters' wings presented a technical challenge, and that NASA should have taken appropriate precautions against debris striking the RCC panels. Milton A. Silveira, who had helped design the orbiter, remarked that wings of airplanes were also incapable of sustaining such strikes. Robert F. Thompson, another designer of the orbiter, who had headed the Space Shuttle Program in the 1 970s, added that providing an impenetrable wing edge was impossible. According to Thompson, if NASA had insisted on that standard, it would have had to abandon the Shuttle project. Diane Vaughn, a sociologist affiliated with Boston College, who in 1996 had published the book The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA, spoke to the panel about NASA's approach to risk-management and decision-making systems. Vaughn observed that NASA had failed to address institutional problems present at the time of the Challenger disaster, and that as a result, NASA decision-makers had remained unable to access the type of data they needed to assess risk accurately and to act on that knowledge. (Marcia Dunn for Associated Press, “NASA Pioneers Testify on Shuttle Columbia Tragedy,” 24 April 2003; Kathy Sawyer, “NASA Mistakes Will Repeat Without Changes, Board Told,” Washington Post, 24 April 2003.

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