WASHINGTON: The board investigating the Columbia accident has concluded that Nasa management and safety system failures were as much a factor in the destruction of the shuttle and its seven- member crew as the foam that delivered a fatal blow to the shuttle’s wing during liftoff.

Retired Adm. Harold Gehman, chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, told reporters on Friday that the final report will give the same weight to the space agency’s decision- making errors as it will to the direct physical cause of the February 1 loss of the vehicle and its crew.

“We’ve now decided that these things are equal,” he said. He spoke in Washington at the final formal briefing the board has scheduled before the release of its report near the end of August.

On Monday, the last in a series of impact tests sponsored by the panel proved conclusively that its theory on the disaster’s cause is valid: A piece of foam insulation that fell off Columbia’s propellant tank and struck the front of the wing during the January 16 launch could easily have punched out a piece of the heat-shield material, leading to the catastrophe two weeks later.

The test on Monday, designed to re-create the launch-day impact, not only left a 16-to-17-inch hole in the carbon fiber panel, board member Scott Hubbard reported on Friday, it also dislodged an adjoining T-seal, broke a lug that held the seal in place, and left “a maze” of cracks running through the carbon fiber panel around the hole.

Board members said the launch-day breach in the wing was probably a little smaller — in the six-to-10-inch range — but “in the same ballpark.”

Gehman said there’s been a pervasive and virtually unquestioned assumption within the shuttle programme that the foam couldn’t possibly have done such damage, even though Nasa engineers had no data to prove it.

This led to a series of flawed decisions, including the failure by top managers to act on engineers’ requests for spy satellite images of the shuttle in orbit. Several board members said on Friday that, based on Monday’s test, the damage was probably severe enough that an inspection in space could have revealed it, depending on lighting, shadow, contrast and other conditions.

The board has also determined that the foam chunk that dislodged January 16 was almost twice as large as the next largest piece that had fallen off the tank during previous launches. “The fact that this piece of foam ... is much, much larger than Nasa’s previous experience is, of course, important,” Gehman said, “because it gets into the question of why didn’t that alarm the engineers in the programme? That’s kind of basic to our investigation.”

Shuttle engineers referred to the January 16 debris strike with the phrase “in family,” meaning similar to past experience and, they assumed, well-understood.

Gehman commented similarly on e-mail, released recently by Nasa, that had been sent to the Columbia crew during the flight, in which a flight director casually dismissed the foam strike as “not even worth mentioning.” Gehman said: “It tells me how widespread and deeply ingrained this sense was that foam can’t hurt an orbiter.”

The astronauts in orbit responded to the e-mail report in kind, with lighthearted dismissal.

In an informal exchange after the briefing, Gehman said the board has met twice with the astronaut corps, urging its members to “get more aggressive and formal” in addressing potential safety issues.

After the investigation into the 1986 Challenger accident, a presidential panel recommended that present or former astronauts play a more prominent role in shuttle management and safety, and they have. In addition to veteran astronauts currently in high management positions, the active corps has small groups of astronauts that follow specific issues, Gehman noted.

Congress intends to respond swiftly to the board’s final report this fall with a series of hearings and action on a new spending bill to provide Nasa with the funds it will need to correct problems and resume shuttle operations some time next year, according to congressional aides.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has scheduled at least two hearings, to begin shortly after Labour Day, an aide to Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said, while the House Science Committee will begin a series of hearings in September that will continue throughout the fall.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.