WASHINGTON, Aug 18: Nasa leaders guilty of ‘smugness’ and ‘arrogance’ failed to learn past lessons in the drive to get the space shuttle back in orbit, experts said, in a scathing dissent to a probe into efforts to make the program safer.

“It is difficult to be objective based on hindsight, but it appears to us that lessons that should have been learned have not been. Perhaps we expected or hoped for too much,” seven of the Flight Task Force’s 26 members wrote.

The seven panelists conceded that quality people were employed in the shuttle program and that improvements had been made, but found leadership of the agency lacking.

“Nasa leaders must break this cycle of smugness substituting for knowledge,” the minority report said.

The full group, known as the Stafford-Covey Task Group after the two astronauts in charge, was set up to ensure that NASA had met the requirements of the investigation into the Columbia tragedy in 2003.

The Task Force released a summary of its final report in June which found that NASA had made the shuttle fleet safer, but had not met three of the 15 return to flight recommendations.

Those requirements included the problem of ice and foam detaching from the fuel tank during liftoff with the potential to damage the shuttle’s protective re-entry shield.

In the minority report, the seven detected an air of insularity in NASA management inappropriate for such a high risk operation.

“The recurrence of apparently preventable accidents and the seeming unwillingness to learn, should be sufficient to install some humility to temper what often looks like arrogance,” the dissenters warned.—AFP