Some May Still Push Excess Shuttle Flights, Panel Says

WASHINGTON —  A congressional committee said Tuesday that some people in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration may still be pushing for an unrealistic number of space shuttle flights, jeopardizing promotion of a safety-first program throughout the agency.

The committee also said the space agency may not have the expertise to conduct the shuttle program properly and does not yet understand how or why deficiencies in its testing program went undetected.

“NASA management and the Congress must remember the lessons learned from the Challenger accident and never again set unreasonable goals which stress the system beyond its safe functioning,” the House Science and Technology Committee said in a report on the Jan. 28 explosion that killed the shuttle’s crew of seven.

The committee was plowing the same investigative furrow as the Rogers commission, which was appointed by President Reagan.

“The fundamental problem was poor technical decision-making over a period of several years by top NASA and contractor personnel,” the committee said.

Ed Campion, a NASA spokesman, said officials would not comment until they had seen the report.

NASA has announced that it is aiming for the first post-Challenger liftoff on Feb. 18, 1988, and that it will have only five flights that year.

The committee, which has oversight responsibility for NASA, said its role is different from the Rogers commission’s and that it disagreed with some of that panel’s findings.

But there was no disagreement on the immediate cause of the accident, a flawed joint in the right booster rocket that allowed hot gases to escape past O-ring seals, eat into the huge fuel tank and set off the explosion.

Information on the joint design and previous problems with the boosters had been presented to all levels of shuttle management, the committee said. And yet, it said, NASA and booster maker Morton Thiokol Inc. failed to understand or fully accept the seriousness of the problem.

“There was no sense of urgency on their part to correct the design flaws in the SRB (solid rocket booster),” it said.