Remembering Fallen Astronauts
NASA's chief reminded staff members Thursday that "the consequences of us not getting it right are catastrophic," as the agency paused to remember the dead crew members of Columbia, Challenger and Apollo.
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said in a televised address to employees that space exploration is risky but never should result in fatalities because of "complacency, indifference, failure to attend to detail." That should be a solemn pledge for anyone who works in the space program, he noted.
The Day of Remembrance falls three days before the first anniversary of the Columbia disaster. O'Keefe said it will be an annual event, always on the last Thursday of January coming as close as it does to all three of the nation's space program catastrophes.
The Apollo 1 fire during a countdown test on Jan. 27, 1967, left three astronauts dead in their spacecraft on the launch pad. The Challenger explosion during liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986, left seven dead. The Columbia breakup during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, killed seven more.
O'Keefe choked up as he read the roll of 17 who "lost their lives because we failed."
"Grissom, White, Chaffee, Scobee, Smith, McNair, Resnik, McAuliffe, Jarvis, Onizuka, Husband, McCool, Chawla, Anderson, Brown, Clark and Ramon.
"They are not with us today because when it mattered most, we failed. And so it is incumbent upon us to remember not just today, not once a year, not on the anniversaries, but every day, every single day that the consequences of us not getting it right are catastrophic, and each of those families will live with this consequence for the rest of their lives."
At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a minute of silence was observed at noon. Flags flew at half-staff. The flags will remain at half-staff at NASA centers nationwide through Monday, when a memorial to the Columbia crew will be dedicated at Arlington National Cemetery, next to the Challenger crew memorial.
NASA employees were also remembering two men who died in a helicopter crash in Texas last March while searching for Columbia wreckage, and all the early aviation pioneers who were killed pushing the limits.
In his midday address, O'Keefe announced that three peaks on Mars seen from the first of NASA's two newly arrived rovers would be named Grissom, White and Chaffee, the Apollo 1 crew. The space agency already has named its rover stations after the Challenger and Columbia crews.
Observers say the agency's leaders appear to be working hard to eradicate fear of reprisal for speaking out about potential problems, a culture blamed in part for the Columbia disaster.
"Obviously, that kind of attitude comes from the top down," says Jose Garcia, a retired space shuttle operations manager who took his complaints about NASA safety cutbacks to the White House in 1995.
Garcia keeps in touch with former co-workers and the word is, "things are getting better; they're headed in the right direction." He worries time will take its toll, as it did after the Challenger accident, and that budget crunches and schedule pressures will start piling up once more and threatening the progress he sees.
"That's the key here, whether we sustain it or not," he said.
Dr. Jon Clark, a NASA neurologist who lost his wife, Laurel, aboard Columbia, is among those dissatisfied with the progress one year later. He says he sees and hears enough to know that resistance persists in NASA.
"The people who don't sit there and see themselves in the report and see ways they can improve things, they're the ones who need to go," Clark says. "In other words, they embrace change, but it's changing somebody else, not them."