The Astronauts Bail Out

By Ed Magnuson.

As concern mounted over NASA's handling of the doomed space shuttle Challenger, the space agency's astronaut corps had stayed stoically tight- lipped. When beleaguered NASA officials trotted out four shuttle veterans for a press conference last week, the astronauts expressed concern about the agency's conduct, but not condemnation. In particular, they reserved judgment on reports that NASA had failed to heed warnings that the weather on Jan. 28 was too cold to launch, leading to Challenger's destruction and the deaths of its seven crew members. "I'm not sitting here angry," said Astronaut Vance Brand. "If there was a mistake, that doesn't bring down the whole system."

But by week's end that solid front was cracking, and the astronauts were firing off criticism as damning to NASA's reputation as any yet heard. Astronaut Sally Ride, a member of the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster, was the first to speak out publicly. Until the agency solves its safety problems, "I'm not ready to fly again," said Ride. "I think that there are very few astronauts who are ready." A more pointed reproach was made public Saturday, when the Houston Post printed a memo sent to space-program officials by Chief Astronaut John Young on March 4, citing safety compromises on shuttle flights dating back to October 1984. The list, said Young, "proves to me that there are some very lucky people around here." Safety had to become a top priority, Young wrote, or NASA "will not survive and neither will our three space shuttles or their flight crews."

In a separate safety problem--on a launch last Jan. 12 of the shuttle Columbia with Florida Congressman Bill Nelson aboard--sources on the presidential commission told TIME that NASA tried to persuade technicians of Rockwell Corp.'s Rocketdyne Division to bypass faulty valves on lines feeding the liquid-oxygen fuel tank. Rocketdyne refused, and NASA learned later that a foul-up was causing the huge external fuel tank to drain rather than fill. "If that orbiter had lifted off with the tank almost empty, it would have imploded, collapsed, and that would have finished the shuttle," said the commission source.

NASA, meanwhile, continued to defend itself in the commission's public hearings at Cape Canaveral. NASA technicians speculated on a variety of reasons--other than the cold weather--why a joint in Challenger's right solid- fuel booster began leaking, spewing superhot gases and probably triggering the catastrophe. The commission seemed unimpressed. Chairman William Rogers urged NASA to include independent experts in making its evaluations. Otherwise, he protested, "The people running the tests, if successful, can prove that they were right all along."

To rebuild the battered agency, the Administration brought back a former NASA administrator: James Fletcher, 66, leader of NASA from 1971 to 1977 and a physicist who headed a commission that urged Ronald Reagan to develop a Star Wars defense against missiles. The mild-mannered Fletcher comes to the post with one handicap: he has accused the Rogers commission of being engaged in a "witch-hunt."

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Washington and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral