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case closed. there's no denying it. you know, there was there was foam falling from day one. they should have had that test on day two. -this was a known failure. but i think the failure to imagine being wrong, the failure to imagine the consequences of failure were catastrophic. and i think it's this whole notion of the failure to imagine failure. -nasa's trying to move forward after tuesday's blistering report, blaming it for failing to prevent the shuttle columbia tragedy. -nasa stands accused of complacency of a flawed safety culture of major management failures. technical failures, but also about a human failure. -nasa had conflicting goals of cost,
to ensure we could hear dissenting opinions and other information was being communicated in spite of potential management or communication challenges. it's tragic we had to go through the columbia accident to get here. so, i always remind myself of what's at stake if we don't retain those lessons. -as always, nasa's arrow is pointed up towards the stars as it should be. it's about the united states , and our partners, remaining the leaders in aerospace technology and exploration. here in the united states senate, i've got a little say on some of these programs, and i'm trying to make sure that nasa has the resources it needs to fly people in space as safely as possible. american astronauts flying on american rockets from american soil into space once again.
there may have been -- i don't even think there was negligence, i just think that the actions we took were inadequate for the problem we were facing. -i think there was a mindset and sort of a hope that we've seen foam strikes before and it's never caused a safety of flight issue. so, we're assuming that's the case here, but not a sure thing. it seemed like by staying ignorant of the degree of damage, the mission management team perhaps didn't want to know about the worst-case scenario. -at this point, from our work in the hangar, i think we have enough information to say we found the physical cause of the shuttle crash. but there were still people at nasa
but, i mean, i was in mission control. i was a nasa employee. i knew about the foam strike. when there's blame that's laid out, i am right up there saying i knew. and i -- and i wish i could've done something differently. but i-i can't undo that. and it -- you can just make it better for those that follow. -i feel ashamed. so, who's guilty? i'm not just gonna say the program managers are. we're all guilty. if you don't speak up for your own system and you're the victims of this environment, we're guilty, too. -during the mission, i could have easily done a story saying, "this thing happened. while nasa is saying it's nothing, some engineers believe there may be some concern." what if i had done that?
i only learned later that there really were people outside of our team that were trying to do something about it. -i had no idea what was happening because there was no communication. i'm not in the loop, i'm not in the know, nobody's talking to each other, so nobody knows what's going on. -the problem that we had in nasa culturally at the time was people would not speak up with their concerns. it was the most anti-dissenting opinion place that i know of. people were scared silly to speak up. -nasa is a series of fiefdoms, and there isn't necessarily a lot of exchange of knowledge across those silos, you know, frankly, the system is not designed for good communication. but that's not an excuse, because this foam problem was a not a new problem.
thousands of mourners are gathering, including that man, neil armstrong , as nasa gathers to say farewell to seven of its own. -knowing that i wasn't gonna see my dad again and losing that many people that you love and that you're close to all at once. it was just so heavy. the world just became a scary place. -just felt like i was so, like... raw, just so...exposed. -to have your dad die in a public way, and you have press focused in on you. i knew i didn't want to be there. -just like a feeling of, like, how are we supposed to act?
-the idea of the us not having its own capability to fly to space again was looming. and i think if you took that away, we would feel as if we'd lost something meaningful and really central to our national identity. the question for nasa was -- what happens next?
that there were over a half a dozen occurrences of foam strikes recorded. so, we turned that in into the investigation board. -1983 was the first bipod ramp foam loss. 1990, 1992, '92 again, 1994. as well as those bigger pieces, we saw small pieces of foam fall away all the time. what we call "popcorning". when popcorn pops, it pops up and comes out and so that's what we call it, popcorning. they weren't very big so you're not talking about much damage to the tiles. and so, it had become the norm at nasa. this mantra -- "it's only foam, it's only foam. hey, we see foam loss all the time. and it never did any damage to the vehicle. we don't have to worry about it, it's only foam."
no one was gonna go public and say, "we know what didn't happen." -you get that shot right there? that's a nasa official. he's holding a piece of foam, which he is now saying could not have had enough impact 'cause it's too light to have damaged those tiles that we've been talking about. -i knew ron. i had respect for ron. ron was linda ham's boss and a good manager. but what's always the first step in grief? denial. -i called ron and i said, "ron, let me just remind you, ok? we had a clear understanding that we are not gonna eliminate anything until the data has come in to definitively eliminate it." -to bring that out and dismiss it, you know, pre-emptively, i think speaks volumes. at the very least they had to acknowledge it. but it was acknowledging their own mistakes
"look what happened a minute after launch." got this very, very slow -- look at that piece of foam right there that struck the shuttle as it came off. the question was, what did it do? ♪ i didn't know for sure. i still was the armchair analyst. but challenger was deep in our memory... ♪ ...and this was kind of a similar scenario. ♪ in the wake of challenger, nasa management just tried to shut everything down, and it created a huge amount of bad blood between the media. it made nasa look guilty as hell. ♪ how will they respond to this? ♪