Washington, Apr 16: NASA began a three-year tune-up program on Tuesday prompted by a new survey that found the space agency still sometimes fails to follow through on safety concerns, more than a year after the Columbia accident.
The new program is aimed at changing NASA's organisational culture, a key recommendation from investigators who probed the fatal mid-air break-up of shuttle Columbia that killed all seven astronauts on Feb 1, 2003.



The Columbia investigators criticised NASA last year for its "broken safety culture," which they found was as much to blame for the accident as any technical failure. The agency's new "plan for organizational culture change," discussed at a briefing at NASA headquarters, stressed this concern again.


"Safety is something to which NASA personnel are strongly committed in concept, but NASA has not yet created a culture that is fully supportive of safety," the 145-page survey said. "Open communication is not yet the norm, and people do not feel fully comfortable raising safety concerns to management."

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said he would follow the recommendations of this plan, starting with a series of meetings and management coaching over the next five months.


That will be followed by a long-term "roadmap" for culture change, according to the report and survey, which was conducted by BST Inc., a California-based behavioral science company.
Bureau Report