America's most spectacular spaceflight successes were born of reforms spurred by catastrophic accidents -- from the fatal Apollo fire that paved the way for the first moon landing to the Mars Observer mishap that fostered efforts to explore the Red Planet.
Time and again, it took the shock of disaster or death to galvanize NASA's senior managers and an engineering bureaucracy blinded by belief in its own infallibility, historians and sociologists said.
"Periodically, NASA gets vaccinated with an accident," said space policy analyst John Pike, who operates the national security Web site GlobalSecurity.org.
The causes of the fatal Columbia accident, however, so closely mirror the management flaws and engineering miscalculations that killed the seven crew members aboard Challenger 17 years ago that many analysts are skeptical of NASA's capacity today for reform and self-renewal.
Despite persistent efforts to mend its ways, the space agency is still afflicted with the curse of the "can do" attitude, they said. NASA is afraid to admit failure, all but incapable of accepting independent criticism and unwilling to trim its space-faring ambitions to match its resources.
The world's only reusable spacecraft and its crew foundered not on the unexplored reefs of space, but on familiar shoals of bureaucratic incompetence, imprudent cost-cutting, management pressures and political expediency, investigators said.
"Some of the issues facing NASA now are at least as old as the Apollo fire," said Duke University historian Alex Roland.
Public revulsion at the serious safety problems uncovered after the Apollo fire in 1967, which killed three astronauts during a launchpad test, provided the impetus to revolutionize the management of human spaceflight, said American University historian Howard McCurdy.
Substandard aerospace contractors were brought to heel; design flaws were reworked; policy dictates were abandoned and key managers were replaced. Among other things, NASA was ordered to put fire extinguishers in future space capsules.
NASA itself was forced to adopt a more thorough method of spaceflight operations called systems management, pioneered by U.S. Air Force project leaders in their development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
"The result was that we went to the moon without losing any astronauts," McCurdy said, even though the agency had anticipated that almost one-third of the Apollo astronauts might die in the effort.
