The new report on the Columbia shuttle disaster was scathing, condemning NASA's rigid culture of stifling dissent, discounting safety concerns and worrying about flight schedules.
Perhaps most regrettably, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board reported that lessons learned from the 1986 Challenger explosion were "undone over time."
Seventeen years later, some of the same organizational and management problems that contributed to the Challenger disaster were apparent in the Columbia catastrophe, investigators said. With both shuttles, NASA managers became dangerously inured to lingering safety problems.
Some NASA officials vehemently object to comparisons between the two incidents. But others point to the agency's tendency to become increasingly comfortable with risk, a term Boston College sociology professor Diane Vaughan calls "normalization of deviance."
Other critics believe that NASA should take a page from its former self as it embarks on meaningful reform.
In his 1995 book "Schirra's Space," NASA veteran Wally Schirra offered pointed advice for space planners: "The solution is to return to the way it used to be. When I was one of the first seven astronauts in the 1960s, we all were graduates of test pilot school and had earned engineering degrees to boot, enabling us to exchange ideas with the engineers. And when we felt strongly, as we often did, we were heard, about vehicle preparation, the flight plan, even policy matters."
Schirra, who has the distinction of flying in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs, wrote that he rejected an accelerated schedule for his Apollo mission because it required a seven-day work week for the technicians.
Alcestis Oberg, a science and technology writer who has covered NASA for 25 years, advocates replacing the current return-to-flight team with "by-the-book engineers who will get their hands dirty making safety a top priority."
Broad criticism of NASA must be tempered with perspective. The shuttle program has had 111 successful flights since 1981. Considering that record, it is somewhat understandable that some NASA leaders came to view the shuttle "as operational rather than developmental." The agency's failure to draw that distinction had fatal consequences.
NASA needs to develop a new means of doing business to win back the confidence of Congress and the American public, which, in the past, broadly supported the space program. Now, Americans struggle to grasp the agency's long-term vision.
Few Americans would want to write off the space program, and yet, without reforms that break down the bureaucracy, improve communication and, most importantly, ensure that safety is being guided through sound science and engineering, it will be difficult for Americans and their leaders to view NASA much differently than any other government agency that is slow to learn and even slower to change.
NASA's work must continue, but it cannot go on as is. Those leaders who resist the reforms called for in the Gehman report need to ensure that the space program does not remain mired in a culture of arrogance that contributed to many of its current problems.