Ask OCE — December 21, 2005 — Vol. 1, Issue 1

The Return to Flight (RTF) Task Group completed its work in August 2005 with a call for greater organizational and individual accountability within NASA.

While offering general praise of the efforts the NASA civil service and contractor workforce made to return the Shuttle to service, the committee concluded that the overall RTF effort was “more complicated, more costly, and lengthier than it needed to be.” It pointed to persistent leadership and management issues that adversely affected engineering rigor, integrated risk assessment, and the definition of engineering requirements for the Shuttle program.

The committee also noted that while management had focused on meeting the fifteen recommendations of the CAIB report, it had not addressed many longstanding problems of organizational behavior that the CAIB and other outside observers have repeatedly highlighted at NASA.