Safety concerns raised over Nasa moon programme

Nasa is not properly emphasising safety in its design of a new spaceship and its return-to-the-moon programme faces money, morale and leadership problems, an agency safety panel found today.

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel cited “surprising anxiety among Nasa employees” about the Constellation moon programme and said the project “lacks clear direction”.

Its 143-page annual report specifically faulted the agency’s design of the Orion crew capsule for not putting safety features first.

Officials in charge of the programme, defending the design safety at a news conference, wouldn’t say whether astronauts are among the worried employees. Astronauts would have to fly in the Orion crew capsule, with a first launch planned by 2015.

Past Nasa spaceships were built with enough backup safety systems “to ensure safety and reliability,” from the start, the report said.

But it said that because of weight problems with the Orion design, Nasa has used a different approach, one “without all safeguards included” from the beginning. In the Orion project, any added safety feature would have to “earn its way in” to the design by justifying that the increased safety was worth the extra cost and weight.

That’s not right, said the safety advisory panel, which includes two former space shuttle astronauts and was created after the deadly 1967 Apollo 1 fire.

The panel said it is “concerned that this process may not be capable of providing adequate protection against hazards that will only come to light once the spacecraft is in operation”.

Nasa’s Constellation programme officials defended the safety of the still evolving spaceship design, but acknowledged that some Nasa employees are unhappy with it.

Nasa has long promised its first launch of Orion by March 2015, but aimed internally for September 2013 as a launch date. Now it’s aiming internally for September 2014.

Nasa plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2020.