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It's more than a mildly interesting coincidence that in the same week that the space shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board released its report on the loss of the shuttle, the History Channel debuted a new documentary based on the book Failure Is Not An Option by Gene Kranz, the NASA mission control chief so famously portrayed by Ed Harris in the movie Apollo 13.

The review board's report makes it clear that the "failure is not an option" ethos - Kranz calls it "the creed we all live by" in his book - is a double-edged sword for NASA. To be sure, the philosophy has promoted a can-do spirit and, in the case of Apollo 13, spurred the kind of ingenuity that saved astronauts' lives.

But the board's report shows that the no-failure credo has also led to the creation of an environment in which agency managers, engineers and other employees are discouraged from raising concerns about safety. Before and during the Columbia mission, even hinting at potential failure - in the sense, for example, of declaring that foam insulation could cause or had caused more damage than previously assumed - was clearly not a viable option.

The report's central conclusion - that NASA failed to heed the management, cultural, and organizational lessons of the 1986 Challenger disaster, and still operates in an environment in which the way the agency is run threatens the safety of spacecraft and the people who fly them - is the most damning indictment of an agency I have seen in nearly 14 years covering the federal bureaucracy.

But what's more chilling is that even now, NASA seems more concerned with the can-do imperative of launching another shuttle as quickly as possible than with taking several steps back to review the cultural and organizational issues that led to the loss of both the Challenger and the Columbia.

From the moment the Columbia disintegrated, the agency's "find it, fix it and fly it" approach has focused squarely on how quickly the next shuttle mission can be launched. Shortly after the incident, NASA officials began talking about flying again in the fall of this year. As recently as early August, they were expressing a hope of launching the shuttle Atlantis in early March 2004.

In the wake of the investigation board's report, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has backed off the gung-ho approach. In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal the day after the board's report was released, O'Keefe pledged to comply with all of its recommendations and acknowledged that the agency had "a long way to go" to restore its capacity to explore space. "In this assignment, failure is not an option," he wrote.

But earlier this month, Richard Covey, a former astronaut who is now a senior executive at Boeing and the co-leader of NASA's Return to Flight Group, told reporters that NASA might not be able to fix all of its management problems before starting shuttle flights next year. At the same press conference, NASA Deputy Administrator Fred Garvey, asked about the need for cultural changes, said, "it would be difficult for me to define to you what the NASA culture is."

Any serious examination of the future of the space program would start by attempting to define that culture, and by asking the question of whether the risks of human space flight - especially in the aging, extraordinarily delicate shuttles - outweigh the rewards. But that question was taken off the table the very day the Columbia was lost. "Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand," President Bush said in an address to the nation. "Our journey into space will go on."

The board's report on NASA's capacity to undertake that journey is long on accusations, but short on detailed prescriptions for overhauling the agency's organizational structure, altering its relationships with its contractors, and changing its approach to space flight in general and shuttle launches in particular. So now that's NASA's job - and there's no getting around the fact that it will be a long slow, and painful one, which will meet internal resistance every step of the way.

The list of agencies that have been able to successfully change their cultures in this kind of dramatic fashion is short indeed. But to even consider launching further shuttles until that process is complete runs the grave risk of further compounding the loss of the Challenger and the Columbia.

NASA has an extraordinarily difficult challenge ahead. And it can only start with the frank acknowledgment that failure is an option at every step of the process.

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