Manager of NASA space shuttle program resigns

The manager of NASA's space shuttle program announced his resignation Wednesday, saying he had decided to leave the post before the Feb. 1 Columbia tragedy.

Ronald Dittemore, who spent more than four of his 26 years at NASA as the agency's space shuttle program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, will remain in his position until the Columbia Accident Investigation Board finishes its investigation and the agency's establishes a plan for returning to space flight.

"My decision to leave the space shuttle program has been a very difficult one, but it is a decision that I began struggling with long before the tragedy of the Columbia accident," Dittemore said Wednesday in Washington.

Dittemore said that he told Michael Kostelnik, NASA's deputy associate administrator for space flight, and other top agency officials in the fall of 2002 that he intended to step aside as manager of the space shuttle program in early 2003. But the space shuttle Columbia's mysterious disintegration upon re-entry on Feb. 1, which killed seven crew members aboard, changed those plans, he said.

"Over the past two months as we have tried to understand the events surrounding the loss of Columbia and her precious crew, every one of you has performed in an outstanding manner, and I have been tremendously proud to be associated with NASA and the members of the space shuttle program team," Dittemore said in a memorandum to the agency about his resignation.

As manager of the space shuttle program, Dittemore is responsible for the overall development of the program, including support for ground processing and flight operations. The two-time Presidential Rank Award winner joined NASA in 1977 as a propulsion systems engineer, responsible for the development and implementation of operations procedures for the space shuttle orbital maneuvering and reaction control systems.

"For more than a quarter-century, Ron has been an integral part of the space shuttle program," said Kostelnik on Wednesday. "He helped create many of the processes and procedures we follow today."

The agency does not have a successor lined up for Dittemore's job yet, and it is too early to speculate on who might eventually replace him, said NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs.

"It is one of those cases where he [Dittemore] was gracious about it and let the agency know what he was going do," Jacobs said of Dittemore's decision to inform agency officials last year of his intention to leave in 2003 and also his decision to stay on through the end of the Columbia investigation. "It allows the agency to go through a thoughtful selection process for the transition before he actually does leave," Jacobs said.

Jacobs said the agency does not have a timeframe for when the Columbia Accident Investigation Board will complete its investigation or when NASA will return to space flight. But last month, William Readdy, NASA's associate administrator for space flight, sent a memo to agency officials indicating that NASA could resume space flight as early as the fall of 2003.