The Board is convinced that the factors that led to the Columbia accident go well beyond the physical mechanisms discussed in Chapter 3. The causal roots of the accident can also be traced, in part, to the turbulent post-Cold War policy environment in which NASA functioned during most of the years between the destruction of Challenger and the loss of Columbia . The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s meant that the most important political underpinning of NASAs Human Space Flight Program --- U.S.-Soviet space competition --- was lost, with no equally strong political objective to replace it. No longer able to justify its projects with the kind of urgency that the superpower struggle had provided, the agency could not obtain budget increases through the 1990s. Rather than adjust its ambitions to this new state of affairs, NASA continued to push an ambitious agenda of space science and exploration, including a costly Space Station Program.

If NASA wanted to carry out that agenda, its only recourse, given its budget allocation, was to become more efficient, accomplishing more at less cost. The search for cost reductions led top NASA leaders over the past decade to downsize the Shuttle workforce, outsource various Shuttle Program responsibilities --- including safety oversight --- and consider eventual privatization of the Space Shuttle Program. The programs budget was reduced by 40 percent in purchasing power over the past decade and repeatedly raided to make up for Space Station cost overruns, even as the Program maintained a launch schedule in which the Shuttle, a developmental vehicle, was used in an operational mode. In addition, the uncertainty of top policymakers in the White House, Congress, and NASA as to how long the Shuttle would fly before being replaced resulted in the delay of upgrades needed to make the Shuttle safer and to extend its service life.

The Space Shuttle Program has been transformed since the late 1980s implementation of post-Challenger management changes in ways that raise questions, addressed here and in later chapters of Part Two, about NASAs ability to safely operate the Space Shuttle. While it would be inaccurate to say that NASA managed the Space Shuttle Program at the time of the Columbia accident in the same manner it did prior to Challenger, there are unfortunate similarities between the agencys performance and safety practices in both periods.