The Columbia Accident Investigation Board is on the verge of
declaring the probable cause of the February 1 shuttle disaster to
be the chunk of foam that struck the leading edge of the left wing
during the first moments of liftoff. What it will not say is that
the tragedy is the latest fateful application of “Lusser’s
Law.”
The irony is that the late Dr. Robert Lusser, regarded as the
“father of reliability,” had always harbored a suspicion that the
propulsion systems for which he was chiefly responsible could not
be made reliable enough. He was chief of the reliability section at
Redstone Arsenal, Wernher von Braun’s development center in
Huntsville, Alabama, in the mid-1950’s. In his native Germany,
Lusser had an early-established reputation for genius. He developed
the Messerschmitt ME-109, once the world’s fastest aircraft and a
mainstay fighter of the German Luftwaffe. Lusser engineered the
Heinkel HE-219. Cantankerous and confrontational, he fought with
both Willy Messerschmitt and Heinkel and at one time or other quit
both.
Most famously, or infamously, Lusser engineered the first cruise
missile, the ram-jet powered V-1, the “buzz-bomb.” Thousands were
launched against Britain after the Royal Air Force had defeated the
German manned bombers. And thousands of Britons died.
A few weeks before the official end of World War II in Europe,
on March 13, 1945, one plane left a flight of Allied bombers flying
high over Upper Bavaria, peeled off and sped for a farmhouse in the
middle of nowhere. It was the sanctuary to which Lusser had sent
his wife and four children. A stick of seven bombs was dropped, one
hitting the house, killing Mrs. Hildegarde Lusser. French prisoners
employed on the farm said the plane bore British markings, odd for
the fact that the others in the formation appeared to be American
on the traditionally American daylight raids. The surviving Lussers
have always wondered. But Robert Lusser was away at the V-1 works
at the time.
Unlike von Braun, who arrived in the West at war’s end, Robert
Lusser didn’t get to the United States until 1948, first with the
U.S. Navy at Point Mugu, then the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Labs, and
then at Redstone with von Braun in 1953. Lusser would apply his law
of probability to the rockets being developed with which von Braun
hoped to send men to the moon. But Lusser, whose formula,
RS=R1xR2x…Rn, presaged systems theory thinking, never caught the
von Braun fever for manned space exploration.
In an interview with this reporter in the mid-Fifties, Lusser
declared that “man can never go to the moon, let alone to the
Mars.” He explained in layman’s terms there was simply too much to
go wrong, the probability odds with which he had wrestled a
lifetime were simply too great for the risk. And this from a man
charged with trying to make it happen! Impolitic? Yes, and
especially so at a time when a Senate Majority Leader named Lyndon
Johnson was leading the budget battle for a nascent NASA.
Lusser’s daughter, Traute Grether, recalls her father was
“completely convinced re-entry would not work.” But an America
alarmed by Soviet space achievements was not to be deterred by
mathematical formulae. (It became legendary among U.S. engineers
and program managers at the Cape that if they waited for “the
Germans” in Huntsville to declare their rocket ready they would
never leave the ground.)
In January of 1959 Lusser left Huntsville, returned to Germany
and joined the combined Heinkel-Messerschmitt-Boelkow concern.
Later, he would make European headlines by accurately predicting
the failures of the German-bought F-104 Lockheed Starfighters
because he observed they were being converted into all-purpose
craft which could not meet those requirements. Twenty of the planes
crashed, killing a dozen pilots. Lusser’s Law was not to be
denied.
Lusser spent his last days and a lot of his personal fortune
trying to market a ski binding he had designed to release at just
the right time of stress. He was 69 when he died in January of
1969, seven months before men did what he thought to be reliably
forbidden; they landed on the moon, and came back.
A review suggests that not enough attention has been paid
Lusser’s Law. The Soviets lost a single space pilot and then a
three-man crew on failed re-entries. The United States lost three
astronauts in a launch-pad fire when pure oxygen was used in the
early Apollo craft, necessitating a switch to an oxygen-nitrogen
mix and elimination of flammable materials in the craft. Of five
Space Shuttles built, two have been lost, the Challenger
on launch and most recently the Columbia on re-entry, with
total fatalities of the crews.
As in the past investigations, the Columbia Accident Board will
assign a probable cause and in hindsight it will all look so
preventable. There will ensue a debate over funding for safety.
Heads have already rolled. More may.
Beneath it all, a constant, a mathematical rule of reliability
intuited by a German genius whose name is unknown to most
Americans. Unless they want to know the odds and then consult
“Lusser’s Law.”
Reid Collins is a former CBS and CNN news
correspondent.
