NASA received repeated warnings about the safety of the space shuttle programme before the deadly wake-up call over the weekend when the Columbia broke up 40 miles above the Earth.
It emerged yesterday that US government auditors, former technicians and other experts had cautioned NASA that budget cuts at the space agency were putting the lives of astronauts in danger.
As recently as last April, the chairman of the aerospace safety advisory panel had told Congress that NASA's management of the shuttle programme was causing grave concerns.
"I have never been as worried for space shuttle safety as I am right now," said the then chairman of the panel, Mr Richard Blomberg.
With space exploration sinking as a political issue, NASA has undergone severe budget cuts in the past decade. Funding for the shuttle programme has been cut by 40 per cent since 1990.
The most recent safety concerns had been sparked by the space agency's plans to extend the life of the existing fleet of shuttles by 25 years.
There are no new shuttles in construction and the basic design was drawn up in the 1970s. The Columbia, built in 1981, was the oldest of the fleet, although NASA has denied that its age and number of missions could be the cause for the break-up. This was the Columbia's 28th trip to space.
In his report, Mr Blomberg said that belt-tightening had caused funding that could have been directed to improving safety to be soaked up by day-to-day operations instead. Proposals for some form of escape capsule for astronauts had remained on the drawing board because of cost.
"My concern is not for the present flight or the next or perhaps the one after that," he said. "One of the roots of my concern is that nobody will know for sure when the safety margin has been eroded too far. All of my instincts, however, suggest that the current approach is planting the seeds for future danger."
In a sideswipe at the White House, he said budgets were "not sufficient to improve or even maintain the safety risk level of operating the space shuttle".
Funding for NASA and other civilian agencies involved in the space programme was cut by US $1 billion last year. In contrast, defence department spending in the US on space programmes was increased by $600 million.
Mr Loren Thompson, a defence industry analyst for the Lexington Institute, a thinktank, told the Washington Post: "The civil space programme that NASA runs has been neglected for a generation, and as a consequence we find ourselves flying increasingly aged technology."
NASA vowed after the Challenger disaster that it would put safety far ahead of all other considerations, including budgetary constraints and political pressure.
NASA did not entirely dismiss the concerns of the report in April but maintained that it would never compromise the safety of astronauts. "We will never launch when it is unsafe," Mr Fred Gregory, then NASA's director of space flight, told the House of Representatives science and space subcommittee. Yesterday the head of the space agency, Mr Sean O'Keefe, promised NASA would "make sure this never happens again".