I may be a skeptic - having been expelled from UT Austin's Aerospace
Engineering a semester short of my Ph.D for having found a faster,
safer, more efficient Earth to Mars trajectory - but I doubt very
seriously that any reforms at NASA will last even into the next
administration.

They have already established a rigid constraint against success.
After all the middle managers have their psych evaluations, and a
chance to change; some new people will be brought in, and others
relocated. The office environment they will be faced with will be
quite hostile (people despise psych tests to begin with, and abhor
anybody who replaces a supervisor who is outsoured by one), and the
bright, creative, resourceful new managers will be crushed to a pulp
in no time. Resistence is futile. Conformity is the evil beast in
the closet of every worker, everywhere - especially with jobs being
sent overseas by the boatload, competition for the few that remain
escalating. There's no way in hell you can isolate anybody anywhere
from those pressures...

Be that as it may, the only possible way NASA will succeed in creating
the kind of corporate culture they are mandated to create is to
institutionalize the reforms - all managers, until the end of time (or
NASA, whichever comes first) must pass these psych reforms. Those who
implement the psych reforms must themselves be policed, and thus be
beyond politics.

Which brings up another problem: psychiatry is synonomous with
politics. Consider that ten years ago there was a popular self help
technique promoted by psychiatry called orgasmic reconditioning. This
is a way for gays to re-orient their sexuality. In recent editions of
the same textbooks, this technique is not even mentioned.
Psychiatrists now consider it too stressful - or, reading between the
lines, they've been lobbied by gay groups to excise it from the
medical lexicon because it implies that gays are mentally ill. The
consequences of this has been that the rest of the population has been
denied the use of this important practice: adulterers wanting to
re-orient their cravings from prostitutes to lawful spouses; clerics
wanting to get turned on my Jesus instead of small boys; even good
christians wanting to try and get an erection from porn instead of
viagra.

So NASA is going to have to isolate the shrinks from the politicians,
as well as from the pharmaceutical companies. Good luck.

A formitable problem is that the NASA culture extends far, far beyond
the 18,000 official employees - to perhaps five times that many
contractors, academics, consultants, and aerospace firms. All of
these institutions are much worse than NASA when it comes to freedoms
of speech and willingness to speak out, and to do the job right the
whole damn aerospace universe has to be gutted of all the prejudice,
fear, and loathing not only for psychiatrists but for bright,
courageous, outspoken people period. Moreover, given the blurring of
boundaries with our international friends because of the International
Space Station, the reforms must be practically global. Every space
agency in the world will have to implement the same reforms, and the
same long term stragety. We're talking Star Fleet Command as an
adjunct to the United Nations here, not some minor NASA pencil
sharpening ~ and it will have to be so high profile that the only
feasible office building is the replacement towers for the 9/11
attacks in New York City.

Like I said, it will never happen. I predict the next major space
disaster will happen within five years, NASA will be shut down, and
the American space effort will die an ignominous death. We might as
well save the space program the expense and gut NASA of all its non
commercial contracts, delegate the pieces that are left to the
military space commands, and accept as inevitable the status quo of
scientific conformity that's been in place since the Dark Ages.

Given the horror I experienced at UT Austin, I admit that I won't
myself shed a tear when that happens. I certainly won't turn over a
finger to try and help it happen otherwise.

Bill Clark