Inertia and Indecision at NASA

"Inertia and Indecision at NASA"
_New York Times_ - August 27, 2003

The bitter bottom line of the Columbia disaster comes down to this: NASA
never absorbed the lessons of the Challenger explosion in 1986, and four
successive American presidents never decided where America's space
program should head after the cold war — and what it would cost in
dollars and risk to human life to get there.

Those were the brutal conclusions of the Columbia Accident Investigation
Board, issued yesterday six and a half months after a sunny Saturday
morning when Americans awoke to the horror of another space shuttle
disintegrating in the sky. What is striking in the 248-page report,
however, is how little had changed in the 17 years between the
disasters. The same keep-it-flying culture found to have disregarded
ample evidence of a fatal flaw in the O-rings in the Challenger case
failed again to heed warning signs that foam debris could cause deadly
damage to the aging, fragile Columbia.

At the same time, the culture in the White House and Congress was
changing, but for the worse. In the 1990's, the board found, budget cuts
and trade-offs ate away at the shuttle program's thin margins of safety.
Meanwhile, the capital was awash in indecision about where America was
headed in space, with moonwalks passé, Mars seeming too far and
dominance of space another chapter in the dusty history of the cold war.

"We are challenging the government of the United States" to make up its
mind, Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., the commission's chairman, said
yesterday, alluding to the ease with which politicians hail the shuttle
program while cutting its budget by 40 percent.

"We need to decide as a nation what we want to do," Admiral Gehman, who
is retired, warned. The solution, he said, was not just a modernized
shuttle. "We shouldn't start by designing the next vehicle," he said.
"That is a trap that we've fallen into several times."

The challenge places President Bush in essentially the same place
President Ronald Reagan was after the Challenger explosion. Confronting
a $480 billion budget deficit this year and many more years of deficits
to follow, does Mr. Bush want to commit to expending the money and
energy needed to remake the nation's space program, the step the
commission said was critical to averting a third disaster? Or do
problems on earth, like bringing order and democracy to Iraq, battling
terrorism or rebuilding another aging technological behemoth — the
electric power grid — rank higher?

The evidence suggests that, like Mr. Reagan, Mr. Bush might be tempted
to go with small fixes rather than big new ideas. He has not publicly
discussed the space program or its goals at any length since he spoke at
a memorial service for the Columbia astronauts in February. The subject
was scarcely mentioned in his 2000 campaign, or in his administration's
national security strategy.

In fact, the cold war imperatives that made the program so potent a
political symbol for John F. Kennedy — and that were fading but still
discernible in Mr. Reagan's time — seem gone for good. The commission's
space historian, John M. Logsdon, concluded that played a crucial part
in the Columbia's awful end.

"No longer able to justify its projects with the kind of urgency that
the superpower struggle had provided," he wrote for the commission, "the
agency could not obtain budget increases through the 1990's. Rather than
adjust its ambitions to this new state of affairs, NASA continued to
push an ambitious agenda of space science and exploration."

But the agency could no longer afford that agenda, Mr. Logsdon wrote,
especially under pressure to divert funds to the International Space
Station and projects supporting a new relationship with Russia.

Mr. Bush did not discuss this when he issued a brief statement yesterday
thanking the commission for its work, and saying, "Our journey into
space will go on." When asked in recent days, Mr. Bush and his advisers
spoke of the space program as an important symbol, but hardly a cause
that moves voters anymore.

"Kennedy was able to relate space exploration to a greater national
cause," a Bush adviser said earlier this week. "I'm not sure that exists
today."

If Mr. Bush is merely the latest president to put off grappling with
the big issues of space, NASA also allowed complacency to take hold,
ignoring the most fundamental lessons of the Challenger disaster.

Senior managers, for example, did not want to hear possible
flight-stopping news. Buried in the report is a reference to a
statistical "sleight of hand" by NASA before the flight that understated
the chances of falling debris causing irreparable damage.

To those who remember the Challenger investigation, it was an echo of
the suppressed memorandums that commission uncovered, when engineers
sent out urgent warnings that it was too cold to launch the Challenger,
and were ignored.

"It's the same damn thing," said Gen. Donald Kutyna of the Air Force,
retired, a gadfly on the Challenger commission along with the physicist
Richard Feynman. "They didn't learn a thing. We had nine O-rings fail,
and they flew. These guys had seven pieces of foam hit, and it still
flew."

By all accounts, Admiral Gehman did a more penetrating job than his
counterpart 17 years ago, former Secretary of State William Rogers.
General Kutyna recalled that the cautious Mr. Rogers "clearly viewed his
job as protecting NASA."

Now, the only way to protect NASA may be to remake it and give it a
clear mission beyond running the world's most sophisticated freight
train to low-earth orbit. And that will touch off the next round of an
old debate, about whether keeping humans in space to conduct
experimentation is worth the risks. Many scientists believe it is. Many
politicians love the image, and are willing to vote for manned space
programs, not robotic ones.

Bruce Murray, professor of geophysics at the California Institute of
Technology and a former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said
that was another priority that might have to change. "When push comes to
shove, they recommend to continue flying the shuttle," Professor Murray
said. "They end up buying the NASA program, not exposing an analysis of
alternatives to it."

"The question they don't ask," he said, is, "does it make sense to
continue?"

[end of article]

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