Skepticism on NASA Reforms

America’s most spectacular spaceflight successes were born of reforms spurred by catastrophic accidents -- from the fatal Apollo fire that paved the way for the first moon landing to the Mars Observer mishap that fostered efforts to explore the Red Planet.

Time and again, it took the shock of disaster or death to galvanize NASA’s senior managers and an engineering bureaucracy blinded by belief in its own infallibility, historians and sociologists said.

“Periodically, NASA gets vaccinated with an accident,” said space policy analyst John Pike, who operates the national security Web site GlobalSecurity.org.

The causes of the fatal Columbia accident, however, so closely mirror the management flaws and engineering miscalculations that killed the seven crew members aboard Challenger 17 years ago that many analysts are skeptical of NASA’s capacity today for reform and self-renewal.

Despite persistent efforts to mend its ways, the space agency is still afflicted with the curse of the “can do” attitude, they said. NASA is afraid to admit failure, all but incapable of accepting independent criticism and unwilling to trim its space-faring ambitions to match its resources.

The world’s only reusable spacecraft and its crew foundered not on the unexplored reefs of space, but on familiar shoals of bureaucratic incompetence, imprudent cost-cutting, management pressures and political expediency, investigators said.

“Some of the issues facing NASA now are at least as old as the Apollo fire,” said Duke University historian Alex Roland.

Public revulsion at the serious safety problems uncovered after the Apollo fire in 1967, which killed three astronauts during a launchpad test, provided the impetus to revolutionize the management of human spaceflight, said American University historian Howard McCurdy.

Substandard aerospace contractors were brought to heel; design flaws were reworked; policy dictates were abandoned and key managers were replaced. Among other things, NASA was ordered to put fire extinguishers in future space capsules.

NASA itself was forced to adopt a more thorough method of spaceflight operations called systems management, pioneered by U.S. Air Force project leaders in their development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“The result was that we went to the moon without losing any astronauts,” McCurdy said, even though the agency had anticipated that almost one-third of the Apollo astronauts might die in the effort.

While the hard-won management lessons of the Apollo fire helped NASA secure victory in a race to the moon with the Soviet Union, they were forgotten as the space shuttle program took form in the early 1970s.

To secure funding approval, NASA officials seduced the taxpaying public with breezy promises of routine access to space, 52 shuttle flights a year, orbital industries and a tenfold reduction in launch costs, historians said.

But the people in charge of the shuttle program ran afoul of fierce schedule pressures and the engineering reality of running the most complex flying machine ever built. Danger signals were overlooked or, worse, taken as reassuring evidence that systems could survive safely outside their operating margins.

It took another accident in 1986 -- and the death of the seven Challenger crew members -- to force the agency to change its ways.

In a harsh assessment of NASA and its shuttle managers, the presidential panel that investigated the 1986 disaster, the Rogers Commission, insisted that the agency strengthen the safety organization that oversees the shuttle, reduce its flight rates, redesign its solid rocket boosters and improve communications so that safety concerns could be more clearly heard within the organization.

At the same time, President Reagan stripped the shuttle program of its national security responsibilities and revoked permission to use it for commercial payloads.

Congress appropriated billions of dollars for a new shuttle orbiter and much-needed repairs for the entire shuttle fleet. An astronaut -- Rear Adm. Richard H. Truly -- was installed at the helm of the shuttle program.

For a time, the reforms ensured the safety of human spaceflight.

“NASA responded to the Rogers Commission in just the right way,” Roland said. “Over time, their resolve simply eroded. The Columbia accident is a repeat of the Challenger accident. It is the same systemic failure.”

With engineers afraid to speak out and mission managers avoiding bad news, the program’s complex rules and reporting procedures became a parody of safety and quality assurance operations, analysts said.

“Safety was in there sandwiched between cost and schedule needs,” said sociologist Diane Vaughan at Boston College. “Managers lost touch with the experimental nature of their program.”

Former chief NASA historian Roger Launius, now head of the space history department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, said the Challenger and the Columbia accidents had one thing in common -- a failure of communication.

“There was a sense of fear, a refusal of those in the trenches to stick their necks out because they were afraid of losing their jobs,” Launius said.

Even so, dozens of engineers did voice their concerns about possible debris damage to Columbia, while the crew was still safely in orbit, just as engineers 17 years ago tried to halt the launch of Challenger.

They were ignored.

Managers belittled their concerns or chided them for stepping out of the chain of command.

At the same time, the investigation into the causes of the Columbia accident exposed a fundamental lack of trust among NASA, the White House that sets its course, and the Congress that funds its dreams.

George W. Bush is the first president since Eisenhower “who has no idea why he has a human spaceflight program,” Pike said. As a policy matter, the Bush administration sees spaceflight as just another federally subsidized transportation system, not so different from Amtrak or the national highways, several analysts said.

While Congress endorsed NASA’s ambitions, it refused to fund their true cost, Vaughan said. In response to the Columbia accident, Congress so far shows little inclination to fund any additional costs of accident recovery or the development of a successor to the space shuttle.

“Despite all the post-Challenger changes at NASA and the agency’s notable achievements since, the causes of the institutional failure responsible for Challenger have not been fixed,” the Columbia accident investigating board wrote in a report released Tuesday.

Unless those flaws are fixed, “the scene is set for another accident.”

Such problems are not confined to human spaceflight. Unmanned space exploration has struggled with them as well.

In 1999, NASA tried to follow up on its successful Pathfinder mission by sending an orbiter around Mars and a lander with two additional probes to the surface, all for less than the cost it had taken to send Pathfinder to Mars in 1996.

The probes failed.

“People were doing the best jobs they could,” said Bruce Murray, a former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped analyze the Mars failures. “But because of the funding levels, they ended up selling something they couldn’t deliver.”

Investigators criticized officials at NASA headquarters for not wanting to hear any bad news about the program from JPL in Pasadena. They rebuked JPL officials for not making clear that they either needed more money or more time to make the mission a success.

NASA leaders acknowledged they had been “cheap” and severely scaled back their timeline to explore Mars, postponing for two years a plan to land on the planet and saying they would wait at least a decade before launching an ambitious probe to collect samples of Mars rocks and return them to Earth.

With extra cash reserves and additional reviews, the first mission to explore Mars after those failures -- the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter -- performed flawlessly.

But the agency’s chronic mismatch of vaunted ambition and modest funding may affect the two NASA spacecraft now heading to Mars.

Conceived as a relatively modest lander very similar to Pathfinder, the project mushroomed into the most scientifically complex space probes ever created. Their complexity and the rush in which they were completed has engineers extremely nervous about whether the January landings of the Mars Exploration Rovers will be successful.

“If one of these [Mars probes] fails,” Launius said, “we’re right back where we started from.”

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Preventing future accidents

Some recommendations from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s final report, released Tuesday:

* Try to eliminate debris shed from the external fuel tank while increasing the shuttle’s ability to sustain minor debris damage.

* Improve preflight inspections of the thermal protection on shuttle wings.

* Develop methods to inspect and do emergency repairs of any potential damage to the shuttle’s outer thermal layer -- during a mission -- with or without the aid of the international space station.

* Improve launchpad maintenance.

* Develop computer models to better evaluate damage caused by debris.

* Upgrade imaging systems on the shuttle and the ground to take better pictures of the shuttle during and after liftoff.

* Better train the mission management team to handle emergencies.

* Establish an independent technical engineering authority, funded from NASA headquarters, to identify and analyze possible hazards. It would be the sole waiver-granting authority for technical standards and would independently determine launch readiness.

* Give NASA headquarters’ Office of Safety and Mission Assurance direct authority over the safety of the shuttle program, providing its resources independently.

* Submit annual reports to Congress on the progress of implementing safety measures.

* By 2010, recertify all shuttle components and systems for operation.

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To read the complete accident report, go to latimes.com/columbiareport.

-- From Associated Press