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Official had warned of NASA safety issues
By John Aloysius Farrell and Glen Johnson, Globe Staff, 2/2/2003
With official investigations just getting underway, it is not known whether any of NASA's problems contributed directly to the Columbia disaster. But analysts in and out of government say that NASA has lost vital personnel to downsizing and retirement, with a commensurate loss of technical expertise and crucial skills. The agency has been stalled in its multibillion-dollar effort to replace the shuttle fleet. And, according to federal investigators, it does not exercise adequate safety control over the private contractors that operate shuttle missions. NASA's morale is down because of recent operational failures, and its work force is graying and functioning under high levels of stress, according to government watchdogs.
NASA's science and engineering staff has three times as many workers older than age 60 as it has younger than 30, a congressional report said last month. In addition, an early suspect as a possible cause of the Columbia disaster - insulation on the exterior fuel tank - was identified as a concern in the late 1990s. But the sought-after improvements were put on a long budgetary path that did not guarantee completion until 2005. ''I have never been as concerned for space shuttle safety as I am right now,'' Richard D. Blomberg, the former chairman of the aerospace safety advisory panel for NASA, said last spring in testimony to Congress. Without major changes in priorities and funding levels, he predicted, ''Nobody will know for sure when the safety margin has been eroded too far.'' In the report issued last month, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said: ''NASA's shuttle work force has declined significantly in recent years to the point of reducing NASA's ability to safely support the shuttle program.'' The agency's problems have coincided with an ambitious number of space shuttle missions, which are inherently high-risk ventures with the slenderest of margins of error. Specialists on NASA offered diverging opinions on whether the agency's troubles and its 20-year-old shuttle fleet might have contributed to the accident. But all agreed that NASA and its mission are bound to confront major reappraisals. Howard McCurdy, a social scientist at American University and the author of six books about NASA, said: ''I think we're committed no matter what to the space program. It's not like NASA is going to get its budget cut in half. But the priorities for spending may change radically.'' The shuttle has always been a high-risk venture, McCurdy said. ''You worry that it finally caught up with us: the fundamental design,'' he said. ''There are a lot of components on the shutle for which a component loss can very quickly cause a vehicle loss.'' A series of safety improvements were made after the Challenger disaster, in 1986. But in recent years several analysts have begun to issue fresh warnings about the possibility of another catastrophic accident. One of the biggest problems faced by NASA is its aging work force. The generation of young engineers and systems operators who won the race to the moon in 1969 has been departing, in part because of government downsizing and in part because of retirements. From 1995 to 2000 the shuttle work force declined by a third, according to a report from the General Accounting Office in 2000. This left ''many key areas that are not sufficiently staffed by qualified workers'' while ''the remaining work force shows sign of overwork and fatigue.'' GAO investigators noted a rise in the number of employees seeking assistance with stress-related problems through federal programs. They also published a long list of NASA ''skill shortages,'' which included project engineering, avionics, design, robotics, computer systems, structural dynamics, and safety engineering. The result, according to NASA, was ''significant shuttle program flight safety risks,'' the 2000 report said. NASA's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, in congressional testimony delivered July 18, 2002, said: ''Even a few retirements can be critical. Everywhere I go across the NASA centers, I hear the same story: `We're only one deep. We can't afford to lose that skill.''' In an attempt to address its personnel problems and to save money, the operation of the shuttle program was increasingly turned over to private contractors - the big aerospace and military corporations that have worked hand in hand with NASA. A 2002 report by the NASA Office of Inspector General, however, warned that NASA had not exercised proper oversight of the contractors, a failure that ''could lead to lapses in safety oversight, increasing the risk of harming personnel and damaging space shuttle hardware.'' Thomas Jones, a former Air Force pilot who spent 11 years as shuttle astronaut and flew four missions, including one on Columbia in 1996, said that the astronauts maintained confidence in the private contractors, but that they worried about budgetary pressures on both private and government operations. ''Those people are all very high quality,'' Jones said of the contractors. ''We were all very confident in the talent and the skills of the people there. We were all concerned we would not know when the low end of the scale would be, when you would start cutting into the bone.'' In the 1990s, NASA spent much money and effort on a program that was intended to replace the shuttle with a second-generation spacecraft, which during testing was known as the X-33 and X-34. According to congressional testimony, the existing shuttle is expected to fail in one of every 250 voyages. The second-generation program was supposed to have a one-in-10,000 failure rate, though that was a profile that some analysts called unrealistic. After six years and $1.3 billion spent, NASA ended the second-generation program after experiencing a variety of technical problems. That left the agency with a crucial decision on how to proceed. As President Bush took office, the agency essentially decided not to decide, in part because NASA and the Department of Defense could not agree on the new spacecraft program's exact role. NASA told Congress that it would study options and put off a decision until at least 2005 on whether to begin work on a program to replace the shuttle. In the meantime, NASA said, money would be invested to extend the current shuttle's operational life. Michael Kranish of the Globe Staff contributed to this report. John Aloysius Farrell can be reached at farrell@globe.com.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 2/2/2003.
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ASHINGTON - The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is a troubled agency whose own leaders have joined federal and congressional investigators in warning that a catastrophic accident, such as the one yesterday, could be expected if the technical expertise and the shuttle fleet continued to deteriorate.
