The Houston Chronicle February 09, 2003
NASA facing a test crisis of trust
By Tony Freemantle
Mere hours after Columbia was lost with all hands, before shock had time to give way to grief, details of the doomed spacecraft's last minutes were known to the public.
Ron Dittemore, the space shuttle program manager, and Milt Heflin, the chief flight director, sat alone at a table at the Johnson Space Center, their haggard faces heavy with sadness at the loss of their friends and colleagues.
This is what we know so far, they said, and for nearly two hours in a televised briefing they laid it out in meticulous detail.
It was remarkable enough that the two men, who had been awake since the early hours of that morning to guide Columbia back to Earth, were up to the grueling, emotionally draining task of facing the world so soon after the shuttle broke up over Texas. What perhaps was more striking was what their performance revealed about how NASA had changed since the last time, almost exactly 17 years earlier, that the agency faced such a disaster.
NASA took nearly three years to get back into space after the shuttle Challenger blew up shortly after liftoff in 1986. It took that long in part because, in addition to repairing the spacecraft's physical flaws, the space agency had to completely rebuild its public image, which lay in ruins as a result of mistakes it made responding to the crisis.
Today, underfunded and its mission under siege, NASA cannot afford to make those errors again.
Within hours of the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and its crew on that frigid morning, NASA knew what was happening in the final moments of the spacecraft's brief and fatal flight. Not why it was happening, but at least what was happening. Instead of sharing this information with a world seeking answers, the agency imposed a complete news blackout that stretched for days, weeks, months.
What little information the public was getting came from leaks to the news media, not from senior managers at NASA who had retreated into the bunker, nor from its public information officials who were guarding the doors.
"There was a horrible revulsion in public opinion at the cover-up by NASA in the Challenger case, and they are determined not to let that happen again," said David Acheson, a member of the Rogers Commission, the blue-ribbon panel appointed by President Ronald Reagan to investigate the disaster. "Some people at NASA must recall how close NASA came to losing the confidence of Congress and the taxpayers."
A week after the disaster, NASA's determination appears to be holding. Every day since Columbia was lost, except for Tuesday, when the nation paused to mourn the loss of the astronauts, the agency has held two extensive and exhaustive news briefings, with senior managers and administrators laying out what the investigation has revealed.
If there has been any criticism of NASA's performance to date, it has arisen over who should be doing that investigation. So much is riding on what is found, and on how the process is conducted, that even the perception that the investigation is anything but independent could be damaging.
The day after Columbia's breakup, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe named a blue-ribbon panel headed by retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman and weighted with military officers and NASA personnel to conduct the inquiry. The panel's makeup immediately was questioned as being too close to NASA to be sufficiently independent of the agency.
On Thursday, eager to head such criticism off at the pass, O'Keefe announced that new, as yet unnamed, members will be added to the panel.
"This is to absolutely guarantee that we eliminate any ambiguity as to the independence of this board," O'Keefe said. "We want to be sure that we are not eliminating any sort of possibilities of what could have contributed to this accident."
The Rogers Commission, headed by William P. Rogers, a former secretary of state and U.S. attorney general, was made up of individuals from a broad spectrum of society, including astronauts, scientists, lawyers, engineers, journalists and military officers. The panel specifically was designed to convince the public that it would seek out the answers without intervention from NASA.
Eugene Covert, a member of that commission who now is professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recalled that Rogers told his colleagues that he wanted an open and thorough investigation, with all facts on the table, so as to avoid the controversy and conspiracy theories that arose when the Warren Commission, investigating the assassination of President Kennedy, issued its report.
"I was very much opposed to doing it in an open way at first," Covert said. "But I am now convinced it was the correct way. Public confidence in the space program was shaken after Challenger because NASA's response was to draw the wagons into a circle. I think the agency is now trying very hard to maintain a level of credibility by giving out details."
Covert warned, however, that the credibility of the investigation could hinge as much on perception as it does on reality. The makeup of any board investigating the disaster should avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest if NASA wants to maintain public confidence, he said.
Donald Kutyna, a retired Air Force major general who also served on the Rogers Commission, said NASA obviously has learned lessons from the Challenger experience. The agency, he said, also is vastly different from what it was 17 years ago, when management failures had almost as much to do with what went wrong as technical failures.
"NASA had a problem after Challenger," Kutyna said. "This time NASA does not have a problem. They are doing it so much better. It took us two weeks to get a timeline out of NASA on the Challenger; this time it was done in one day."
The NASA of 1986 is very different from the NASA of 2003, though the modern version is not trouble-free. It is chronically underfunded, and chronically under siege from a broad range of opinion that questions the value of shuttling humans through the most dangerous reaches of the Earth's atmosphere without any vision of journeying to the beyond.
The old NASA had the very real problem of living up to its promises. When it was conceived, the shuttle program had been sold to President Richard Nixon partly on the basis that it would be a money-making venture -- shuttling commercial payloads into space on a regular basis for a fee. The reality, evident by 1986, was that the complex vehicles possibly would never be able to shuttle to and from space with the regularity that would make that concept feasible.
"The problem they had at the time of Challenger was that they were trying to get the flight rate up to 24 launches a year," said John Pike, a space policy expert at GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area think tank, and a former space policy director for the Federation of American Scientists. "This pressure to fly was driven by the fundamental economics of the shuttle program."
In the post-Challenger years, Pike said, the agency also knew full well that without a clear purpose for the shuttle program, another catastrophe could doom it, which may have been why NASA was so eager to get a space station, or at least a partially built space station, into orbit before that happened.
The international space station, with its quasi-permanent human crew, gives NASA an immediate argument for conducting a transparent investigation into the Columbia accident and then getting what is left of its shuttle fleet flying again as soon as possible. Russian Soyuz spacecraft for the moment can service the crew and bring it back in an emergency, but, ultimately, there is no space station without the shuttle, and vice versa.
While the public is unsure of where NASA is going beyond the space station, confidence in the agency and its shuttle program remains strong even after the Columbia accident, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted last Sunday. Most Americans want to see the shuttles continue flying.
The test, said Pike and others, is how the public views the agency in several months' time, a perception that will hinge on how NASA handles the investigation into the Columbia disaster. For the shuttle program to continue, whatever its mission, public confidence will be paramount.
"Unavoidably, there is going to be some rough sailing here because unavoidably, it will eventually be understood that mistakes were made and eventually it will be understood that someone was asleep at the switch," Pike said. "But if this develops into a massive cover-up of pervasive incompetence and there is an absence of accounting, things could go badly."
Americans want to continue going to space, and, by a vast margin, they want humans to continue going to space. This by no means is a universally held opinion in policy circles, where people like Acheson seriously question the cost and dangers of doing so. The space shuttle program is "showmanship," not science, Acheson argues. The lion's share of NASA's budget goes to protecting the crew, when it should be going to science, which can be conducted without humans.
But, said James Oberg, a former shuttle engineer who now writes extensively on the space program, this view misses the point -- the public remains committed to the space program precisely because of human involvement. It is a forgiving public, too. It can accept that mistakes will be made, as long as those mistakes are not covered up.
"The fundamental contribution that NASA makes to this country is genuinely spiritual," Oberg said. "What they do is remind us that cultures that explore have a future. NASA's activities are at the heart of that. If they blow it, if they don't play in a credible way, that future is in jeopardy."
Ironically, openness has its pitfalls.
There is a fine line between withholding information and giving out too much information, said Jim Burnett, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates airplane crashes. NASA, he said, in an obvious attempt to hold nothing back, may be straying too much into the realm of speculation and analysis, something the NTSB resolutely avoids.
The investigation also has to be cold and clinical, he said, another reason that it is not a good idea to have too many NASA people on the panel investigating the accident.
The other potential downside of giving out too much information, said Pike, is that if there is no definitive answer within months despite all the talk, details, theories and speculation, the public's confidence in the "can-do" spirit of the agency that put men on the moon could erode.
"If they quickly find an obvious technical flaw and quickly fix it and quickly return to flight status, that's good," Pike said. "If it comes up to the end of the month and they don't have a clue about what went wrong, or have different theories, none of them particularly compelling, Houston will have a problem."
Copyright © 2003, The Houston Chronicle
