Cost Cutting Trumped Key NASA Safety Upgrades

Under relentless pressure to cut costs, NASA has scrapped hundreds of millions of dollars in safety upgrades for the space shuttle program, canceled efforts to modernize equipment and laid off thousands of workers performing maintenance or safety inspections.

Since 1990, the space agency’s spending on the shuttle has been cut by Congress, three presidents and NASA itself, even as the program was touted as an important national undertaking and officials proclaimed a policy of “safety first.” As a result, the shuttle program is left with aging or obsolete equipment, experts say.

The loss of Columbia eight days ago followed years of warnings from outside advisors, aerospace executives, lawmakers and NASA officials that the program was underfunded and that another crash was growing more likely.

“It is not like this is completely unexpected,” said John Pike, a longtime space expert in Washington. “You can’t do this on the cheap. There was a hallucination that reduced spending would actually improve safety.”

Not even the shuttle’s most strident critics blame the budget cuts and shelved upgrades for the demise of Columbia and its seven-member crew. With NASA still mystified by the cause of the eldest shuttle’s destruction, they say, it’s impossible to know whether the zeal to control the agency’s budget contributed to the disaster.

After the Challenger blew up in 1986, a massive investment into safety was made with a 50% increase in spending on the space shuttle that peaked in 1990 at $5.5 billion. By 2002, the shuttle budget had shrunk 40% to $3.3 billion.

In the process, major upgrades were killed or delayed endlessly.

New details about these abandoned upgrades and their ramifications for safety surfaced last week in interviews with dozens of experts, and in reviews of more than a decade of NASA safety reports and budget documents.

Among the highest-priority upgrades that were never carried out:

* A safer replacement for three auxiliary power units, which use highly explosive chemicals, were mothballed by NASA two years ago. The power units are considered the shuttle system most likely to cause a safety problem.

* Congress in 1993 killed a lightweight and more reliable replacement for the giant rocket booster that caused the Challenger explosion.

* Last year, NASA officials killed a replacement for the 1970s-vintage computer system used to prepare and launch the shuttles at the Kennedy Space Center.

* More than half of the maintenance personnel and safety inspectors at NASA and aerospace industry sites across the nation were eliminated since the early 1990s, raising concerns among critics who say the agency should be increasing the inspection workforce as the shuttle fleet ages.

“I defend NASA because they are trying to find a way to continue and keep flying with less and less money, but I don’t know how Congress or anyone can expect NASA to keep flying safely with less and less money,” said Chris Hunt, a millwright who is president of Local 525, Transport Workers Union of America, the oldest union at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA officials say they never cut or delayed any shuttle effort that involved safety, and that upgrades were meant to address future problems, not present ills. Indeed, NASA has made significant safety improvements over the years, and two years ago completed a $145-million retrofit of Columbia that was intended to help eliminate a number of problems.

But other big-ticket modifications were put off because the agency had hoped to replace the shuttle fleet by 2004. Now, the shuttle program launched by President Richard Nixon in 1972 is expected to operate for at least another decade -- perhaps until 2020.

Over the last decade, NASA’s efforts to modernize the shuttle were often stymied by unrealistic cost estimates, budget overruns, schedule delays and cancellations.

W. Brian Keegan, former NASA chief engineer, said the agency came under intense pressure to cut costs during the 1990s while also ensuring the safety of the shuttle flight, which required “more money than we had.”

As such, NASA officials were forced to assess and prioritize what upgrades were the most critical and often had to put off certain improvements or “make trade-offs.”

“There were many substantial, lengthy discussions on how best to accommodate the budget cuts in a way that would not compromise safety,” Keegan said. “We had many difficult choices to make, and I believe everyone in the agency feels that there were no decisions made that would have contributed to the degradation of safety.”

He added: “The reality of the matter is that what you thought was a good decision can still result in a bad outcome.”

The last two NASA administrators have made budget cutting a priority. Daniel S. Goldin, who headed the agency from 1992 to 2001, made “faster, better, cheaper” his mantra as he pushed NASA to drastically change its culture and outsourced many of its operations to private contractors. In a September 2001 interview with The Times, he said, “Every safety indicator is up, and we are spending $1 billion less a year on the shuttle.”

However, critics say NASA was growing complacent. Immediately after the Challenger explosion, it put the probability of another loss at 1 in 78, but by 1996 it had upgraded that estimate to 1 in 248. By 2001, the estimate was 1 in 483.

Goldin was succeeded by Sean O’Keefe, who was known as an advocate of NASA austerity even before he arrived. He served as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget before taking over NASA, keeping spending programs on a short leash.

As the White House and Congress trimmed the NASA budget, worried voices were drown out.

In unusually candid congressional testimony in 2001, Michael J. McCulley, a top officer for the aerospace contractor that maintains the shuttle and prepares it for launch, warned, “The ice is getting thinner under our feet as we move out toward the middle of the lake.”

A minority in Congress was equally concerned. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), a former shuttle astronaut and ardent advocate of the program, said he repeatedly complained to the White House and congressional colleagues about delays in upgrades to the shuttle.

“I fear that if we don’t provide the space shuttle program with the resources it needs for safety upgrades in the future, our country is going to pay a price that we cannot bear,” Nelson said at a September 2001 hearing of the Senate science, technology and space subcommittee.

“We’ve got accountants making life-and-death technical decisions for our astronauts and our ground crews, instead of the engineers and program managers.”

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No Power Upgrade

Among the upgrades that the space agency canceled after substantial effort was a replacement for the shuttle’s auxiliary power system, which provides the hydraulic power needed to operate flight controls during reentry.

The power system has been a persistent problem, causing significant launch delays, endangering ground inspectors and on two occasions leading to a near disaster.

Each shuttle has three of the power units, two of which are required to land. The third is used as a backup. The equipment is powered by hydrazine, a highly volatile chemical that ignites when exposed to air.

In 1988, a Newport Beach aerospace consultant, working under a $1-million contract, warned NASA that power system failures could triple the chances of a disaster from 1 in at least 200 missions to about 1 in 70.

NASA officials dismissed the report, according to published reports, and said they had already made improvements, including fire and corrosion protections. They also vowed to discontinue such studies because they were “not really telling us any more than we already know.”

The study followed several failures, including a fire aboard Columbia as it landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base in 1983. A day later, NASA inspectors found a charred rear compartment. Hydrazine had leaked from two of the three auxiliary power units during orbit, but it froze in the cold environment of space. As Columbia reentered the atmosphere, the fuel melted and ignited.

That wasn’t the only fire involving the system. In 1999, a fire erupted during maintenance and three inspectors slapped it out with their gloves.

“The end result was they put the fire out in about 25 to 30 seconds and the damage was minimal,” said McCulley, chief operating officer for United Space Alliance, who described the incident in congressional testimony. “But it points out ... that there’s not just flight hazards associated with these types of fuels; there are also ground hazards that we have to deal with.”

After the fire, the National Research Council recommended the agency make upgrading the power equipment among its top priorities.

“Few systems are more important to the safe operation of the shuttle than the auxiliary power units,” said the council, a congressionally chartered advisory group.

But NASA officials canceled the upgrade in 2001 after cost projections rose from $224 million to $667 million. By then, the agency had spent $70.4 million.

William Readdy, a former astronaut and NASA’s deputy director for the office of space flight at the time, testified that the decision was “prudent” considering the cost overruns and the technical difficulties of developing a new generation of small, lightweight batteries for an electrically-powered system.

A NASA official reiterated the agency’s position Friday.

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1970s Computers

When the shuttle lifts off from Kennedy Space Center, it projects an image of U.S. prowess, but the technology is often obsolete. Nowhere is that more true than in the computer system used to prepare and launch the spacecraft.

The system was developed in the late 1970s, using mainframe computers built by a manufacturer that has long since left the business.

“As this system aged, the cost to maintain it grew and grew and grew,” said Kevin Brown, a vice president at CCT Corp., an engineering firm advising NASA. “I wouldn’t call the technology primitive in the sense that it was from the 1940s or 1950s, but there are technologies today that are capable of higher performance.”

Indeed, new home computers have 2,000 times the memory of the NASA launch system. It has an archaic computer language no longer used, making it difficult for NASA to find anybody who can work on it.

The agency even has been forced to build its own electronic components to keep the old hardware running, Brown said.

Replacing the system has been a top priority, but O’Keefe, the NASA administrator, canceled that effort last summer after $273 million had been spent on it. Originally expected to cost $206 million, NASA estimated the system would end up at $533 million by 2005.

A spokesman for Lockheed Martin, a key contractor, said the effort was impeded by the difficult task of converting 1970s-era software to a format that would run on modern computers. About 3 million lines of computer code needed updating.

As a result of the cancellation, NASA could end up using its system for another 20 years, a commitment to old technology that would be improbable in a private company.

In a final embarrassment, a top NASA official announced layoffs to 570 employees in a parking lot at the Kennedy Space Center. It enraged O’Keefe.

“I found that to be an absolutely outrageous display of poor leadership,” he told reporters.

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$2 Billion Spent

Congress has had a direct role in killing several high-priority NASA programs, including one to develop more powerful and efficient rocket engines.

After the Challenger loss, caused when joints on the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters leaked flames, NASA embarked on an ambitious $4-billion program to develop and build an “advanced solid rocket motor” that would have fewer joints. NASA argued the new rockets were safer, less costly and could lift heavier payloads.

After $2 billion had been spent, the House voted 401-30 in 1993 to kill the program. Critics said the project was behind schedule and over budget, branding it pork-barrel politics.

So the agency began again from scratch, designing a liquid-fueled booster that would cost $4 billion to $5 billion.

NASA said the boosters would improve safety by allowing the shuttle to more carefully abort a takeoff, and save $400 million a year in operating costs. The latest effort has received little support in Congress.

Pike, the space expert, said the tortured saga of the boosters illustrates the typical pattern of NASA upgrades. Programs are started with too-little funding, fall behind schedule, run into costly technical difficulties and then are ultimately branded a failure by Congress. NASA then restarts a new effort and repeats the cycle.

Since cutbacks in the early 1990s, NASA has sliced the maintenance staff for the shuttle program from 4,000 to 1,700 at its facilities around the country. In the last six months, NASA has hired some new staff but remains far below the levels of the early 1990s.

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Staffing Takes Big Hit

Outside studies have warned the cutbacks have hobbled safety efforts and caused undue stress on remaining workers.

“The large reduction in NASA quality-assurance inspectors for each shuttle is very disturbing,” said an independent assessment written in 2000 by Henry McDonald, then the director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The report also cited a number of workmanship problems on the Discovery.

Union officials say they are concerned about NASA management but do not routinely see serious safety problems not being addressed.

“Space exploration is inherently dangerous, and from time to time there is going to be bad news, catastrophes, disasters,” said Lynn Beattie, an electrician who is president of International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. “Sometimes when you start thinking you can run the space shuttle program like an airline, you’re heading for disaster.”

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Vartabedian reported from Los Angeles, and Fineman from Washington. Times staff writers Peter Pae in Los Angeles, Aaron Zitner in Washington and John-Thor Dalhburg in Florida contributed to this report.