Serious Discord at Top Levels : NASA’s Flaws Extend Beyond Its Launches

WASHINGTON — NASA always thought of itself as something special. It was not a government bureaucracy. It was a team, America’s showpiece. It was the future. It inspired, even when it fell short.

Never did it have a better moment than the morning in 1970 when the crew of Apollo 13 was fished out of the Pacific Ocean, three men who had survived an explosion on the way to the moon. The country had held its breath as their crippled spacecraft plunged homeward, and it welcomed them as conquering heroes when they stepped onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Iwo Jima to the raucous strains of “The Age of Aquarius.”

Now, nearly 25 years after the agency launched its first man into space, the worst accident in the history of the Space Age has turned the National Aeronautics and Space Administration into an agency in crisis.

Flaws in a Process

The month since the Challenger disaster has revealed not only flaws in a launch process that long epitomized Yankee perfection, but serious disarray and discord at the top levels of NASA as well. The new-breed agency that coped heroically in other crises has now been clutched by bickering and uncertainty. Seeds of the trouble had been been germinating for years. With the Jan. 28 Challenger disaster, all of them burst into view.

President Reagan will soon put new leadership in command of the agency, beginning what is likely to be a period of extensive repair and renovation, but the morale of NASA’s 22,000 employees already has been severely damaged and the space program’s prospects on Capitol Hill are more uncertain than at any time in years.

In times of stress, personal pettiness and revenge-seeking are common in bureaucracies--government or corporate. As a man who has spent more than two decades in space program management put it, however: “People expect more from NASA.”

NASA expected more of itself. Its people expected more of themselves. “We are not the Department of Agriculture or the Bureau of Reclamation,” the veteran manager said. “We’ve been special, we’ve been clean, we’ve been free of all this. I’m sick about it. We didn’t measure up.”

Nothing better illustrates that failure than an episode just 72 hours after the Challenger explosion. Behind the green glass doors of NASA’s seventh-floor executive suite, a welter of critical questions were waiting: How best to investigate the cause of the disaster? How best to restore faith in the agency that had carried the nation’s hopes to the moon and beyond? How best to put the pieces of the space program back together again?

But some of NASA’s most senior officials had little time for such issues. Instead, they were worrying about the passenger manifests for NASA planes flying the next day to Houston for memorial services for the Challenger crew. And the burning question was whether they should allocate seats to James M. Beggs, on a leave of absence as NASA administrator two months after his indictment on charges unrelated to the space agency.

The debate simmered and flared, going on for hours. White House aides were consulted. Congressional staffers were called. NASA managers were polled.

The problem was the increasingly public bitterness between Beggs and William R. Graham, two men in awkward juxtaposition at the top of the agency. Graham, the acting administrator, had official control. Beggs, technically on leave, still had the agency’s loyalty. And distrust between the two was deep. Weeks earlier, Beggs had told Graham to his face that he considered him unqualified to fill the administrator’s shoes.

At first, about noon on the Thursday after the disaster, Graham informed aides that Beggs and his wife should be stricken from the manifest of the NASA planes.

Then NASA’s ranking career official--General Manager Philip E. Culbertson--protested that barring the Beggses was a “lousy idea.” The ban was reversed.

Propriety Questioned

Still it was not over. Hours later, from a NASA executive jet bound for Houston, Graham changed position again. The White House counsel’s office had questioned the propriety of a man under criminal indictment getting a free trip on an agency plane.

A Graham aide carried the revised orders to the middle-level officials: If Beggs and his wife got on a NASA jet, they should be physically removed. NASA protocol officers and others, including the agency’s leading supporters on Capitol Hill, were repulsed by the specter of manhandling the 60-year-old Beggs, a tall, patrician figure, and his wife, Mary, a slender grandmother.

They arranged space for the two on another plane.

Unhappily, the graceless struggle over airplane seats was only a taste of things to come.

A 31-day diary of NASA’s top leadership in the days since the Challenger disaster--a chronicle compiled from interviews with more than a score of participants and observers, a cross section of insiders who provided not only their recollections but in some instances their contemporaneous notes and stacks of agency documents--offers a portrait of leaders who did not lead, of human strengths and weaknesses, of a once-great institution that seemed to lose its sense of direction and meander into a swamp of meanness and indecision.

Day 1, Jan. 28, 1986: On this cold winter morning in Washington, William Robert Graham strode through the dim marble corridors of the Longworth Office Building for a meeting with Rep. Manual Lujan Jr. (R-N.M)--a meeting NASA’s acting administrator did not anticipate with pleasure.

As Lujan and Graham both knew, NASA was facing pressures unknown in its glory days: Tighter budgets, wandering public attention, Pentagon hostility, a host of other factors. The shuttle, in particular, had become an awkward hybrid, carrying NASA’s star-spangled banner aloft with glamorous passengers while struggling to keep its federal and private customers happy by lugging assorted hardware into space on an uncomfortably tight schedule.

And Lujan was unhappy.

The ranking Republican on the House Science and Technology Committee, he had long supported the space program. But of late he had been grumbling. NASA was becoming too political and too bureaucratic, Lujan had told his staff. It was losing its old crispness and unity of purpose.

Lujan Liked Beggs

What made matters worse, Lujan thought Graham had neither the personality nor the experience to lead NASA. Lujan liked Beggs a lot better.

Lujan, a graying, deep-voiced insurance broker from Albuquerque, began the meeting by mincing no words. “NASA is supposed to be the National Space Agency,” he declared. “Too much is being decided by your little cliques . . . where is the focus?”

About 10 minutes into his lecture, Lujan paused to turn on a television set to watch the Challenger lift off. He and Graham chatted about how cold it was in Florida.

At Cape Canaveral, bright sunlight flooded through big windows of the launch control room. Outside, temperatures were barely above freezing, but inside it was cozy and calm. Shirley Green watched in wordless awe as Challenger thundered off.

“It is so beautiful . . . it seems so perfect,” Green remembers thinking. It was her second shuttle launch since becoming director of NASA’s public affairs division the previous month.

Big Fireball Flashes

Then, barely a minute into flight, the big fireball flashed against the blue sky. In the control room, no one said a word. There was silence. No sound.

“There must not be anything wrong or someone would say something,” Green thought. But she had reached out to grip the shoulder of Chuck Hollingshead, the Kennedy Space Center’s veteran public affairs officer.

“Is it gone?” she asked when he turned.

“Yes,” Hollingshead said, shaking his head. “It is gone.”

In Room 1325 of the Longworth Office Building, Graham stared at the television screen in silent disbelief. He turned to Lujan: “I need to get back to my office.”

From the Cape, Shirley Green had opened up a telephone line. For the next two hours, it was the only reliable link between the control room in Florida and NASA offices in Washington. A half dozen or so agency officials gathered in Graham’s office, mostly silent, staring occasionally out the window through the gray noon hour at the Air and Space Museum.

Beggs Gives Instructions

Beggs stepped through the door. “You need to get down to the Cape,” he told Graham. “And take Milt with you,” he added, motioning to Milton A. Silveria, NASA’s chief engineer.

Graham said, “Thank you,” and Beggs left. Less than a half-hour later, he returned.

“Here are some names you might consider for the investigative panel,” Beggs said, putting the list on the table.

“Thank you,” Graham said.

The two men, who had hardly spoken in the previous month, would not talk again during the next 30 days.

The Beggs-Graham feud was one more piece of evidence that, at the age of 26, the agency of the future had become just another inward-looking Washington bureaucracy.

For the two decades after Sputnik, NASA had restored the nation’s pride and planted the American flag on the moon. It inspired a renaissance in scientific and technical education. Revered like no others, NASA’s silver-suited astronauts endured in the American heart as symbols of vibrancy and commitment to excellence.

Luster Disappeared

Since those halcyon days, however, the luster had disappeared. Astronauts now walked the corridors of NASA headquarters unnoticed and unrecognized. Long gone were the pathfinders who created the manned space program.

Wernher von Braun was dead. Likewise Kurt H. Debus, the first director of the Kennedy Space Center. Robert R. Gilruth, who first directed the Johnson Space Center in Houston, was long in retirement. Christopher Columbus Kraft, the godfather of all flight controllers, had become an industry consultant.

“There are no more than half a dozen administrative people in headquarters now who would have made the team in the Apollo days,” a longtime NASA official said. “I do not know what has happened with the technical people, but I believe that is absolutely the case as far as administration is concerned.”

“How could it be otherwise?” asked space historian John Logsdon of George Washington University. “I don’t think that should be surprising when you say you are doing something routine. You don’t put your best people on things that are repetitious; that makes it inevitable that you lose them.”

Day 2, Jan. 29: Even before he flew to Florida with Vice President George Bush the afternoon before, Graham had told aides: “Do not let anybody say anything until we are sure it is correct. Make sure nobody speculates on the cause or states with finality how the investigation will be structured.”

To one Texan in NASA’s upper ranks, the message was: hunker down. An agency long proud of its openness was in for a pitched battle with the press.

In a temporary office at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA executives were giving Graham more lists of possible members for an investigative panel. Like the names Beggs had given him the day before, these lists included agency officials uninvolved in the shuttle program, former NASA officials respected in government and industry, and outside experts. To a man, the NASA executives wanted the agency’s leadership to seize the initiative.

A blueprint already existed. Nineteen years and one day before Challenger and its crew perished, fire flashed through an Apollo spacecraft, killing three astronauts. Before word of the tragedy swept the country, then-NASA Administrator James E. Webb already had President Lyndon B. Johnson’s approval for NASA itself to spearhead the investigation, putting it in the hands of space agency officials who had no direct involvement in the Apollo program, men who quickly called on non-NASA experts for help.

Graham Hesitated

This time it was different. Whereas the Apollo astronauts died during a routine test on the launch pad in the evening darkness out of public view, the Challenger horror unfolded in morning sunlight with the world watching. And whereas Webb acted decisively in 1967, Graham hesitated in 1986.

The acting administrator called the White House often, but mostly he talked with lower-level aides. And he left NASA’s internal investigation in the hands of associate administrator Jesse W. Moore, the shuttle program’s director and the man who gave the final approval for the Challenger’s launch.

Day 3, Jan. 30: In ordinary times, NASA’s executive suite is comfortable and serene. On the last Thursday of January, it was tense.

Acting administrator Graham had flown back to Washington late the night before and was at his desk before sunrise. There was much to do. The initial shock was wearing off, replaced by quiet grief and a search for understanding. Questions were being asked about the form of the official investigation. Members of Congress wanted to discuss NASA’s funding plans.

In addition, the President had announced that he would go to Johnson Space Center on Friday to eulogize the Challenger crew. Many on the headquarters staff wanted to be at the Houston services too. Nowhere outside the crew members’ immediate families was the pain deeper than within the NASA family; more than a few found themselves weeping at their desks.

General Manager Furious

Graham was aware of widespread desire to go to Houston but ruled out chartered planes as too expensive. NASA would make do with its small fleet of 12-passenger executive jets and whatever seats the Air Force would make available. The senior staff at headquarters was asked to recommend names for the planes’ manifests, and in the executive offices the lists were slashed to a select few.

Then there was the Beggs issue. When Graham told Culbertson that the man who had headed the agency since 1981 could not go on a NASA jet, the general manager was furious. And when Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) heard of Graham’s decision, he exploded with uncharacteristic fury. Garn, who heads the Senate subcommittee handling NASA’s appropriations and who flew a shuttle mission himself last year, relayed a stern protest to Graham’s office.

Garn did more than that: He complained bitterly at the White House about Graham’s actions and went to Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who ultimately made room for Beggs and his wife on the congressional plane.

Took Unpaid Leave

All of this was happening without Beggs’ knowledge. Since taking an unpaid leave after his indictment in December, Beggs had been working on his defense at his suburban Maryland home, but he still came to his seventh-floor corner office--less than 20 paces from Graham’s smaller office--for a few hours nearly every day, always using a separate, unmarked entrance to the executive suite.

Dating to his tenure as executive vice president of General Dynamics Corp. from 1974 to 1981, the indictment accused Beggs, the company and three other executives of improperly charging the Pentagon $7.5 million in cost overruns on the Sgt. York anti-aircraft gun.

It had been over Beggs’ objections that the President installed Graham as NASA’s deputy administrator last fall, a clear sign that Graham has friends at the White House. Graham, a 49-year-old physicist and engineer with degrees from Caltech and Stanford, was pushed for the NASA job by supporters at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He was on Reagan’s transition team in 1980, then in 1982 became acting chairman of the President’s advisory committee on arms control and disarmament.

A thin man with a trim mustache, he is described by friends as extremely intelligent--”his IQ goes off the chart,” one said--but somewhat reserved, almost shy. “He’s best in a one-on-one situation, not in a group or a public appearance. But once you get to know him, it’s different,” one colleague said. Aides say he has a remarkable capacity for “operating on several tracks at one time, keeping up with everything.”

But his critics within NASA--and they are legion--call him a vindictive ideologue. “He’s not one of us,” one high-ranking veteran said.

Day 7, Feb. 3: Beneath the chandeliers of the White House Roosevelt Room, Graham stood beside Ronald Reagan but one step behind him as the President announced formation of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.

“It’s been almost a week since our nation and families stood together as we watched Challenger slip beyond our grasp,” Reagan said. “ . . . as we move away from that terrible day, we must devote our energies to finding out how it happened and how it can be prevented from happening again.”

Two days later the commission, headed by former Secretary of State William P. Rogers, would hold its first meeting. Within a week it would start raising questions about NASA launch procedures; within two weeks it would order Graham to remove from NASA’s internal review group all agency officials involved in the launch decision; within another 10 days Rogers would flatly blame NASA officials for decision-making that was “clearly flawed.”

Pinning Down the Cause

To many past and present space agency officials, the Rogers commission was doing its job backward: searching for someone to blame long before it pinned down the cause of the explosion. Instead of following the well-established system used in airline crash investigations, it had been tempted into blame-finding instead of fact-finding. The press, in NASA officials’ view, was even worse.

“The responsibility will be established in time,” former astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt said. “The most important thing is to be sure we know exactly what went wrong, and to know beyond doubt that we have fixed it before we go out to launch again.”

And, in a polarized NASA, many were blaming Graham for allowing the commission to take charge of the inquiry. “If he had acted in the first days like Jim Webb did back in ‘67, this never would have happened,” one ranking NASA engineer said.

Day 18, Feb. 14: Phil Culbertson had been telling friends for days that he was growing more uncomfortable around Graham. Their relationship, never warm before the Challenger disaster, had grown chilly, he said.

Just before Beggs began his indictment-induced leave, he had designated Culbertson as the agency’s general manager. It was a new position, with responsibility for NASA’s day-to-day affairs. Beggs’ reasoning had gone like this: If the White House insisted on installing the inexperienced Graham as acting administrator, at the very least it should allow an experienced NASA manager to have a voice near the top. Graham could be Mr. Outside; Culbertson would be Mr. Inside.

The appointment of Culbertson, a veteran engineer deeply respected up and down the ranks, was hailed by many within the agency and on Capitol Hill. But it did not seem to sit well with the newest arrivals in the executive suite--Graham and his closest aides.

O-Ring Problems

The inevitable showdown came at dusk on the 18th day after the disaster, the end of another grinding day, another trying week. Graham called Culbertson into his office and said he was distressed by the fact that Culbertson had approved a contract without Graham’s knowledge and that Culbertson had known about NASA studies on rocket booster O-ring problems but had not told Graham until a newspaper got wind of a critical analysis.

Graham said he could no longer rely on Culbertson’s judgment and he wanted him to step aside voluntarily. Culbertson refused. Graham then handed him an alreaDy-signed memo to all officials in charge of NASA programs. It withdrew, “effective immediately, the specific responsibilities delegated to the position of general manager.”

Day 24, Feb. 20: Facing a dozen television cameras and scores of reporters in NASA’s press briefing room, Graham sat stiffly behind a table on the low stage, flanked by Moore and Richard H. Truly.

He was announcing that Moore, the associate administrator, would be moving to Houston shortly to take over as director of the Johnson Space Center, a move announced five days before the Challenger disaster but not scheduled to happen until summer. Truly, a former astronaut who had made two shuttle missions and now was a rear admiral heading the Naval Space Command, would replace Moore as director of the shuttle program and head of NASA’s internal review.

No, Graham said, this was not a direct result of the Rogers commission’s findings. It had been in the works for months. Truly was surprised by Graham’s statement. He said he had not been approached until the previous Friday. That, it was later disclosed, was about the time Rogers called Graham to tell him the commission had decided NASA’s shuttle decisions may have been flawed and that officials involved in the Challenger launch should be removed from the internal investigation.

And no, Graham said, the reports of low morale and bureaucratic infighting were wrong.

‘A Sense of Teamwork’

There “is a sense of teamwork and spirit to work together,” he said. “The whole team is pulling together. I have never seen such a spontaneous coming together. . . . I find no low morale.”

Moreover, he declared, there is “no bureaucratic infighting going on in NASA.” Yes, he added, “I have streamlined the front office slightly. . . . I have taken the general manager out of the day-to-day chain of command,” but he “is still general manager.”

Day 30, Feb. 26: Jim Beggs had decided to quit. White House spokesmen had been saying for weeks that the President would not ask for his resignation but would welcome it if offered. Beggs had made it clear he did not want to resign unless and until he received assurances that Graham would not get NASA’s top job. He had not talked directly with the President, but his friends on Capitol Hill said they had gotten a pledge that Reagan would go outside the agency for a new administrator.

The night before in their comfortable suburban home with its Federal-period furnishings, Beggs and his wife, Mary, went over the letter to the President, scratching out some words and adding others. At midafternoon, an aide delivered it to the White House counsel’s office, the same office that was said to have recommended against letting Beggs and his wife get on the NASA plane to Houston.

“I realize the difficulties and unhappiness the past events have caused you and your official family, as well as my personal family,” Beggs wrote. “ . . . I consider my association with NASA to be the most rewarding experience of my professional life. I salute the fine men and women of the agency who have demonstrated a dedication and professionalism second to none. Their achievements have earned the admiration of the nation and the world.”

Day 31, Feb. 27: The White House, swamped with the aftermath of Ferdinand E. Marcos’ overthrow in the Philippines, acknowledged receipt of Beggs’ letter but had no immediate presidential response.

There were no such distractions in NASA’s executive suite: At dusk, the agency’s legal counsel was given a memo from Graham. Call Beggs, the memo instructed, and tell him he is forbidden to leave the agency with anything belonging to NASA.