Report to Blame NASA ‘Baronies’ : Shuttle Panel to Focus on Decision Flaws at Agency’s Marshall Center

Days before he and his ace rocket team transferred from the Army to the just-organized National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1960, German-born rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun came up to Washington from Huntsville, Ala., for a private talk with his new boss.

He wanted to know just where his men stood in NASA’s developing plans. “All we want,” he told NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan, “is a very rich and very generous uncle.”

Von Braun, who was soon to become the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, was only half joking.

System Worked for Years

“That has been the attitude at Marshall from that day until this,” says a longtime official of the U.S. space program. “Just give us the money, and we’ll get the job done.”

And for years, the approach worked. Washington indeed was a “very rich and very generous uncle.” And the Von Braun team developed gigantic rockets, including those that transported astronaut crews to the moon and launched them within milliseconds of schedules announced weeks in advance.

But on Monday, the official report of the blue-ribbon commission appointed by President Reagan to investigate the Challenger disaster will publicly fix much of the blame for history’s worst space accident on that same Alabama space complex.

The report concludes that the accident resulted both from a faulty engineering design and a flawed NASA decision-making process. And it holds that NASA now must deal with an underlying problem foreshadowed by Von Braun’s visit to Washington more than two decades ago:

Dominated by Powerful Men

While nominally controlled from its Washington headquarters, NASA has long been dominated by powerful leaders in the field centers that run the manned spaceflight program--not only Marshall but the Johnson Space Center near Houston and the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

“Neither Huntsville nor Houston ever understood that they worked for Washington,” says George Washington University historian John Logsdon. “In the beginning, you had Robert Gilruth in Houston and Von Braun in Huntsville, both strong, independent and autonomous. They were like feudal barons protecting the baronies.”

From what is already known of the commission report, and from records and interviews with a wide range of past and present NASA officials, it is clear that the unrestrained competition between the centers and their stubborn autonomy contributed to the atmosphere in which the Challenger accident occurred.

That unrestrained competition--persisting long after Von Braun and other giants had passed from the scene and NASA’s management had begun to atrophy--played a critical role in the sad deterioration of a “can-do” agency that once set a new standard of excellence in government.

Centers Competed Intensely

Although the line of responsibility was theoretically clear--Marshall developed rockets, Houston developed and operated spacecraft, and Kennedy launched them--the giant centers actually competed for everything from budgets, payrolls and new facilities to influence over the basic decisions charting America’s future in space.

At times, the competition reached the point of absurdity.

In the 1960s, for example, a need began to develop for expertise that would enable astronauts to do extensive work outside their space vehicles while in orbit. And Von Braun, though theoretically supposed to concentrate on rockets and leave astronaut training to other centers, sought funds to build a huge water tank at Marshall so that engineers and astronauts could wear pressure suits and simulate working in the weightlessness of space.

When Washington said no, according to a one-time aide to the rocket designer, Von Braun built the tank anyway--diverting funds budgeted for road construction and repair. After the water tank was completed, Von Braun invited George Mueller, NASA’s manned space flight chief, to Huntsville for a demonstration, and once Mueller had put on a space suit and tried out the tank himself, he was sold.

Local Interests Defended

Houston’s astronauts soon found themselves training in Alabama.

Officials at the Houston space center responded with budget requests for a tank of their own, carefully cloaking their plan in vague descriptions so that it would not appear to be duplicating the facility in Huntsville. Watchful Von Braun lieutenants repeatedly spotted the duplication and pointed it out to Alabama congressmen, who defended their local interests by repeatedly striking the item from NASA’s budget.

Houston retaliated by sending worn-out or leaky space suits to Huntsville when Marshall requested such equipment for training activities in its water tank.

This bureaucratic warfare went on for years, ending only when Houston got its own tank.

The conflicts were sometimes far more serious.

Houston Officials Sensitive

In 1967, three astronauts died when fire erupted in a sealed Apollo spacecraft during a training accident at Kennedy Space Center.

Responsibility for that tragedy belonged to Houston, just as the Challenger accident has pointed to Huntsville. At the time of the investigation, sources say, some Houston officials were furious at the finger pointing their way and even hesitated to cooperate when Eberhardt Rees, Von Braun’s deputy at Marshall, was named to head a special panel reviewing the problems with the Apollo command module.

Nor was the rivalry limited to Houston and Huntsville. According to another former Marshall official, it extended to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, whose first director was Kurt H. Debus, a member of the original German rocket team and a close friend of Von Braun.

Debus, who set out to establish his own center in the same orbit with Huntsville and Houston in the NASA cosmos, was said to have been miffed on one occasion by the massive news media attention heaped upon Von Braun when the Marshall director was in Florida for a launch.

Independence Survives

Von Braun and Debus are now dead and Gilruth has long been retired, but their old empires’ stubborn independence from Washington has survived them.

Anticipating a presidential commission recommendation that the NASA field centers be put on a shorter leash, James C. Fletcher, NASA’s new administrator, last month recruited retired Air Force Gen. Samuel C. Phillips to undertake a study of the agency’s management, including the way Marshall and the other centers operate.

Ironically, some critics blame Fletcher for turning too much authority over to the centers during his first stint as NASA’s boss in the 1970s, when the agency completed the Apollo lunar exploration program and began developing the shuttle. At the outset of the shuttle program, Fletcher designated Johnson as the “lead center” for the project, backed up by Marshall and Kennedy.

It was an effort to streamline management and moderate competition for budgets and influence. In the view of some critics, however, the move only perpetuated excessive rivalry at a time when the space budget was being cut and the centers were fighting to preserve their turf, their programs and their payrolls.

Didn’t Recognize New Roles

“The problem,” says a former space agency official who declined to be identified, “was that the people at Marshall refused to acknowledge that they had been reduced to a vendor, and the people at Kennedy would not accept the fact that they only provided a service.”

Says Harold T. Finger, an assistant administrator of the agency during the 1960s: “After giving the centers their head, after putting the responsibility in the field, Fletcher didn’t have sufficient means to keep check on them.”

Ultimately, Fletcher’s attempted reform probably failed because the independence of the centers and the rivalries between them were deeply rooted in the origins of the space agency, which was created in 1958 after the Soviet Union launched the first man-made Earth satellite.

The Marshall center, established in the summer of 1960, was nothing more than a piece carved out of the Army’s Redstone Arsenal. It was built around Von Braun’s team of 118 rocket experts who came to the United States from Germany after World War II, and its leader was the glamour boy of the space program before there were astronauts--a charismatic figure who wrote and spoke compellingly of manned space stations and expeditions to the moon and Mars.

Inspired Loyalty

By contrast, Gilruth, the first director of the center at Houston, was a retiring man who inspired intense loyalty among young engineers but was visibly uncomfortable in the public spotlight.

A New Experience

The nucleus of his Houston organization came from the old National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, an underfunded, old-fashioned and largely unnoticed research and development organization that had nonetheless managed to keep the United States at the leading edge of aeronautical research for four decades.

Finding themselves under Washington’s wing was a new experience for managers who had spent their careers with little bureaucratic interference.

According to Glennan, the first NASA administrator, it rankled Gilruth when he was told that a quality control and reliability specialist at NASA headquarters would monitor the centers on safety issues. Gilruth’s group was not accustomed to such oversight by bureaucrats in Washington, and he said so.

“I’m sorry,” Glennan replied, “you’re going to have somebody else looking over your shoulder now.”

Staffs With Narrow Vision

Compounding the sense of fierce independence felt by Von Braun and Gilruth was the makeup of the space center staffs--legions of engineers a full generation younger than they and fresh from Southern colleges such as Georgia Tech, Auburn, Mississippi State and Virginia Tech.

“By and large, they did not come from scientific backgrounds or rich cultural or intellectual traditions,” said a former NASA official who served in a top post for more than a decade. “They were ordinary people who wore crew cuts and preferred the comics to the editorial pages. What set them apart was their intelligence. In their fields, they were brilliant. They were pioneers. But they were very narrowly focused.”

The men who grew up in the space centers at Huntsville, Houston and the Cape also lacked a larger perspective on the space program itself. One result was a parochial loyalty that ultimately opened the way to disaster.

Marshall over the years has been even more independent than Houston, a consequence, perhaps, of the heavy German influence. “There is a certain closed character about Marshall,” said Logsdon, “an unusual arrogance, and at the same time a paranoia, perhaps because it has been a place that the Office of Management and Budget wanted to close.”

May Date to World War II

A member of the presidential commission recently speculated that Marshall’s “fortress mentality” dates to World War II. In Germany, where it developed the notorious V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, the Von Braun organization was ever fearful of reporting bad news to Berlin.

“They didn’t tell Berlin,” the commission member said, “and they didn’t tell Washington.”

After Von Braun was summoned to Washington by NASA in 1972 in the hope that he could help rally support for a manned expedition to Mars, the leadership at Marshall passed first to Rees, his deputy, and then to Apollo program director Rocco Petrone, who had worked closely with the Von Braun organization since their Army days. Then, 10 years ago, another Von Braun protege, William R. Lucas, took over.

Sources in NASA, the aerospace industry and the presidential commission say the decline in Marshall’s internal management came under Lucas, who resigned last week amid the continuing controversy over the Challenger accident.

Hierarchy Called More Rigid

According to Marshall sources, the center’s hierarchy had become more rigid and the director less accessible--problems aggravated, they say, by the fact that the shuttle program lacked the professional and intellectual challenges of earlier pioneering in space.

Lucas’ management did not become publicly controversial until the Challenger accident. The press had paid Marshall--and the rest of NASA--less and less attention. The agency’s relationship with Congress was in the nature of a romance, as evidenced by its giving Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) and Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) a ride in space.

But it was Marshall engineers who oversaw the design of the shuttle’s tragically vulnerable solid rocket booster. It was Marshall officials who waved off warnings and cleared the way for the Jan. 28 launch that claimed the lives of seven crew members 73 seconds after liftoff.

Even during the long investigation of the accident, Marshall’s leaders infuriated members of the presidential commission. In the face of powerful evidence to the contrary, they publicly contended they had made no mistake. And in private, they suggested the blame lay hundreds of miles away at the Kennedy Space Center, where Challenger’s booster rockets were assembled for launch.

Letter Criticizes Lucas

In the wake of the stunning disclosures that Marshall officials had approved the Challenger’s launch in the face of sharp warnings, the Huntsville Times received a letter purportedly written by a senior manager at the center who described Lucas’ management style as “feudalistic.”

The letter, signed only “Apocalypse,” said: “The only criteria for career advancement is total loyalty to this man. Loyalty to country, NASA, the space program mean nothing. . . .We have learned that we must tell him he is right even though he is wrong in order to survive.”

If much of the trouble originated at Von Braun’s old stand, a presidential commission source says NASA’s top management bears equal responsibility for the Challenger disaster.

There are now strong indications, in General Accounting Office reports and elsewhere, that the shuttle program was never well-managed. “There was no management of this program,” a member of the presidential commission said last week. “Even without the accident, the program would have ground to a halt by this point.”

Says Beggs Relaxed Control

Another commission member says James M. Beggs, NASA’s administrator from 1981 until earlier this year, relaxed the space agency’s control of the shuttle program in particular. He says Beggs must bear a heavy share of the blame because he proclaimed the shuttle an operational system, approved increasingly ambitious launch schedules and inspired the programs to take ordinary citizens, such as New Hampshire schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, into space.

But if the commission recommends--as expected--that NASA headquarters in Washington bring the field center baronies hard to heel for the first time, it is already clear that task will be neither easy nor a panacea.

Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), the first American to orbit the Earth, recently raised a voice of caution. “I think the effort to put Houston in control was a good one,” he said. “That’s where the final authority should be. That’s where I would want it to be if I were going up in the shuttle.

“Everything just can’t be run out of Washington. You’d have a bureaucracy of 10,000, and pretty soon it would be beyond all control.”

The people at Marshall refused to acknowledge that they had been reduced to a vendor. . . ‘