THE CHALLENGER: AN AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY : Fletcher Pledges NASA to Make Technical, Managerial Reforms

NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher, pledging that the blue-ribbon presidential commission’s work will “not have been in vain,” said Monday that the agency will “respond directly” with technical and managerial reforms to the panel’s recommendations.

Fletcher said the panel’s recommendations seem “reasonable” but insisted that he needs more time to study them before agreeing to implement any one of them. He refused, for instance, to say whether the agency would restrict shuttle landings at Kennedy Space Center in Florida or establish an internal safety review office--both recommendations of the commission.

Although he agreed with the commission that the shuttle remains a “research and developmental vehicle,” Fletcher nevertheless said he envisions the orbiter carrying private citizens into space, once safety concerns are resolved. He also defended NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which bore the brunt of criticism in the commission’s report, and stressed that he does “not anticipate wholesale retirement for the space agency.”

‘Outstanding Talent’

“The Marshall Space Flight Center has some very talented individuals. . . . We could not have reached the moon without it,” Fletcher said of the facility in Huntsville, Ala. “So it is a center with outstanding talent, and it should not be treated any differently than any other part of NASA, as far as management improvement is concerned.”

In general, however, Fletcher said the report’s conclusions are “certainly not entirely undeserved” and pledged that the space agency will “overcome our errors.”

“I think the accident was clearly caused by a series of mistakes within NASA, procedures, a marginal design,” he said.

‘Day of Tension’

Although the report’s long-awaited release Monday--which Fletcher called a “day of tension” for the agency--culminated one of the most intense government investigations in recent history, NASA workers elsewhere expressed little surprise at the commission’s findings and agreed with those they had heard.

Bob Register, a NASA computer analyst at the Kennedy Space Center, said he is glad that commission Chairman William P. Rogers focused the bulk of his criticism on Marshall during a press conference after the report’s release.

“I don’t think there needs to be any changes here at Kennedy,” Register said. “The SRB (solid rocket booster) responsibility is with Marshall. That’s the problem: Marshall.”

Other Kennedy employees, however, complained about job pressures and low morale. “The (launch) schedule was too tight before the accident,” said a Rocketdyne mechanic who requested anonymity. “But even that wouldn’t make a difference if we had a good atmosphere.”

Criticism Welcome to Some

To some employees at Marshall, the criticism was welcome news. Engineer William C. Bush, a longtime critic of the center’s management, said the commission’s description of the Alabama facility’s isolationism from the rest of NASA was well deserved. Marshall management has an “us vs. them” mentality and equates dissent with disloyalty, Bush said.

“Everybody in a position of responsibility has to ape the boss in order to maintain their position,” Bush said. “They have to have the same noxious attitude. Dissent is a bad word.”

Employees of Morton Thiokol Inc., manufacturer of the solid rocket boosters, generally described as fair and even-handed what little they knew of the report. Although some were stung by criticism of the company’s original testing of the rocket joint, whose failure has been blamed for the shuttle disaster, “nobody came out to use a hatchet on anyone,” one employee said.

Endorsed by Thiokol Chief

In a statement released from the ompany’s Chicago headquarters, Thiokol Chairman Charles S. Locke endorsed a commission recommendation that an independent committee oversee redesign of the rocket joint and seals. The company already has begun to redesign the joint and seal.

The responsibility for the shuttle accident was not laid entirely to the company and NASA. In Washington, for example, some members of Congress blamed themselves for failing to have scrutinized the space agency more carefully and predicted intense oversight and more generous budget allocations in the wake of the disaster.

Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), chairman of the House Science and Technology subcommittee on space and applications, said it is now up to Congress to investigate what “slipped through the cracks” of the probe.

Flew Shuttle Mission

Nelson, who represents the district that includes the Kennedy Space Center and who flew on the last shuttle mission before the Challenger explosion, said he wants lawmakers to “concentrate on areas of communications breakdowns and getting astronauts more involved in decision making.”

Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), who was the first American to orbit the Earth, said, “As the commission has shown, the mind set of a few people in key positions at NASA had gone from an optimistic and super-safety-conscious ‘can-do’ attitude, when I was in the program, to an arrogant, ‘can’t-fail’ attitude on the day the Challenger exploded.”

Rep. Manuel Lujan Jr. (R-N.M.), ranking minority member of the House Science and Technology Committee, praised the commission’s report and its recommendations but described its tone as “rather subdued.”

Believes There Is Negligence

“I don’t think they went far enough,” Lujan said. “I think there may be negligence involved inasmuch as NASA knew about the O-rings,” the rocket seals that triggered the shuttle accident. Lujan said he believes that there is “negligence on both the part of the contractor and NASA.”

Lujan said that Congress has been too soft on NASA and predicted tougher scrutiny. “The committee has been too cozy with NASA,” he said. “We’ve just been really an extension of NASA.”

Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Technology subcommittee on space, said the report indicates a need to re-evaluate an overreliance on the shuttle to carry out the bulk of the country’s space chores. But Gorton, pointing to recent failures of unmanned launch vehicles like France’s Ariane rocket, cautioned that they “aren’t a magic solution either.”

Fiscal 1987 Budget

Both the House and Senate versions of the fiscal 1987 budget resolution contain money to build a new orbiter. However, Gorton noted, the orbiter money is also linked to other provisions requiring revenue increases to pay for a new shuttle--implying that Reagan will have to accept a tax increase of some sort to pay for the vehicle, rather than take the money from some other program.

Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), another member of the Gorton’s subcommittee, said lawmakers will move swiftly to attach many of the commission’s recommendations to the NASA appropriations bill for fiscal 1987, thereby giving them the force of law.

Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), a member of Nelson’s space subcommittee, said his only reservations about the report are that the commission was not empowered to examine congressional pressures and restraints on NASA that could have contributed to the accident.

Also contributing to this story were Barry Bearak in Florida, David Treadwell in Alabama, J. Michael Kennedy in Houston, and William C. Rempel in Washington.