NASA Awarded Thiokol Bonus of $75 Million

Despite “a long-festering problem” with the space shuttle booster rockets, NASA awarded manufacturer Morton Thiokol Inc. a $75-million incentive bonus, a congressional report says.

The award was earned before the January destruction of the shuttle Challenger, which was traced to a leak in a joint on the right rocket booster, the House Science and Technology Committee said in a report on the accident.

Morton Thiokol has received $34.1 million in payments since the accident and is owed about $41 million, said Robert C. Ketcham, committee general counsel who wrote the final version of the report. He said he was told by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that there have been no payments since May.

Blame Put on NASA

“So, I guess it was April,” he said, adding that “they are not paying for anything that happened after January.”

Ketcham repeated an assessment from the report: “One must not fault Thiokol for collecting the bonus; one must fault NASA for allowing the bonus to be collected at all.”

NASA spokeswoman Barbara Selby said she was trying to get the facts behind the assertions in the report, which was issued Oct. 29.

“Under its NASA contract, Thiokol was never penalized for any of the numerous SRB (solid rocket booster) flight anomalies,” the report said. “The booster joint had never worked as intended, nor was its behavior at ignition ever clearly understood.”

25 Incidents of Leaking

There had been more than 25 instances of leaks past the booster’s O-ring seals at the time of accident, the report said, and the rate had been increasing since Morton Thiokol--the sole source for the boosters--had received its production contract in 1983.

“The seal problem was serious enough to lead both to briefings at headquarters and to establishment of a re-design task force. Yet, in spite of all these problems, Thiokol was eligible to receive a near-maximum incentive fee of approximately $75 million,” said the 442-page study. “But, in the final analysis, it was NASA that both approved the SRB design and drew up an SRB contract which contained no provisions for performance penalties or flight-anomaly penalties.”

Ketcham said the committee feels that NASA has to reexamine its contracts to see whether they can provide more incentives for safety and quality and that NASA’s new safety and quality assurance office should be involved in drawing up the pacts.