‘Jury Is Still Out’ : NASA Shows Visible Signs of Recovery

On Wednesday, it will be a year since seven space voyagers, the robust image of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the illusion of routine operations in space perished in the fireball of the shuttle Challenger.

At 11:38 a.m., the same moment that the Challenger’s fatally flawed booster rockets ignited in 1986, setting in motion the worst tragedy of the Space Age, NASA will lower its flags at installations from Wallops Island off the Virginia coast to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

And from Houston to Huntsville, Ala., to Washington and the Florida launch site itself, tens of thousands of NASA and aerospace industry employees will pause for 73 seconds of silence--one for every second of Challenger’s nine-mile ascent toward disaster from Launch Pad 39B.

Memorial Service Scheduled

In the early afternoon, several family members and a few of NASA’s top officials will meet at the chapel at Ft. Myer, Va., adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, for a private memorial service for the seven who were lost--among them Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the 37-year-old schoolteacher who was to have been the trailblazer for all the “ordinary people” who would ever fly in space.

A year after the accident suddenly left the American space program in utter shambles and NASA a confused, dispirited bureaucracy, the agency has begun making visible progress toward putting the disaster behind it. Its focus has shifted from the accident to preparation for another shuttle launch on Feb. 18, 1988, a date unanimously agreed to be heartily optimistic.

Although the space program is still far from its old self, NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher is encouraged. “NASA is stronger now than a year ago and is growing stronger every day,” he declared earlier this month. “We’re getting our house in order and getting our act together. We have turned the corner in our recovery efforts.”

Fletcher’s evidence is the markedly quickened pace of activity throughout the agency and the shops of its hardware contractors in recent weeks. For example:

--During the last six weeks, the shuttle’s sophisticated main engines have undergone test firings equivalent to six full orbital missions.

--A five-man crew, composed of veterans of the shuttle’s most difficult flights, has been named to begin training for the first post-Challenger mission.

--Officials have expressed confidence that the first of the redesigned solid booster rockets, modified to prevent the seal failure that caused the Challenger tragedy, will be ready to ship from the Morton Thiokol plant in Utah to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in July.

--Contractors are nearing the completion of reviews of all the shuttle’s safety-critical systems and components.

--A decision has been made to modify the orbiter hatch, installing explosive bolts to instantly remove it and give crew members a chance to bail out of a stricken shuttle in gliding flight once it has descended to 20,000 feet.

With 200 mandatory changes and another 200 “prudent” changes expected to be made, experts agree, that the shuttle will be a substantially safer vehicle when it flies again.

Months Before Decision

However, it will still be months until NASA and Morton Thiokol will be ready for the first full-scale test firings of its redesigned booster rocket--tests that will probably determine whether there is a chance to launch the shuttle Discovery 13 months from now.

“If we test our fix and find that it is wrong, that we haven’t solved it, then we have another very major delay ahead of us,” NASA Associate Administrator Philip E. Culbertson said. “We’re all hoping, expecting that we have the solution, but we will have our fingers crossed until we get there.”

And redesign of the huge booster rocket is only part of the tortuous recovery.

An investigation of the Challenger accident by a special presidential commission found that NASA itself needed fixing as badly as the notorious O-ring seals that leaked. The space agency, therefore, has given as much priority to its management and decision-making processes as it has to fixing the ill-designed booster.

After years of seeing its powerful Johnson, Kennedy and Marshall centers operate as competing fiefdoms overshadowing their national headquarters, the agency has moved to strengthen Washington’s authority.

Three New Directors

Besides beefing up headquarters’ management, NASA has put a new director in charge of each of the three centers responsible for the shuttle program. The centers have, in turn, carried out their own reorganizations, including larger safety units that report directly to center directors.

Fletcher still has not satisfied everyone that his management has been as firm as the situation demands.

The agency’s recovery effort so far has been a “mixed bag,” says Robert B. Hotz, retired editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine who served as a member of the presidential commission.

“In some areas, they are still stumbling and fumbling,” Hotz said. “We were afraid that in the solid rocket booster modifications they would try to just put a Band-Aid on it, and it looks very much like that is what they are doing.” Hotz contends that NASA may have been too predisposed to going ahead with booster modifications that it already had in mind before the accident investigation.

‘Sense of Unease’

Others’ concerns are less defined. “On the surface, it looks like all the right things are being done,” said space historian John Logsdon of George Washington University, “putting new people in top management, reorganizing, fixing the shuttle and getting a good, solid budget--but there is still a sense of unease, a feeling that these things aren’t really taking hold. People are not yet convinced that this is working, so the jury is still out.”

But at NASA, the feeling is that the agency has turned around.

Top NASA officials have pledged to carry out more than 100 recommendations made in a nine-month study of agency management by retired Air Force Gen. Samuel C. Phillips, who directed the Apollo moon landing program during the 1970s.

Nearly all of the officials directly involved in the decision to launch the Challenger in the face of serious concerns over the extreme cold weather that morning are gone.

Jesse W. Moore, who was chief of the shuttle program at the time, was reassigned back to headquarters. He has taken a leave of absence, and NASA sources said he is still “in the process of depressurizing.”

Influx of Military

No fewer than six military officers have been installed in management positions in recent months, including Air Force Lt. Gen. Forrest S. McCartney, as director of the Kennedy Center, and Rear Adm. Richard H. Truly, a former astronaut who returned to the agency three weeks after the accident to direct the investigation and run the shuttle program.

Responding to recommendations of the presidential panel, which was headed by former Secretary of State William P. Rogers, several astronauts in addition to Truly have been brought into management.

In addition, after the nine-month management study by Phillips, NASA last month created a new associate administrator’s post exclusively dedicated to space flight operations, and the agency promised that it would consider putting operations of the space shuttle and the planned space station under one boss.

In Houston, Eugene Kranz, the veteran director of flight control operations, hailed the move as having historic importance, giving operational activities a stronger hand to compete for its share of the agency budget.

Debate Over Role

“There has for a long time been internal NASA debate over whether we are a research-and-development or an operational agency,” he said. “We are finally recognizing that operations is a major element of the agency.”

Nowhere is the shake-up at NASA more evident than at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, where officials were blamed with pressuring Morton Thiokol management to approve the Challenger launch.

Gone into retirement are most of the participants in a long night of deliberations that ended with Morton Thiokol management overruling its own engineers on the eve of the launch: Lawrence B. Mulloy, the center’s solid rocket project manager; Stanley R. Reinartz, manager of its shuttle projects office; George B. Hardy, deputy director for science and engineering; James E. Kingsbury, director of science and engineering, and William R. Lucas, the center’s director.

Lucas, an aloof and autocratic man who had directed the center for than a decade, was replaced by J. R. Thompson, who worked at the center for 20 years and once headed its shuttle main engine project. He had more recently been deputy director of Princeton University’s applied physics laboratory.

New Environment

“He’s approachable, he’s fair, he’s interested in hearing people out,” said a Marshall official who has worked closely with Thompson during his first months as director of the center. “People who work for him are entirely comfortable call ing him Bob. It was never that way with Dr. Lucas--we thought Doctor Lucas was one word. It was always ‘Yessir, Doctorlucas.’ ”

The responsibility for reforming the agency and repairing the shuttle has fallen first on the shoulders of Fletcher, a former university administrator and aerospace executive who was NASA’s administrator at the time the design of the shuttle was undertaken in 1972.

A bland, soft-spoken man who served at NASA during the relatively serene period after the historic astronaut missions to the moon, he was at first reluctant to return to the troubled agency. Not only was NASA reeling from the Challenger tragedy, it had just seen James M. Beggs, its previous administrator, leave office under criminal indictment resulting from his administration of a Defense Department contract while he was an aerospace company executive.

Runs Into Long Delay

Fletcher eventually agreed March 6 to return as administrator, but he was not confirmed by the Senate until May 12. And, when he finally assumed the job, he ran immediately into a prolonged Reagan Administration delay in deciding whether it would recommend building a new orbiter to replace the Challenger.

A senior interagency group headed by the President’s national security adviser, John M. Poindexter, fell into a fierce dispute involving NASA, the Defense, Transportation and Commerce departments over the future role of the space shuttle. The Administration has ordered NASA to phase itself out of the commercial satellite-launching business.

According to one source close to Fletcher, who had returned believing that a replacement shuttle would be expeditiously authorized, the new NASA administrator began to doubt the seriousness of President Reagan’s commitment to the shuttle program and found it impossible to move the agency as long as investigations continued.

Standing in the Ruins

“For weeks,” said the source, who declined to be identified, “Fletcher found himself confused. He found NASA greatly divided over the accident, the centers stronger, and many of the good people he had relied upon when he was there earlier were gone. There he stood for a couple of months in the smoking ruins.

“He had a very hard time asserting himself at the White House. Although Reagan is a space buff, all the outside appearances indicated that (Chief of Staff) Donald Regan was calling the shots. . . . It reached the point that he didn’t know whether the President was going to support him or not, and he was at the point of saying: ‘Let me do my job, or let me go back home.’ ”

Thus, it has only been in recent months that NASA has made significant strides toward long-term recovery. Ironically, that recovery has been strongest and has come first at the centers most closely associated with the grounded shuttle program.

The Marshall center is moving full steam in managing the redesign and testing of the solid rocket booster in Utah and in testing the shuttle’s main engines at the National Space & Technology Laboratories in Mississippi.

In Houston, the Johnson center is about to begin intense crew training for the first time since the accident. The flight control team for the first 1988 Discovery flight will be named momentarily, and the 1,200 people in flight control operations will begin the massive adaptation of their procedures to the changes being made in the shuttle and its operations.

At the Kennedy center, where flatbed trucks are now hauling the shattered, burned remains of the Challenger to their final resting place in two retired missile silos, the return to normalcy will be slower.

And still victimized by the disaster is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the United States’ planetary exploration program. Brought to a standstill by the accident, it is still uncertain when planetary missions that were being prepared for launch a year ago will get under way.

Space agency officials insist that they will not be driven by schedules again, nor will they let success mesmerize them.

“We haven’t fixed the institution yet,” said Culbertson. “We have come up with a set of corrective actions, but we are a long way from getting them in place and operative.

“I guess I agree that you can fix hardware faster than you can change people, but I think the personality of NASA is changing in a very favorable way. We accepted the admonitions of the Rogers commission, but I don’t like the phrase they used that our procedures were flawed.

‘Practice Was Flawed’

“Our procedures were all right--the practice was flawed.

“They say the most dangerous pilot is one who has flown about 100 hours, and he thinks he knows what it is all about. He has gotten over the caution he had as a learner, but he still doesn’t have enough experience to understand what is really wrong. I think we may have gotten into that kind of position on the shuttle. When you walk away from a plane crash, you regain a respect that you had lost, and I think that has happened to us.”