Study Acts Globally and Benefits Locally : Ecology: SAIC will help federal agencies to find clues to the ominous changes occurring in the environment.

In recent years, scientists have learned more about what’s going wrong with the environment--the widening holes in the ozone layer, the warming of the ocean currents and the melting of polar ice caps, for example--but not enough about what’s causing the ominous phenomena.

Now, a federally funded, $2-billion study, the Global Change research project, isgearing up to get at the roots of budding environmental disasters.

Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a San Diego-based contract research firm, has just won a significant role in the project.

The Global Change project entails an air, earth and sea monitoring system that will involve up to 20 satellites as well as earthbound measurements of terrestrial and ocean conditions. The changes in those conditions over time will provide scientists with clues about how and why environmental changes are occurring.

SAIC will help the multi-agency team collect and analyze those clues.

Late last month, SAIC was awarded a 10-year, $150-million contract to provide data processing, instrumentation development and systems and logistic support to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s role in the research project.

SAIC will help design NASA instruments that will be placed aboard satellites to collect atmospheric data. The company will then help NASA store, organize and interpret the data to help develop theories about global change, said Neal B. Hutchinson, SAIC’s senior manager for the contract.

“We’re trying to understand what humanity is doing to the environment around us,” Hutchinson said. “We know the effects, but not enough about the causes” of environmental change.

NASA is one of the four main federal agencies--the others being the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--that are leading the research effort under the authority of Allan Bromley, director of the Bush Administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The three agencies will collect data in their respective purviews, while the Department of Energy’s contribution will be to collect data on the burning of fossil fuels by cars and factories and its effect on pollution.

One of the concepts NASA may be apply, Hutchinson said, is taking a “column of air 10 miles up from the Earth and, with the satellites, understanding and measuring what’s going on inside that column in terms of heat balance, air flows and chemicals.”

SAIC plans to dedicate at least 200 employees to the project, all of whom will be based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. An unspecified percentage of the 200 will be new hires, Hutchinson said.

The contract fulfills a long-frustrated desire of SAIC, which throughout its 22-year existence has been primarily a defense contractor, to get a major share of NASA contract work. In fact, SAIC hired Hutchinson, a 26-year NASA employee, in 1989 to help it devise strategies of cracking the NASA market.

By the time Hutchinson left NASA in 1986 for a three-year stint at Rockwell, he had ascended to the position of flight director at Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. From there, he directed the flights of two Apollo missions, all three Skylab space shots as well as the Apollo-Soyuz U.S.-Soviet space flight and the first three space shuttle launches.

Hutchinson decided to leave NASA and the flight director’s job when the space shuttle Challenger blew up shortly after launch in early 1986. He considered staying on to help NASA recover from the near-mortal blow to the program, but instead decided to follow “plans already set in motion” to join the private sector.

Although SAIC is now a 13,000-employee, $1.16-billion contract research behemoth, it continues to seek relatively small contracts, such as the NASA pact, which will generate an average of $15 million in revenues per year over the 10-year life of the contract.

The small contract size is desired, Hutchinson said, because it spreads responsibility and entrepreneurship among a broad base of employees. Also, it limits SAIC’s vulnerability to being financially hurt if one particular area of research falls out of favor with the government or becomes obsolete.

The company, whose employees may be working on 2,000 research contracts at once, also likes diversity, a preference it is accentuating now that tighter defense dollars mean military contracts may shrink. About 50% of the company’s revenues now come from military contracts, down from 65% five years ago.

Despite a tighter budget outlook in its bread-and-butter military business, the company still expects 10% growth in employees and revenues for the fiscal year ending this month, compared to the previous year.

The company’s diversity is illustrated by its current mix of projects, including a 10-year, $500-million contract to provide “ruggedized” laptop computers to the Army; a $15.4-million deal for an automatic toll road fare-collection system in Orange County, Fla., and a $5-million agreement to evaluate environmental damage at several Air Force bases that are scheduled to be closed.

Although the bulk of the company’s employees are based in the East, SAIC is headquartered here and has a high local profile, occupying seven buildings totaling 750,000 square feet in the Campus Point area of San Diego.