NEWS ANALYSIS : NASA’s Task Is to Build on Hubble Success

The senior NASA astronomer, his robust tan now almost flannel gray with fatigue, waited for the sun to rise over the Johnson Space Center, as somewhere in the sky overhead a crew of astronauts, flushed with success, completed their repairs on the Hubble space telescope.

So the question was inevitable: Had NASA now earned a ticker tape parade like those once awarded the men who went to the moon?

“Oh god,” Edward J. Weiler murmured bleakly and inhaled the last of his filter-tipped cigarette. “I don’t want any parades. I want something that works.

“We missed the point when we first launched it. We forgot we were launching a 400,000-part machine. We were naive,” Weiler said. “Now this week, everything has been going so well that you start to expect it.

“And that is dangerous.”

As the astronauts returned to Earth late Sunday, NASA officials allowed themselves to savor what some experts say is their first unalloyed success since the space shuttle proved that it could fly. Several space policy analysts said the mission was the first tangible evidence of fundamental change in an organization chastened by a decade in which America’s automatic admiration for NASA’s “can-do” engineering skills yielded to equally reflexive skepticism.

In many respects the Hubble repair mission was a pivot point for an agency caught between a past it is unwilling to relinquish and a future it is hesitant to embrace. It is a future that NASA will build with its former Cold War competitor, beginning with a major joint agreement expected to be signed with Russia this week.

This is a sadder, wiser and more cautious NASA than in the days when the agency was high on the right stuff, analysts say.

“We get fascinated with the daily excitement of the Hubble, but something much more fundamental is going on,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

“We are in the process of building a new NASA . . . from an agency that promised more than it could deliver, that had in general lost its edge of quality and become primarily interested in self-preservation.”

The $629-million mission to repair the Hubble telescope, agency officials said, was more thoroughly rehearsed, more rigorously tested and more aggressively monitored by outside investigators than any they have conducted in the decade the space shuttle has been in operation.

Agency officials said the preparation of the 1,200 planners, scientists and flight engineers directly involved in the mission for the past 18 months was unprecedented.

Flight director Milt Heflin, who has worked in the space program since the Apollo moon project, said it was the first time he could recall that managers from different NASA space centers actually learned each other’s names, instead of addressing each other by the call sign of the center that employed them.

But some scientists and several independent space experts worry that in the heady emotions after the success of the most complex U.S. space servicing mission attempted, NASA officials may forget that their opportunity for triumph was created by the institution’s own mistakes.

It was, after all, the telescope’s flawed optics that made the astronauts’ expensive, spacewalking heroics necessary.

The scientific value of a functioning Hubble telescope may be incalculable for astronomers, but agency critics fear that NASA officials--hungry for public approval--may be too quick to measure the mission by the quality of the live television it produced, the presidential telephone call it garnered, and the extra votes it may earn the agency in Congress for the beleaguered space station project.

NASA would do better to remember that although space exploration may be the stuff of national dreams, successful spaceflight is a matter of unforgiving engineering standards, they said.

“The more and more it looks like a success, the more inflated the rhetoric will get, with NASA wrapping itself in the flag and the future of America in space,” said space historian Alex Roland at Duke University, who was an in-house NASA historian during the decade the shuttle was in development.

“Maybe they have made changes and are not doing business the old NASA way,” Roland said. “I am still pretty loathe to think they have seen the light.”

NASA is not the kind of institution that easily accepts change or thrives on diminished expectations.

Nothing seems to have focused the agency’s concentration quite like its struggle to live with smaller budgets and more modest ambitions. NASA is being dragged “kicking and screaming” into the post-Cold War era, said John Pike, a Washington-based space policy analyst for the Federation of American Scientists and frequent critic of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

To save the only major new U.S. manned space endeavor planned in this generation--the space station--NASA is reversing 35 years of Cold War competition and marrying its fortunes to the Russian space program, which has been running its own more modest space station for more than a decade.

This week in Moscow, Vice President Al Gore, who on Friday called the Hubble mission “a symbol of NASA on the way back,” and NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin are expected to sign a major cooperative space pact with Russia.

For the first time in a generation, a Russian cosmonaut will fly with American astronauts next month. American astronauts are preparing to fly to the Russian space station Mir for the first time. At least 10 U.S. space shuttle missions will link up with the Mir between 1995 and 1997.

Until recently, space analysts said, agency technocrats resisted fundamental changes in the way they managed spaceflight, despite efforts by several NASA administrators to restructure the agency.

In the aftermath of the 1986 Challenger accident, a presidential investigating commission urged a major overhaul of NASA’s insular system of independent space centers, to eliminate what commissioners said were management flaws that contributed to the fatal accident and the agency’s other problems.

Administrator Goldin, who has scoured agency ranks for “new thinkers,” is credited with finally getting their attention.

“He is kicking ass and taking names,” said one former member of the Challenger commission.

Change is being forced upon NASA from other directions as well. Congress has taken a more demanding role in overseeing the agency’s affairs. The FBI recently disclosed a sting operation at the Johnson Space Center allegedly involving kickbacks related to shuttle flights.

NASA’s inspector general said there are more than 400 investigations being conducted into agency waste, fraud and abuse, with more than $12 billion in agency assets that auditors could not account for.

If it was the old NASA that built and launched the defective $1.5-billion orbiting observatory, some want to believe it was a new NASA that fixed it with such care last week.

“The institutional culture that launched Hubble was very much an old-fashioned, right-stuff, can-do group,” Pike said. “In a change originating at the top, they are much more prepared now to be candid and honest with the public about risk of failure.

“It’s a very positive end to a troubled era,” he said.

To ensure that NASA did not repeat the mistakes that led to the Hubble debacle, eight independent review committees double-checked preparations for the repair mission. NASA officials acted on every one of nearly 200 recommendations before launching Endeavour and seven astronauts on its repair flight 11 days ago.

This heightened level of peer review was not entirely welcomed. Some mid-level managers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the two NASA centers most involved in the repair mission, were clearly irritated by what they considered outside interference by an “endless parade” of committees, saying it almost made them “doubt themselves.”

Agency officials said this week that although the outside reviews produced “some good ideas” that increased the mission’s safety margins, they had no immediate plans to make them a permanent fixture of the space program.

Others, however, welcomed the scrutiny.

“We have already learned once on this project how dangerous it is to not subject yourself to independent scrutiny,” said David Leckrone, Hubble senior project scientist.