Plan to Overhaul Space Shuttle Operation Sparks Controversy : Budget: Proposal would hand responsibility for the spacecraft program over to private industry. Some NASA workers see safety risks.

After 31 years of helping put Americans in space, Jose Garcia figured his opinion would mean a great deal to the higher-ups at NASA, especially if it involved astronaut safety.

He figured wrong.

Shrugged off by his bosses, the shuttle operations manager says he had no choice but to go public with his concerns about NASA’s plan to turn over most of the responsibility for its four space shuttles to a private company.

It pains Garcia to say it, but here it is: Better to cancel the country’s human spaceflight program than to give NASA the back seat and hand over the shuttle keys to industry.

Removing NASA from day-to-day shuttle operations is the biggest threat to flight safety since the Challenger disaster, Garcia says. Despite 14 years and 70 safe flights, he says, the shuttle is still a research and development operation that demands a hands-on role by government.

Garcia first expressed his fears in a letter to President Clinton after NASA announced in late August that it would be getting out of the shuttle operations business.

Hammered by budget cuts, the agency is looking for a single contractor to take over the $3-billion-a-year shuttle program so it can focus more on research and development. NASA brass say such a restructuring will reduce costs and increase accountability, i.e. improve shuttle safety.

“Safety is certainly something we’re going to keep our eye on first and foremost,” said Wayne Littles, head of NASA’s spaceflight program.

The plan also will eliminate more shuttle jobs--several thousand already have been scrapped since 1991 to cut costs--and that has workers mighty worried. Morale at the Kennedy Space Center is “probably as low as I’ve seen it,” said Garcia, the technical assistant to NASA’s electrical and telecommunications division.

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, an independent watchdog group, agrees that stress over job uncertainties has taken a worrisome toll on morale at the space center.

Panel Chairman Paul Johnstone warns that “overzealous” job and budget cuts, combined with tight flight schedules, could jeopardize shuttle safety.

Hans Mark, a former NASA deputy administrator who has been pushing for a single prime contractor for more than a decade, goes so far as to recommend that security be tightened as the space agency makes the shift over the next few years.

He fears employee sabotage.

So far, Garcia seems to be the lone, loud voice of dissent in the shuttle program, even though hundreds if not thousands of workers privately back him--astronauts included. He’s got the computer, phone and mail messages to prove it. Some are anonymous, including the author of a fax distributed around the space center that describes workers as “sheep being led to slaughter.”

NASA wants to slash 3,150 jobs at the space center over the next four years, part of a plan to eliminate more than 28,000 civil service and contractor positions at NASA centers nationwide to meet Clinton’s call for a $5-billion reduction in space spending by the year 2000.

“They’re scared,” Garcia said of the space center work force. “They’re scared for their jobs.”

Even the most derring-do astronauts are reluctant to criticize NASA’s shuttle-restructuring plan. “They’re concerned if they did speak up, they wouldn’t fly again,” Garcia said.

Fueling the rank-and-file’s fears have been the abrupt resignations in the last year of key shuttle managers, including former Kennedy Space Center director and ex-astronaut Robert Crippen, who was concerned about the rate of change. Crippen’s successor, Jay Honeycutt, has had to assure workers that, contrary to rumors, he is not quitting.

“Don’t panic,” Honeycutt urged his 15,760-member work force in August. “The worst thing that can happen to us is to come unglued.”

Honeycutt says he tries to be as open as possible with employees. For instance, he’s admitted to workers that privatizing the shuttle program “isn’t a plan perhaps that I would have chosen” but added, “we will support it.”

Garcia, 54, says if he’s alone in his fight, so be it. He says he cannot quietly stand by and watch another shuttle be destroyed and another crew killed, even if that means risking his job or the jobs of his children, all three of whom work at the space center.

“I feel good about the launches that are coming up,” he said. “But the communications are a lot worse than back then [pre-Challenger] when it comes to speaking your mind and getting things done, in terms of the direction that the agency is taking.

“It’s either, ‘Get on board or get the hell out.’ ”

A presidential commission criticized NASA after the Challenger accident for, among other things, poor communication. All seven people aboard were killed when Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986, because of a hot gas leak in the right solid-fuel rocket booster.

The agency’s unwritten, unspoken code of silence dates back to the late 1970s, when shuttle development started to unravel and the fledgling program was threatened, former NASA historian Alex Roland says.

It has persisted because of the continuing vulnerability of the shuttle, which never has lived up to its promise of cheap, easy space transportation.

So it’s all the more surprising, Roland says, that someone within the shuttle program is challenging the status quo.

“NASA people tell me they have simply been told by headquarters to hew to the party line or leave, and it’s been put to them just that boldly,” said Roland, a history professor at Duke University.

NASA officials insist Garcia is free to say whatever he wants to whomever he wants, even though they think he’s wrong. Garcia acknowledges no one has asked--or even hinted--that he shut up. He received a brief, noncommittal response from the White House and has yet to hear from NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, but has conferred with two congressmen and space safety officials.

“I don’t know if he would be the most popular guy around in some circles, but nobody’s going to punish him,” said Brian Welch, a spokesman at NASA headquarters in Washington.

Garcia’s concerns prompted Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House space subcommittee, to visit Kennedy Space Center earlier this month and talk to shuttle workers. He was accompanied by Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.), the subcommittee vice chairman, whose district includes the space center area.

Sensenbrenner notes that no one really knows what all the ramifications of a single prime contractor would be, but says he was appalled by the “woefully inadequate” information provided by Littles, the space flight program head, at a hearing in Washington last month.

Littles says money will be saved by consolidating the current 85 shuttle contracts involving 56 companies into one contract involving one prime contractor, a move recommended in March by a panel of aerospace experts--including Christopher Kraft, former head of the Johnson Space Center in Houston and a key player in the Apollo moon missions.

But Littles can’t, or won’t, specify the amount of savings or how many jobs will be lost.

Kraft estimates that NASA could save $1 billion a year by having a single prime contractor and eliminating unnecessary tasks. It’s the only way to bring down inexcusably high costs, he says. At present, a shuttle mission costs about $500 million.

“When you’ve got 4,000 people working on safety, that seems to me to be a bit much,” Kraft said. “You have people looking at people who are looking at people who are looking at people who are looking at people, and I could go on 17 times because that’s approximately what they have.”

The shuttle program currently employs 22,500 people nationwide: 19,700 contractor and 2,800 civil service employees. NASA expects only half of the 2,800 civil service workers will be needed by the year 2000. It’s anybody’s guess as to how many contractor employees will be dumped.

The congressmen have demanded more details from NASA, and a second subcommittee hearing is scheduled for November.

“I was led to believe there was a plan and the plan shows that you can realize savings,” Weldon said. “But I’m beginning to realize that the desire for the savings is driving the plan, and I’m very concerned about that because I think that’s a scenario for a real disaster.”

Littles stresses that shuttle safety will remain the top priority throughout the transition, expected to take two to three years, and that the flight rate will not be disrupted.