One Too Many Misfires

The loss of two U.S. spacecraft over Mars in the last three months rightly led NASA Administrator Dan Goldin to call Tuesday for an audit and overhaul of the agency’s entire interplanetary exploration program.

The Red Planet has often eluded Earth’s space explorers--of 25 previous U.S. and Russian Mars missions since 1962, 11 have failed.

The $165-million Mars Polar Lander that disappeared last week could have encountered sharp cliffs or powdery drifts that no NASA engineer could have foreseen. Astronautics is a science in infancy.

The Mars failures, however, are the most prominent signs of a series of chronic engineering problems that the agency should have been able to avoid. They have plagued NASA since the disappearance of another Mars probe, the $1-billion Mars Observer, in 1993. Just this Monday, technical failures forced the space agency to delay a Space Shuttle mission aimed at fixing another set of technical failures on NASA’s own Hubble Space Telescope.

Several recent outside audits of NASA have identified a key underlying problem: the agency’s failure to properly oversee the outside contractors and subcontractors upon which it has increasingly come to rely.

For instance, a recent inquiry into why the lander’s sister craft, the Mars Climate Orbiter, disappeared in September concluded that NASA’s Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory had placed too much faith in the quality-control expertise of its outside contractors. NASA “has not applied sufficient resources or ensured that subcontractors implement procedures that resolve ineffective practices,” the report said. The orbiter vanished after engineers at Lockheed Martin failed to properly convert metric and English system measurements.

NASA achieved its most famous accomplishment--putting a man on the moon in 1969--using a centrally coordinated government command structure. In the mid-1990s, however, Congress derided this system as an ineffective form of big government and urged more out-sourcing. Recent audits of NASA have made it clear that the agency may have been placing too much value on independent innovation over careful coordination.

It’s highly possible that the Mars Orbiter would not have disappeared if NASA had given its primary contractor, Lockheed Martin, a specific, old-fashioned Apollo-era checklist rather than the vague promise of a bonus if the job was done right.

Congressional critics of NASA are already citing the Mars mission failures as reasons for cutting the agency’s budget. Congress, however, has been part of the problem. Its frequent threats to cut NASA funding have only exacerbated the staffing shortages that audits say contributed to the recent mission problems.

That’s why Congress, instead of glibly blaming NASA, should help the agency find ways to apply the quality controls of its past to oversight of the private ventures that are an inevitable part of future space exploration.