Cuts Imperil NASA Safety, Panel Warns

Strapped by budget cuts, hiring freezes, buy-outs and early retirements, NASA now faces a manpower “crisis” that may soon leave it without the expertise it needs to manage America’s space program safely, the agency’s independent safety panel warned Thursday.

The shortage of trained technicians at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s manned space flight centers “can jeopardize otherwise safe operations.” Moreover, the agency’s inability to attract new scientific talent clouds its future, the safety experts said in their annual assessment of the agency’s programs.

William Readdy, head of NASA’s space shuttle program, acknowledged Thursday that the agency has not been able to hire the new engineers and scientists it would like, but said that budget cuts and hiring freezes have not eroded NASA’s commitment to safety.

Independent space policy analysts, however, said the panel’s warnings about the agency’s personnel cuts should be taken seriously.

“NASA has been cutting into muscle and bone,” said John Pike, space policy director at the Federation of American Scientists. “They were taking a calculated risk they could reduce overall staff and cut the number of safety and quality assurance inspectors, without appreciably increasing the risk of another Challenger accident.”

The work force situation is especially important as NASA starts the ambitious construction of a $50-billion international space station. “There are no clear plans” for handling the extra demands imposed by the space shuttle flights needed to ferry materials and work crews into orbit, the panel concluded.

“This is a critical problem,” the safety experts reported.

The space agency launched the shuttle only five times last year, but the number of flights necessary for the 16-nation space station is expected to reach more than eight a year, greater than at any time since the Challenger accident in 1986, which killed seven astronauts and destroyed the $2-billion spaceship.

In all, the 1-million-pound orbiting space station--the size of two football fields--will require five years, more than 40 shuttle launches and 1,700 hours of spacewalks to construct.

But it is the agency’s own future that concerned the panel most.

“Safety in the short run is well-served,” said panel chairman Richard D. Blomberg. “The long-term picture is less certain.”

With twice as many scientists and engineers over the age of 60 as under the age of 30, NASA faces an exodus of its top talent in the next few years that could leave it without the expertise to conduct safe spaceflight operations.

NASA officials are juggling existing obligations like the space station program even as they look for ways to fund new efforts, like the Stardust spacecraft set for launch Saturday on a mission to capture samples of comet dust.

NASA is hardly alone in its struggle to do more with less, as tight budgets have become a permanent fact of federal financial life. But the very nature of the agency’s mission--to lead the human exploration of space--makes it unique in the federal government.

Overall, the agency has cut more than 6,100 employees in seven years.

At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the shuttle work force has been cut by 50% in the past five years, down to 3,800 contractors and 600 civil servants. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, employment has been cut by about 775 people during the same period, down to 5,009 engineers, scientists and support staff.

To make ends meet in the manned space program, the agency is turning over day-to-day operation of its fleet of four space shuttles to a private contractor called the United Space Alliance.

Readdy at NASA said the agency has been worried enough about pending retirements that it recently started a formal assessment of its in-house scientific and engineering needs.

“We do need to start hiring again,” Readdy said. “We want to start growing the next generation of researchers, engineers and explorers.”

But the safety panel “is especially concerned that the normal patterns of bringing new technical and managerial leadership into NASA have been seriously disrupted.”

Even though there is no longer an agency hiring freeze, “budgetary restrictions make it all but impossible to replace experienced persons who are leaving,” the panel said. “In those circumstances, the question of who will be available and fully qualified to lead NASA’s human space flight programs [after] 2005 has become real.”