Columbia Probe Examines Boeing Job Moves

Engineers in Southern California built the space shuttle fleet and helped maintain it for more than 20 years, until Boeing Co. decided two years ago to begin moving 1,100 engineering jobs in the program to Texas and Florida.

What seemed like a routine case of an aerospace company searching for lower costs or stronger political support in another state, however, has become something more: Investigators are examining whether the move eviscerated Boeing’s technical capability and played a role in the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1.

The decision to move the jobs was highly unpopular among Boeing’s workforce, and about 80% of the California engineers refused to relocate, forcing the company to hire workers in Texas and forfeit much of the experience of its California engineering base.

The ill-fated Columbia’s launch in January marked the first time Boeing’s Texas engineers had primary responsibility for providing technical assistance to NASA, according to investigators. During the mission, the Boeing engineers in Houston were asked to assess whether the shuttle’s wing had been damaged during the launch and they subsequently advised the space agency in writing that the orbiter could return safely to Earth.

Whether that erroneous assessment was caused by an inexperienced staff and can be blamed at least in part on Boeing’s decision to leave Southern California is an important issue being examined by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

Maj. Gen. John Barry, a member of the board, said a broad range of questions is being asked about the capability and training of the Boeing engineers who advised NASA during the Columbia mission. The board has asked Boeing and NASA to produce all the documents involved in the relocation.

“The reason we are looking at Huntington Beach and Palmdale is to see if there were any factors involved there that may have contributed to this mishap,” Barry said. “We have a lot more work to do.”

Boeing’s rationale for the shift was to improve management efficiency by moving the engineers closer to the space shuttle headquarters in Houston and to reduce long-term costs, said Steve Oswald, the company’s space shuttle program manager. Oswald said Boeing was careful to preserve its technical expertise.

So far, Boeing has transferred about 500 engineering jobs from its Huntington Beach headquarters for space shuttle design, investigators said. Only about 100 engineers moved. A smaller number of jobs were transferred to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center from Palmdale, where Boeing had assembled the orbiters and later performed major shuttle refurbishments. The Palmdale facility, which was closed shortly after Boeing completed refurbishing Columbia in 2001, did not play a direct role in the Columbia mission.

Investigators are looking more closely at the Huntington Beach-to-Houston move to determine whether Boeing retained the right skills, experience levels, training and certifications for the engineering staff.

Among engineers at Boeing’s Huntington Beach plant, there is deep resentment over the move and a feeling that Boeing lost significant know-how when it made the move.

“The feeling is we had better technical expertise here, particularly in the area of the shuttle’s thermal protection system,” said one veteran space shuttle engineer, who asked that his name not be used. “But they ignored us. It’s a pretty universal feeling among the California employees.”

During the mission, NASA asked Boeing to help evaluate whether foam debris observed falling off the shuttle’s external tank 81 seconds after liftoff could have damaged the orbiter’s thermal protection system. The Boeing staff in Houston produced a report that investigators and aerospace experts have struggled to understand.

The report examined the potential damage caused by foam debris and used a NASA computer tool known as Crater to evaluate the damage. Crater predicted that serious damage probably occurred to the heat-resistant tiles that protect the orbiter, but Boeing engineers dismissed the Crater predictions. For reasons that are still unclear, Boeing engineers predicted a safe return for the shuttle.

The faulty conclusion then “flavored” all of NASA’s subsequent decisions about risks facing the shuttle, said board Chairman Harold W. Gehman Jr.

Even if the foam impact was not the eventual cause of the accident, it should have been considered a potentially serious safety problem and received high-level attention, most space experts say. The orbiter was never intended to be hit by anything, and foam debris strikes are a critical safety incident, Bryan O’Connor, NASA’s associate administrator for safety and mission assurance, said in an interview.

Whether the Huntington Beach engineers would have come up with a different formal recommendation than their counterparts in Houston may never be known. But some of them believe NASA and Boeing have marginalized them.

Another engineer, who also asked not to be identified, said the Huntington Beach staff never accepted the rationale that being physically closer to the Houston space center would improve communications, because they had effectively communicated with managers in Houston for 20 years.

Moreover, the move has precipitated an unnecessary brain drain from the program, as senior space shuttle engineers found new jobs inside and outside Boeing, engineers said. Some of the engineers moved to a Boeing project in Seal Beach to design a next-generation spy satellite, for example.

But NASA officials did not see any problems. When NASA shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore was questioned about the reasons for Boeing’s move at an accident board hearing March 6, he called the transition “very successful.”

“We have very high confidence in the technical leadership we were able to capture,” Dittemore said.

Oswald, the Boeing program manager, said the company was losing touch with NASA before the move and its relationship with the agency had “withered” since the mid-1980s. The move was an effort to address those problems, though he acknowledged that not everybody inside Boeing agreed with the decision.

Boeing is hardly the first aerospace company to move operations out of California. The trend, which began in the mid-1980s and has continued on and off ever since, has put a dent in the region’s dominance of aerospace.

Despite the industry’s consolidation, an aerospace corridor from the San Fernando Valley to Orange County forms the largest concentration of spacecraft operations in the country. Boeing has four major complexes that design or build spacecraft and rocket engines, including the world’s largest communications satellite plant. Northrop Grumman runs Space Park, the former operations of TRW. NASA builds deep planetary spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Aerospace Corp. is the nation’s architect for military space operations. Engineers at the Los Angeles Air Force Base manage the service’s spacecraft and missile programs.

Some experts have questioned why Boeing would want to withdraw the shuttle engineers from such an environment and answer the question by pointing to political forces. The Texas congressional delegation and the White House played a role in the move, they said, adding that it was no accident that the move occurred the same year that President Bush took office.

“Surprise, surprise, of course there is a political linkage,” said Rohit Shukla, president of Larta, a Los Angeles technology think tank. “Nobody has been more aggressive than the cities in Texas with lines straight into the White House. Why shouldn’t companies respond?”

Boeing’s Oswald denied political considerations had any role in the move, though he said the company contacted the congressional delegations from Florida, Texas and California during the move. He called the contacts a “courtesy.”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), chairman of the House space and aeronautics subcommittee, said he couldn’t do much to stop the Boeing moves and did not try to intervene, though the job loss occurred in his district. Although he faulted California’s “left-wing Democrats” for a business climate that pushes companies out of the state, he acknowledged that any benefit from the move was outweighed if it contributed to the disaster.

Barry said the investigation board would not determine whether Boeing erred in moving the engineers or address any political forces that may have influenced Boeing’s or NASA’s decisions, saying such issues are “beyond the purview of this investigation.”

Howard McCurdy, a space expert and professor at American University in Washington, D.C., said NASA has a long history of making key decisions with keen attention to the political fallout.

The decision to put the Johnson Space Center on a former cattle ranch in Houston was ordained by then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. In the current political climate, the pull of Texas again seems obvious.

“California is not in the Republican column in 2004,” McCurdy said.

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Times staff writer Peter Pae contributed to this report.