Tight Budgets Cast Doubt on NASA Safety

The day after the destruction of space shuttle Columbia, lawmakers and other government officials gingerly opened what is all but certain to be a prolonged debate over whether a decade of tight NASA budgets had ended up compromising the safety of America’s astronauts.

On Sunday, most officials were careful to avoid directly suggesting that NASA’s financial troubles had caused the catastrophe that claimed seven lives.

But a drumbeat of comments about the agency’s budgetary problems, and calls for more funding and modernization, pointed toward what already was shaping up as a central theme for the congressional hearings and investigations that lie ahead: the disparity between what the public and Congress have been willing to support and the still-soaring dreams of NASA officials and their backers.

“If this problem is traceable to a lack of funds, then the blame lies not with any particular administration or any one political party. This was a broadly based, bipartisan phenomenon,” said Loren Thompson, an aerospace analyst.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) agreed. “Space has been on the back burner of the major political decision-makers for a decade or more,” he said.

The developing debate seems likely to thrust NASA’s chief, Sean O’Keefe, into an intense spotlight.

O’Keefe described himself when he was nominated to the NASA job in 2001 as a “budgeteer, not a rocketeer.” In numerous interviews since the Columbia disaster, however, he insisted that safety is paramount for every shuttle flight and that budgetary constraints were “not at all” a factor that put astronauts in danger.

He received strong backing from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who proclaimed his conviction that after the 1986 Challenger disaster, “safety is first and foremost built into the [NASA] culture.”

But Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) expressed skepticism that years of budget cuts had been achieved without safety shortcuts.

After NASA suffered a 40% decline in funding over the last decade, Hutchison said on “Fox News Sunday,” “you’re going to suffer consequences.”

So far O’Keefe, who has headed the space agency for a little more than a year, has appeared adept at neutralizing the agency’s many critics.

A former Navy secretary and the Pentagon’s top financial officer when Vice President Dick Cheney was Defense secretary, O’Keefe received a wary reception from NASA advocates in Congress when he moved to the agency.

As deputy budget director of the Office of Management and Budget, O’Keefe had become one of the most outspoken critics of NASA, which had long struggled with overruns and had built up a $5-billion deficit when the Bush administration began. He said he wanted to put NASA’s “house in order,” and especially to halt the runaway costs of the international space station.

Lawmakers such as Trent Lott (R-Miss.), then the Senate majority leader, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Hutchison warned O’Keefe against harmful cost-cutting in an agency that had already seen deep reductions in its staff.

One debate was whether the agency should go ahead with proposed upgrades to the shuttle or save the money for a wholly new spacecraft and other purposes.

Yet some critics have changed their tune. Nelson, who had been one of the most vigorous critics, said over the weekend that he has new confidence in O’Keefe.

“I believe he’s going to be a good administrator,” Nelson said Sunday on Fox TV, and he praised him for pushing forward with safety improvements to the fleet.

Some believe O’Keefe’s ties to Cheney may prove important in winning support for the agency. Even before Saturday’s disaster, O’Keefe had won administration support for a new unmanned mission to Jupiter that will cost $3 billion over the next eight years, said Keith Cowing, editor of NASA Watch, a Web site that monitors the agency.

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Sunday that President Bush’s budget, which is scheduled to be released today, would increase NASA’s overall funding, including spending on the shuttle program, by $469 million from its current $15 billion. He said the proposal may be affected later by the shuttle disaster investigation.

But that additional money is a relatively incremental change.

Sunday’s comments by lawmakers and others signaled something broader -- a full-scale reassessment of what the nation wants from its space program and what it is willing to pay for, at a time of growing budget deficits and competing spending needs, including a possible war against Iraq.

A chorus of former astronauts and others linked to the program declared that finding and fixing the problem that destroyed Columbia must be followed by a renewed commitment to manned space flight. Several suggested that any cutback would mean the Columbia crew had died in vain.

Rohrabacher shared that view, but he added in an interview that additional resources should be devoted to the development of the next-generation “workhorse” for manned space exploration to replace the aging shuttle fleet.

Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., conservative public policy center, agreed. “You do reach a point where what looks like cost efficiency becomes living dangerously,” he said.

The background to that debate is that NASA as an agency is partially a Cold War relic, created to lead a space race against a Soviet Union that once seemed to threaten America’s technological supremacy but no longer exists, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit think tank here.

“How much are you going to spend on a space race if you’re the only one running?” he asked.

In the face of the budget cuts, NASA allowed itself to become “wildly optimistic about the inherent reliability of the shuttle -- and consequently made significant cutbacks in safety and quality-assurance personnel back in the mid-’90s,” Pike said. “They were drop-kicking them.”

At the same time, NASA has raised concerns among some analysts by trying to use safety upgrades to extend the shuttle fleet’s life by another quarter-century, far beyond its intended lifespan.

Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.) was among those who on Sunday called for a “next generation” shuttle to replace the present fleet -- a goal supported by an array of former astronauts.

“The equipment is getting older every day,” Breaux said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “We’ve got to make sure they’re doing it with the most modern, up-to-date, technologically correct equipment.”

Another likely upshot of the Columbia disaster is a detailed review of NASA’s practices well beyond its safety procedures.

A General Accounting Office report issued just days ago concluded that NASA “continues to face challenges that threaten its ability to effectively run its largest programs.” The GAO also reported that NASA is keenly aware of the need to reduce costs across the board, from launches to the space station.

At the same time, the report said, NASA faces a serious brain drain, especially in such crucial areas as engineering, science and information technology.

“The president, clearly, is going to want answers,” Breaux said. “We’re going to want answers. The American people will want answers.”