The Price of NASA’s Loss of Integrity

I hate memorials. There are the somber crowds, the weeping families, the “missing man” formation of aircraft in the sky. Then there are the cliched speeches about how people died doing what they loved, how risk is always part of life -- words carried on the wind as flags flutter and snap in the background.

I’ve heard it all before. During the Challenger memorial, I stood before President Reagan, listening to his words. I was part of the NASA family then. My husband worked in Mission Control, and I was a semifinalist in NASA’s Journalist in Space project. I lived and breathed the space life, dreamed the space dream.

As Reagan spoke, I thought about my dinner with some of the crew before they left for their flight, and for their deaths. I asked Christa McAuliffe whether she was scared. Excited, yes, anxious to do a good job, yes ... frightened of dying, no. She felt she was in good hands with NASA. We all did.

It took a long time for the dream of spaceflight to die inside me. During the Challenger investigation, I watched NASA circle the wagons, stonewall -- arrogantly refusing to face public judgment.

At first, I took it to be reflexive self-defense. But it soon seemed more like an escape from accountability by self-interested bureaucrats whose “flawed decision-making process,” as a blue-ribbon investigative panel said, had caused the disaster.

The turning point for me was an article I researched on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing. I went through NASA’s archives, digging out the secrets of how we went to the moon.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration operated under the highest standards of engineering professionalism back then: Engineers were queried about their misgivings in every decision, asked to document their concerns for further reflection and analysis. The Apollo engineers understood that there is no room for sloppiness, carelessness or mendacity in outer space.

Space is a terrible place, just waiting to kill you in a thousand different and horrible ways. What got us to the moon was a profound, meticulous commitment to truth -- an institutionalized mission to leave no stone unturned, no fixable problem unforeseen.

When NASA didn’t take the necessary steps toward honesty after Challenger and focused more on its public relations image, my heart began to withdraw and the dream began to die.

During the 1990s, NASA’s “cheaper, better, faster” mantra ignored an adamantine fact of spaceflight safety: It takes time and money to do things properly. NASA pushed out the very engineers and workers who took us to the moon -- just as many corporations expel experienced workers because their salaries are too high. The older engineers were the ones most stubborn about safety, most insistent on doing things properly.

This mindless cost-cutting was at the heart of Columbia’s catastrophic end Saturday. These shuttles are temperamental, fragile, aging vehicles, and the Clinton administration’s budget cutbacks created dangerous gaps and inadequacies throughout the system.

I decided I didn’t want to know any more astronauts.

Throughout the Clinton administration, NASA was obsessed with its image -- it became filled with wishful thinkers and boastful know-it-alls who turned their backs on the cautious culture of the Apollo program. There is no room for engineering integrity or great accomplishments when there is so much untruth about. An organization that cannot tell the truth publicly ultimately cannot admit the truth to itself privately.

For instance, NASA launched shuttle after shuttle to the space station Mir when it was manifestly unsafe to do so. By then, the agency was so far from engineering integrity that more astronauts were certain to die. It was just a matter of time.

Astronauts are not people who cherish the soft and easy life. Their vocation is a fulfillment of their hopes and an expression of their essential beings.

That’s why I hate attending their memorials so much. In my heart I know that 14 shuttle astronauts died from preventable causes -- from an inevitable chain of human errors, not unpredictable frontier events beyond human control.

When I wrote the families’ public statement on the first anniversary of the Challenger disaster, I expressed their words: “Do not fear risk.... Only if we’re willing to walk over the edge can we become winners.”

We shouldn’t fear risk. But we shouldn’t fear truth either -- or expense -- or doing whatever it takes in the exploration of that deadly, unforgiving frontier called space.