NASA, in Danger of Dying, Needs a Tough New Boss
When NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe leaves in a few months, his successor will find the space agency in profound crisis. O’Keefe inherited a NASA in 2001 that had endured a decade of cutbacks, disintegrating infrastructure, chaotic budgets, bombastic promises and a deeply dysfunctional culture that suppressed critical judgment and undermined engineering integrity.
On his watch, O’Keefe made some reforms to the budget, but he also endured the Columbia disaster in 2003, in which seven space shuttle astronauts died, and was beset by problems aboard the International Space Station. He cobbled together a controversial presidential plan for long-term exploration of space and may be on the brink of canceling NASA’s most successful science project, the Hubble Space Telescope.
Worse, the arrogant, defensive, know-it-all NASA culture that was blamed for the Columbia disaster by the panel that investigated the calamity has not been changed or reformed by O’Keefe -- inviting speculation that trouble lies ahead.
More than at any time in its history, NASA needs some tough love. President Bush will need to appoint a no-nonsense NASA administrator who has the technical background to understand space systems and the implications of his decisions -- something O’Keefe lacked with his narrow, bean-counting background. Furthermore, the new NASA leader will have to do what O’Keefe never had the stomach for: a thorough housecleaning of NASA management, including wholesale replacement of top position-holders in spaceflight operations, policy and even public affairs.
NASA’s greatest problem now is neither technical nor budgetary -- it’s first and foremost a people problem.
The bottom line is that NASA -- having suffered the Columbia disaster and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 -- has killed 14 people, destroyed two spacecraft and set the space program back over the last 18 years through what the investigation into the Challenger accident described as a “flawed decision-making process” that agency leaders have refused to honestly and courageously confront and deal with.
In both the Challenger and Columbia disasters, few of the people responsible for these avoidable catastrophes lost their jobs or experienced any career-altering consequences, whereas conscientious engineers and workers who did try to sound warnings about safety lapses say they have suffered the destruction of their careers.
NASA’s problems cannot be solved with a simple management reorganization, as was attempted after the Challenger disaster. Whether NASA survives the next decade as a serious government entity depends largely on whether its next administrator embraces the notion of radical change. This person must be empowered by the president to revolutionize NASA, which O’Keefe never was. Without embracing innovation and flexible thinking, this sclerotic bureaucracy will invite more disasters and will ultimately become irrelevant by the end of the decade -- if it isn’t already.
Commercial efforts, such as the triumphant SpaceShipOne, are on the way to opening the brave new world of spaceflight to tourists. These efforts may carry out what NASA hasn’t been able to: opening the New Frontier to the next generation of pioneers -- us.
