Repair of NASA Tougher Than Fixing Rocket

When James C. Fletcher was handed the reins of the battered National Aeronautics and Space Administration on May 12, he predicted it would be harder to repair the space agency itself than to fix the booster rocket that caused the Challenger tragedy.

The three trying months since then have so far borne out his assessment.

Last week, engineers unveiled what they believe to be a fail-safe design for a new booster rocket joint, and after a prolonged internal debate, the Reagan Administration produced a plan to build a new orbiter. But NASA itself is far from recovered from the accident that devastated the United States’ space program.

More Layoff Notices

At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians who prepare shuttles for launch anticipate the certain arrival of more layoff notices. At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, astronauts and flight controllers regularly quit or depart for new military assignments. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, scientists and engineers await word from Washington on another plan for someday launching the delayed Galileo and Ulysses probes to Jupiter and the sun.

“I think the shock is behind us now,” said acting Kennedy center Director Thomas E. Utsman, “but we will never lose the impact of it. It is going to be like an old war wound that people will always remember, and will always have a very significant meaning to them.

“People are remorseful, but now we are looking at ways that we can strengthen ourselves. The problem is that the future looks awfully murky. It is awfully discouraging for the working folks.”

At the Florida launching center, the announcement that the first shuttle flight would not come before early 1988 had a stunning impact.

“That really took the wind out of a lot of peoples’ sails,” Utsman said. “It brought the specter of more layoffs, of a lack of work to keep people occupied. It made people wonder, ‘Do we really have a feel for where we’re going?’ ”

Nearly seven months after the accident, the space agency has yet to name a deputy administrator to replace William R. Graham, who is to become the White House science adviser. Neither has it announced a new director for the Kennedy center, although congressional sources say the job has been offered to Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney, now chief of the Air Force Space Division in Los Angeles.

Moore May Leave

NASA officials, who declined to be identified, said last week there is a growing expectation that Johnson center Director Jesse W. Moore will leave the post he assumed shortly after the Challenger accident. He was director of the shuttle program at the time of the disaster.

With the agency’s top management in a state of flux, the burden of the recovery program has fallen heavily on Rear Adm. Richard H. Truly, the former astronaut brought back to the space agency to head NASA’s investigation of the accident as well as to direct the recovery program.

Fletcher’s efforts to move past the tragedy and restore the agency have been frustrated by both Congress and the White House.

Only Friday did he receive a go-ahead to build another orbiter to replace Challenger, an approval delayed for months by the debate over financing and a decision to take NASA out of the business of launching commercial satellites.

When he moved to tighten management of the space station project, members of the Texas congressional delegation, who saw jobs being lost in Houston, protested so loudly that he agreed to reconsider the decision for another 90 days. His decision to reconsider then caused unhappiness in Alabama, where the Marshall Space Flight Center stood to gain an expanded role in the space station development.

Nine-Month Assessment

In the wake of the Challenger accident, Congress demanded that NASA headquarters take the agency’s powerful field centers firmly in hand. Fletcher’s first step was to bring in retired Gen. Samuel C. Phillips, who directed the successful Apollo lunar exploration program in the 1960s, for a nine-month assessment of NASA management, particularly the relations between Washington and the field centers. The changes to tighten management of the space station program were among his first recommendations.

Despite such frustrations, however, NASA has finally turned its focus away from the accident itself toward preparations to resume shuttle operations.

While engineers from Marshall center and Morton-Thiokol Inc. move toward tests of the new seals for solid-rocket joints, technicians in Florida have concentrated on maintenance and modifications on the three grounded orbiters--Columbia, Atlantis and Discovery.

Columbia will be loaded atop its Boeing 747 transporter in October and flown to Vandenberg Air Force Base to be used in tests of the new Western shuttle launch complex.

Next month, Atlantis will be moved from the vehicle assembly building to a Florida launch pad for a series of tests, including emergency escape drills by astronauts.

Engines Dismantled

Kennedy workers have also dismantled shuttle engines to ship combustion chambers back to California where they will be nickel-plated to extend their lifetime.

Still, the prospect is that there will be insufficient work to keep the center’s work force busy between now and 1988, and that more contractor employees will join the 1,200 already laid off.

The slowdown has also seen 700 workers laid off or transferred from an assembly plant in New Orleans where NASA ordered Martin-Marietta Corp. to cut back on its production of external fuel tanks for the shuttle system.

At Houston, more than half a dozen astronauts have departed. More are expected to follow, and NASA has canceled this year’s addition of six new pilots and six mission specialists to its astronaut corps. At the same time, at least 18 flight controllers have retired, and others have returned to military assignments. What happens in the coming months depends to some extent upon the tax overhaul bill now making its way through Congress. If its provisions make it more attractive to retire now, there is expected to be a surge of departures by space agency civil servants.

But even though the next shuttle launch is at least a year and a half away, preparation for it is already quickening.

Simulator Training Planned

In less than three months, new computer software will be completed to begin simulator training for astronaut crews who will fly the first missions. “What we are going to do basically is have a set of pretend launches about February and again about April,” said Frank Hughes of the the Johnson Space Center’s astronaut training office. “We will do all the things we would do in a launch, but instead of a launch we will have a long simulation. We will put astronauts in the simulators, the people in the control room, and go around the clock for a day or two. Those simulations will make us feel that we are pretty much ready.”

Eugene Kranz, the director of flight operations at Houston, has launched a high-priority effort to beef up the recruitment and training of flight controllers while the shuttles are grounded.

During the last two or three years, the turnover of young engineers who plan shuttle missions and staff the control center during manned spaceflights had risen so dramatically that concerned officials hired an outside consulting firm to find why they were leaving.

The study found that the young controllers liked their jobs, but they were going to work for shuttle customers for higher salaries. When their companies’ satellites were launched, the ex-NASA controllers could return to the mission control center for the flight, serving as the customers’ payload specialists.

“That way,” Kranz said, “they could enjoy the best of both worlds.

“Now I think we have reached the point where we have to cope with an average life span of six or seven years for our controllers, so during this down time, we are setting up a very concentrated and rigorous program for bringing new people into the system.”

Anticipated Project

The hiatus has also provided a chance for scientists and engineers to do additional preparation for one of the most-anticipated science projects in NASA’s history.

At the time of the Challenger accident, the space agency was scheduled to launch its $1-billion space telescope this October, beginning a program that officials boldly predict will rewrite astronomy textbooks.

Above the atmosphere of the Earth, the telescope will be able to see objects 50 times more faint than anything seen by observatories on Earth, perhaps objects at a distance of 15 billion light years. In effect, scientists will be looking at the universe as it appeared just after its creation.

Although the officials are struggling to set priorities for the payloads backed up awaiting launch, it is expected that the 25,000-pound telescope will be aboard one of the early launches.

For the next year, engineers will practice operation of the telescope, sending commands from the Goddard control center in Maryland to the spacecraft stored in a clean room at the Lockheed plant in Sunnyvale.

“What we will do is provide much more time for the ground systems to talk to the flight spacecraft,” said James Odom, director of the telescope project at the Marshall center. Having more than a year of practice sending increasingly complex commands to the spacecraft, he said, “means that when we do fly, the ground folks will be much more efficient at doing their job.”

Looked Forward to Decision

NASA officials looked to Reagan’s decision on replacing Challenger, his declaration that the space station will go forward and his promotion of a privately funded satellite launching industry as the beginning of a new era for the chastened agency.

But in some cases, the recovery started even as the first bits of Challenger’s wreckage were brought ashore.

“The day after the accident, I had a staff meeting and put a work plan in place,” Kranz said. “We didn’t miss but eight hours until we had a work plan in place and moving out into the organization.

“The most difficult thing for me and for all of us was later, when we found out that in the broadest sense that there was culpability, that it wasn’t just a Marshall problem or a Thiokol problem, it was a total system problem. We had been pressing very hard, and we thought we were taking every safety precaution. But the fact was that we were operating at a point where, in another six or nine months, unless we had solved our personnel attrition problem, or unless we got our training program in place, we could have been the ones hit with this thing.”

Still Winces

Still, even now, Kranz winces when he is asked if it was complacency.

“You can’t spend half of your life over in the control center practicing launch aborts unless you believe deep down that someday you will have to do it,” he said. “And you can’t have a booster engineer who looks at a main engine swallowing 15,000 pounds of fuel a second and feels comfortable. You never feel comfortable. People say, ‘Well, you had so many successes.’ Well, Jesus, our problem is not to worry about successes; our job is to be there in case we’ve got a problem.”