Comment on Columbia Board's Report

IFPTE and the NASA Council of IFPTE Unions support most of the CAIB conclusions.    They never contacted the Unions that represent the NASA technical workers, and what is in the report is a reflection of those they talked to.  Yet back in March IFPTE reported "a combination of budget cuts, workforce downsizing, and contracting out key NASA operations negatively affected the safety of NASA's manned space program, its ability to retain and pass along core technical knowledge, and its oversight of the contractor workforce," clearly a resource that was available to the Board

NASA has never needed technical people from the bottom to the top like they do today.  It takes rocket scientists if you please.  Leaders who can understand the technical arguments of scientists and engineers from NASA and its Contractors and who have control over the safety and mission issues.  The public has never considered NASA a jobs program, as lives are at stake, and they know we often need the best talent we can find, and where talent is not the issue, we need dependability and integrity. 

To the extent that the NASA Culture is failing is a consequence of a long term devaluing of scientific and technical expertise within the agency.  Management is too detached from the daily work and its challenges and have opted to contract out more than they ought, bowing to pressures of Congress and the Whitehouse.  It is not so much, is it "inherently governmental" as it is, is it "inherently technical"?    We clearly need contractors and they often have their heart into the space business just as NASA does.   And we have often heard it said that contractors will do the right thing, it is in their best interest or lawsuits will result, but that doesn't move our space business forward, that doesn't bring back our astronauts; we must have oversight, we must know that all things will work the first time and every time. However with the mindset of the past few years, we are not doing enough in-house work for our contractors to respect us, nor for our young employees to become educated enough to oversee contracts when they begin to move into that phase.  It is not always money that keeps the best and brightest from taking jobs at NASA but the kind of jobs we are offering them.  They want hands-on work, where the fun and where the challenges are, and those jobs are going to contractors.   We are saying that the web of subcontracts has grown so great within NASA and within its Contractors that mission assurance is a real problem. 

We join with Dr. John Logston, member of the CAIB who said "believing that the shuttle was a mature system, NASA turned a lot of its operations over to a single contractor.  But importantly, turned a lot of NASA responsibilities in safety and mission assurance over to that contractor and backed off, did insight instead of oversight of the program.  And we believe that was a mistake . . ." A GAO report issued just a few days before the Columbia disaster said that NASA's contract management was ineffective.

NASA's safety programs have to be some of the best of any agency, just look at the things that don't happen.  The past disasters connected to Oxygen, O-rings and foam were widely separated events and clearly independent, the number of experiments that are done within the Shuttle or Space Station are many from all over the world yet none have destroyed a vehicle.  Yet too often Safety organizations are merely taking data on insignificant issues compared with generating small tiger teams to investigate perceived problems aimed at reducing the danger in activities that many of NASA employees face, handling high pressure gases, fuels, space flight safety, etc. where these are life or death issues, and involve major hardware and programs.   From the CAIB Press Conference, member Wallace reported "Foam was coming off the orbiter from the very first mission.  NASA requirements dictated that this not happen . . . but it happened on every flight."   Of course NASA should have had a vigorous program on-going to solve this problem instead of watching out for spiders and chiggers and holding the hand rails (not that those are unimportant).  Yes some things need to be radically changed and moving people about is not the answer the Unions would be looking for.