Running NASA Into the Ground

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 13, 2000 | by Timothy W. Maier

Budget cuts, mistakes and poor management decisions have cost NASA's space program dearly. Will the agency be able to turn itself around and fly high once again?

The mission was supposed to solve one of the oldest questions of the universe: Are we alone? The Mars Polar Lander would search the red planet for signs of water and, if there indeed is water, perhaps life of some sort exists on Mars. But this ancient mystery will remain unsolved because, once again, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, finds itself trying to explain another failure.

The official reason for why the $165 million Polar Lander fell silent Dec. 3, 1999, was simple enough: Someone made a math mistake, forgetting to convert a metric measurement into an avoirdupois measurement and, poof, the Polar Lander was gone. This came on the heels of another Mars disaster in which the Climate Orbiter spacecraft crashed into the red planet's atmosphere because of navigational judgment errors, costing $125 million.

So much promise vanished so quickly. The thought of such disasters has not even been on NASA's radar screen since it recuperated from the 1986 Challenger explosion by going forward with highly successful shuttle missions and giving the world a peek at deep space from its enormously popular Hubble telescope. Spin-offs of NASA technology -- from miniature electronics to Velcro to improving the ability of pilots to land safely in bad weather -- have been touted by NASA as reasons to keep pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the space industry.

Under NASA Director Daniel S. Goldin a new approach to space exploration was unveiled that would whet the appetite of thousands of scientists. No longer would NASA tackle the big mission, but it would lean toward a "faster, better, cheaper" philosophy so that many missions could be accomplished at once. Goldin's credo was engraved on every program. Critics charge this latest Mars fiasco may be but one more example of how NASA has sacrificed quality for quantity.

Former Mars Polar Lander project manager Donna Shirley, now an assistant dean of engineering at the University of Oklahoma, tells Insight she warned NASA of the pending doom, to no avail. "They kept adding to the project and not putting more money into it," she says. "This whole `better, faster, cheaper' was going too far. I told them something was going to fail. The reason is we were spread too thin. There was no one to check and double check, and when you have complicated and complex missions you are going to make mistakes that need catching."

Shirley says she would prefer to do one mission right than have 10 go wrong. But because there is a "big, hungry science community, NASA keeps trying to do more than it can do with the money. There is no reason to launch tens of missions a year."

Unable to persuade NASA to change course, Shirley retired after three decades of service. "I couldn't persuade them that they were going too far with `better, faster, cheaper,'" she says. "I couldn't stop that train. I was afraid something like this was going to happen and I couldn't do anything about it. Why stay there and suffer?

Physics professor David Klassen at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., whose work studying Mars has been funded in part by NASA, argues that while the recent loss of the Mars Polar Lander is a setback, it should not be an indictment of Goldin's philosophy. "If we make a mistake and lose, it's only $200 million," he says.

"People are really wondering if faster and cheaper means too many sacrifices so that better is only a dream," Klassen observes. "What gets lost in the shuffle of reports that NASA has lost a $200 million probe is that a lot of this money was not lost. The space probe itself is only a fraction of this price, and the launch itself is about half the cost. A good part of the cost for a space probe is the research and development. These funds spur on our science and technology, creating great spin-offs that will better our lives in years to come. This is the message NASA needs to get out if it is to survive the bad press of its mistakes."

The Polar Lander to search for life on Mars was supposed to be the mission of the millennium. Quick to capitalize on its dramatic potential, NASA unveiled an all-out media blitz of a kind not seen since the return of John Glenn into space. This story was front-page news all over the country, including the cover of Newsweek. But then all the promise of finding life on Mars before the close of the century disintegrated as the lander fell silent.

NASA momentarily raised its hopes in January when it detected a faint beep believed to be coming from the vehicle. A month later that space heartbeat was as silent as the grave, prompting NASA grudgingly to admit the plug had been pulled on the mission.

This "faster, better, cheaper" program appears to be a recipe for disaster, charges Edward Hudgins, director of regulatory studies for the libertarian CATO Institute in Washington. It is time, Hudgins says, for the government to step aside and let the private sector take over the final frontier. He thinks such a move should have been made 35 years ago at the conclusion of the Apollo missions.