New York Times Article on NASA

I've clipped this article for those who don't subscribe to the New
York Times.

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NASA Is Held Down by Its Own Bureaucracy
By JAMES GLANZ

In the early morning hours of Feb. 1, 1958, William Pickering,
director of the laboratory that had assembled America's answer to
Sputnik, was waiting for word from a tracking station in California
that the craft, the nation's first satellite, had gone around the
Earth exactly once.

Two scientists waited with him in a Pentagon office Wernher von
Braun, the former chief rocketeer for the Nazis who had become a
leading American rocket innovator, and James Van Allen, a brilliant
young astronomer. It had taken them just three months to match the
Soviet Union's shocking achievement by firing a four-stage rocket
jammed with sensing equipment into space.

When the word finally came "It is in orbit," Dr. Pickering said
the men were rushed to Washington, where they greeted reporters by
lifting a model of the rocket over their heads like a trophy.

The nation was electrified, the space race had begun, and Dr. Van
Allen's instruments would revolutionize scientific understanding of
Earth and the solar system. Within months, Congress declared that
the space effort would be led by a new federal entity, the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration.

It was the kind of triumph that, many scientists say, today's NASA
with a declining technical base, an eroding pool of scientific and
engineering talent and ever fewer patents and notable research
papers would not be able to match.

For more than three decades, NASA defied all reasonable odds as it
grew into a multibillion-dollar bureaucracy with tens of thousands
of managers, scientists, engineers and technicians, yet somehow
remained true to the intoxicating audacity and technical mastery
that gave it life.

NASA's young innovators did not just land men on the moon and
explore the solar system, dropping probes onto Venus, Mars and
Jupiter and visiting all the outer planets but Pluto. Together, they
assembled and maintained a remarkable repository of technical and
scientific talent.

Today, though, NASA is dominated not by scientists and engineers who
think big but by technical managers who rely largely on outside
contractors who have themselves been rocked by consolidation,
layoffs and lean economic times.

As a result, NASA researchers are producing vastly fewer patents
than they did in earlier years, and there has been a recent falloff
in papers as well. Other scientists, many of whom questioned the
value of the shuttle program from the start, are now surprised at
the lack of scientific sophistication displayed by the NASA
engineers charged with explaining the Columbia disaster publicly.

A Changed Culture

In interviews, a cross section of scientists, engineers and
historians of technology universally expressed admiration for the
efforts of NASA engineers and officials to determine what caused the
Columbia disaster and take steps to fix problems. But they also
unanimously voiced another thought: with a few important exceptions,
NASA has lost its status as a technical powerhouse.

"There's been a steady decay in the competence and the feeling that
you're really dealing with scientific peers," said Dr. Van Allen,
who with his group at the University of Iowa has sent instruments on
mission after mission with NASA over the decades.

Reliance on outside contractors has left personnel at NASA centers
like the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., with little hands-
on expertise. "They don't really know what's going on," Dr. Van
Allen said. "They do what they are supposed to, in a very narrow
sense, on a day-to-day basis."

Devastating assessments come not just from scientists who were
present at the program's creation, and who still carry a special
pride for the inspired daring of those early days. Daniel Baker, who
led a space sciences laboratory at Goddard from 1987 to 1994, said
that in the 1990's, when NASA cut some of the last in-house programs
that let young engineers and scientists build satellites themselves,
the technical decline slid from steady to precipitous.

"I think that's disastrous," Dr. Baker, now director of the
University of Colorado's laboratory for atmospheric and space
physics, said. "NASA has lost some of its nerve, maybe some of its
sense of purpose."

Scientists said that the agency's original sense of mission and can-
do spirit had largely given way to a civil-service culture, with a
maze of bureaucratic rules, overlaid by a risk-averse approach that
permeated NASA after the Challenger explosion in 1986. As a result,
these experts said, it was difficult to attract ambitious young
talent.

"The aging leaders of NASA today came into this enterprise with
stars in their eyes," said Bruce C. Murray, a planetary geologist at
the California Institute of Technology who directed NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., from 1976 to
1982. "That's not the case now."

Rise of the Contractors

Some seeds of NASA's technical decline were probably sown much
earlier than anyone could have then realized. Lacking a national
political constituency, NASA in the early 1960's began to rely on
contractors scattered in Congressional districts around the country,
said Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University who has
extensively studied NASA's history and internal culture.

NASA's other stated purpose in farming out technical and
manufacturing work was to improve the capabilities of American
industry, Dr. McCurdy said. But the move met immediate resistance
from the NASA engineers and scientists who continued their string of
successes by putting John Glenn into orbit in 1962 and ramping up
for the Apollo manned space program.

In an often-told story, Dr. von Braun, who was the director of the
Marshall Space Flight Center, once stomped into the office of James
Webb, the NASA administrator, brandishing an oily rag. "This is what
we find in these rockets that the contractors make!" said Dr. von
Braun, who believed that technical managers could not do their jobs
without hands-on experience.

The decision to farm out manufacturing had little negative impact
immediately, since NASA had no trouble keeping the technically
proficient managers who had started the program and could oversee
the work.

But as spending at the agency plummeted from $5.9 billion in 1966 to
$3.3 billion in 1974 at the end of the Apollo program, NASA began
a "reduction in force" program that fundamentally changed its
character. "They were basically letting their good people go," Dr.
McCurdy said.

After the Challenger exploded, Dr. McCurdy asked 700 NASA engineers,
scientists and administrators if they agreed or disagreed with two
statements: "Since I came to work for the agency, NASA has lost much
of its in-house technical capability," and "NASA has turned over too
much of its basic engineering and science work to contractors."

The first statement drew agreement from 63 percent of the employees;
78 percent agreed with the second. Numerous management changes were
instituted at the agency as a result of the Challenger inquiry, but
there is wide agreement that those two concerns received little
attention.

Allan J. McDonald is a former vice president for advanced programs
and technology at Thiokol, a successor company to Morton Thiokol,
which made the booster rockets whose failure doomed the Challenger.
He said that while NASA increasingly outsourced its operations in
the 1990's, those contractors were themselves enduring a "mass
exodus" of talent in corporate consolidations and payroll cutbacks.

Managers "didn't have the background and knowledge" to do great
engineering, said Mr. McDonald, who was one of two Thiokol engineers
who had argued that the Challenger should not be launched on the day
it was destroyed.

By the 1990's, though, privatization had become a potent buzzword.
Dr. Baker at the University of Colorado said that the hands-on
satellite program, called Explorer, that he directed at Goddard gave
more experienced NASA engineers a way to convey their deep
understanding of the trade to their younger colleagues. Most
satellite building moved to universities and contractors after he
left the agency in 1994, he said.

In 1995, two major NASA contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin,
formed a consortium called the United Space Alliance, and NASA gave
it wide responsibility for day-to-day operations of the shuttle
program. The USA consortium plays a similar role with the
International Space Station.

A NASA-financed study of the shuttle program completed last December
found that 92 percent of the money spent on the shuttle now goes to
contractors.

"NASA has found itself in a position of retaining management jobs
and an aging work force, while being restricted in its ability to
attract, train and retain younger engineers," the study
found. "Creating USA and transferring key jobs has made it difficult
for NASA to bring engineers `up through the ranks.' "

But NASA's contractors have their own problems. For example, at the
Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, owned by NASA and operated
by Lockheed, most employees have more than 20 years' experience,
while a few others have been hired more recently. Workers say there
is an age gap 15 years or more between the older workers and the
youngest ones because many employees who would have been between the
two groups in age had lost their jobs in waves of layoffs.

The plant plays a critical role in the space shuttle program. It
produces the giant external tank that holds fuel the shuttle needs
to reach orbit. Since the Columbia disaster, more than a dozen NASA
investigators have closed down parts of the plant and are looking
into whether insulating foam produced at the plant could have
damaged the Columbia's left wing after flying off the external tank
during liftoff.

Before the Challenger disaster in January 1986, Michoud employed
4,800 workers. By December 1986, it had laid off 1,000 employees.
Last year, it eliminated 15 percent of its work force of 2,400
workers, after NASA said it would take six external tanks a year
rather than eight.

"The whole of NASA as an entity has a lot of people who want to
retire from there," said James Lemann, 44, a former sheet-metal
worker at Michoud. "If you're steadily laying off the new hires and
you keep the older ones who will retire, then you'll come to a point
where you've got no people left who can do the stuff."

One 27-year-old former worker said that after the initial
certification courses, he received little additional training.
Workers were given procedural booklets for every step of the
assembly, but they could be hard to understand, both he and Mr.
Lemann said.

"If the guy who was working there for 10 years doesn't explain it to
you, you're lost," said the former employee, who worked in the plant
for three years.

A Lockheed spokesman, Marion LaNasa, said the company had several
programs for helping to develop a handful of junior employees each
year. But Mr. LaNasa acknowledged that because of cutbacks, the
number of workers with less than five years of experience
was "underrepresented from where we would like it to be."

Measuring Competence

Budget squeezes at NASA and its aerospace contractors are far from
the only explanation for the graying and decline in technical
competence of the space program.

The end of the cold war left the space program without the allure of
competing with the Soviet Union, the rivalry that fueled the
American drive into space in the first place. And few scientists
outside NASA have anything good to say about the shuttle program,
which they say siphons money from research that could be done more
cheaply with expendable rockets.

"There isn't any science on there that can begin to justify the
cost," said Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist and
an official at the American Physical Society, a group of 42,000
physicists.

Dr. Park noted that NASA's combined budget for the shuttle and the
space station was more than the $5 billion budget of the National
Science Foundation, which finances about 20,000 research grants
every year, resulting in tens of thousands of research reports
published in scientific journals. By contrast, science on the
shuttle produces a spare handful of publications in areas like
crystal growth and embryonic development, which happen to work best
in a weightless environment.

Advocates for the shuttle program believe that the challenge of
human space flight justifies the cost. But the shuttle is now used
mostly to ferry building materials and other supplies to the space
station, a mission many young scientists find less than compelling.

When the United States chose the shuttle over continued exploration
in space, NASA lost much of its appeal for young researchers, said
George Gleghorn, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and
a former chief engineer in the space division of TRW, an aerospace
contractor.

"The product you turn out, in a sense, is what you set your goals
for," said Dr. Gleghorn, who until last year was a member of NASA's
Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. "I don't think we measure up to the
Van Allens and the von Karmans," he said, referring to Theodore von
Karman, the path-breaking engineer who led NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory to prominence.

That lack of appeal is reflected in the age profile at NASA and the
aerospace industry as a whole. The average age of workers at the
United Space Alliance consortium has risen to 45.3 from 44.5 since
it was formed in 1996, and the percentage of workers younger than 35
at NASA has fallen to 11 percent from 28 percent since 1993. In the
aerospace industry as a whole, the ratio of workers older than 35 to
those younger than 35 rose to 4.9 in 2001 from 2.2 in 1992.

The implications are painful, say experts who point to an erosion of
NASA's technical skills. For instance, the Institute for Scientific
Information, a Philadelphia company that tracks scientific
publications and trends, recently did a study that showed NASA's
world share of research papers had been declining for a decade. In
recent years, the raw number of papers produced by the agency's
scientists has also dropped.

"If you're producing fewer papers, and your world share is going
down, you might want to pause and ask yourself why," said David A.
Pendlebury, a senior analyst at the institute.

The same trend is seen in NASA patents, a measure of technical
inventiveness. CHI Research of Haddon Heights, N.J., which tracks
science trends, said NASA patents had declined steadily in the last
decade.

NASA was awarded 155 patents in 1992, and 89 in 2002, CHI said. In
contrast, it noted, I.B.M. received 3,334 patents last year.

The shift in the technical ambience that those numbers imply is not
subtle, said Seymour C. Himmel, a retired NASA official who recently
left the agency's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.

Dr. Himmel recalled a visit the safety panel made to a NASA center,
where employees described their work. "All the presenters talked
about was contracts and bucks," he said. "I got so mad. I said,
`Your job is knowledge!' "

Technical Innovation

Scientists who deal with NASA seem to find galling the evidence that
some agency affiliates retain their technical edge, suggesting that
decay is not inevitable.

Many point to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is affiliated
with Caltech, as a place where innovation lives on. But Dr.
Pickering, who greeted the press in triumph after the first
successful launching, said the laboratory's decision to maintain its
university ties had caused friction.

"Everything else was civil service, and the NASA bureaucracy didn't
quite know how to handle this," he recalled. "There was a little bit
of division of culture."

Though the laboratory lost two of its Mars probes in the late
1990's technical errors by a contractor were the cause it also
navigated relatively inexpensive probes to circle and land on the
planet. The laboratory remains a center of excellence in areas
ranging from futuristic propulsion concepts to deep space
communication.

"From my observing it all these years," said Charles Barth, an
emeritus professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the
University of Colorado, "I think they have done very well in
continuing to be innovative and developing technical ideas."

And when NASA works closely with the free-thinking minds of academia
in other areas, the results can be uplifting. Just a few days ago, a
NASA satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe,
developed in close cooperation with Princeton University, returned
the earliest pictures yet of the infant universe, data that will
form the basis for many areas of cosmology and astrophysics for
years to come.

David Spergel, a Princeton physicist who worked with a team at
Goddard on the project, said there were still centers of excellence
that could serve as models for the agency. "In some areas," he
said, "the people at Goddard and J.P.L. are the best in the world
the kind of people that universities and industry would love to
have."