Jim Oberg has written a fine article on why NASA keeps making the same fatal mistakes over and over again in the manned space program.

At the end he makes the inevitable reference to the remarkable safety record of the US Navy nuclear submarine program under the leadership of Admiral Hyman Rickover, and contrasts it with the dysfunctional safety culture at NASA that has existed throughout the 1990s.

It would have been nice if a rigid system of safety rules had been in place during the Shuttle, Shuttle-Mir, and Shuttle-ISS programs. But this could never have been done without wrecking the manned space program.

The naval reactor program of the 1950s was not an appropriate model for safety at NASA in the 1981-2002 time frame (although it might be in the near future). The two programs operated in very different environments.

Political Factors: Rickover could afford to take a totally uncompromising attitude toward safety because he had unlimited funding, strong political support in Congress, and total hire-and-fire authority over both military and civilians in his program.� No NASA Administrator or middle manager has had these advantages for a long time.�

Unlimited funding ended around 1964 and is never coming back. Hire-and-fire authority went away with government regulations that make it possible only to hire, never to fire. And political support has leaked away over the years because of a long series of broken promises and evasive testimony by NASA officials.

This last issue doesn't get as much attention as it should. Rickover believed that absolute honesty and clarity were essential in gaining Congressional support and the transcripts of his appearances before various committees make a refreshing contrast to the dismal smokescreens of rhetoric laid down by NASA managers in recent years.

Military Factors: the nuclear submarine program was viewed as essential to national security in a way that the Shuttle has not been since 1985, when the USAF decided to keep the Titan III/IV boosters in production.

This made it possible to shift key military satellites off the Shuttle after the Challenger disaster and left it with no truly vital function.

Once demilitarized, the Shuttle was reduced to a symbol of national pride � a Texas-size version of the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic airliner (which also suffered a very public crash caused by debris penetrating a wing).

But in order to perform that function, it has to work, or at least appear to be working. If the Shuttles are grounded too often or too long, then the whole program crosses over the red line that separates national pride from national embarrassment.�

It is never quite clear where this red line is, and its location has varied with political changes in Washington. But it was in the back of every NASA manager's mind when he made a go/no-go decision. If a "No-Go" would put the program over the line and into serious political trouble, he had to say "Go" no matter what the tech-heads told him about potential problems.

If he said "No-Go until all the safety deficiencies are fixed", the program would be cancelled because the cost of fixing them all in both money and time is excessive. If he said "No-Go forever because the design is fundamentally flawed" then NASA would be faced with designing some kind of Shuttle Replacement on a crash basis, which would also would have cost too much and have taken too long.

So the only possible answers were "Go regardless of the danger" or "No-Go until we fix this year's most public safety problem (H2 leaks, frayed wiring, foam strikes) and then go regardless of all the other problems".

There was a relentless constant underlying pressure on NASA to ignore the basic problems with Shuttle that is independent of "schedule pressure" related to particular launch windows or political events. "It's not much of a spaceship, but it's the only spaceship we've got � or are likely to have."

Technical Factors: Rickover intuitively chose a basically sound technology in the pressurized water reactor. It took a lot of engineering to make the concept work reliably, but there were no show-stopping problems. All successful ship reactors in the world (and most power reactors) use this design.

By contrast, the Shuttle Orbiter is a fundamentally unsound attempt to combine two incompatible craft: the hypersonic reentry vehicle and the subsonic airliner. It falls halfway between two stools and is only marginally functional like most such compromise designs.

The RV wants to have a blunt shape, a solid heat shield with no penetrations, and a crew lying on their backs. The airliner demands large thin wings with sharp leading edges, a heat shield riddled with dangerous holes like windows and wheel-well doors, and a crew sitting upright against the g forces like WWII dive-bomber pilots.

These fundamentally incompatible requirements are the root cause of most of the Shuttle's safety flaws and performance shortfalls. The various safety upgrades proposed over the years all treat the symptoms without curing the basic disease.

There is no imaginable modification that would allow a Shuttle crew to survive most boost failures or a major failure of computers, APUs, or hydraulics during reentry.

The Shuttle Orbiter is akin to the dreadful submarines which the US Navy would have gotten had they rejected Rickover's PWR design in favor of one of the "more efficient" sodium- or lithium-cooled reactors then on offer.

The Soviet Union actually tried reactors cooled by a lead-bismuth alloy in their Project 705 Alfa submarines and found out that Rickover's intuition was right � the liquid-metal reactor is theoretically superb but a nightmare in practice.

Sociological Factors: The public isn't outraged or frightened by problems with the Shuttle the way they were with real or imaginary problems with nuclear reactors. In fact, the public reaction to the two crashes has actually benefited the program in many ways.

If you look at the NASA budget corrected for inflation, the only times it has tended upward for even a short while after 1965 is in the immediate aftermaths of the two Shuttle disasters. Both these events brought NASA lots of high-level attention and new money which the agency has never gotten in the wake of its successes.

This is exactly the opposite situation that Rickover faced. He believed that in the atmosphere of the 1950s, with nuclear power living under the cloud of nuclear bombs, even one serious reactor accident would have produced a spasm of public outrage which would have ended the nuclear submarine program and probably the commercial power program too. (Rickover was actually a moderate on this issue � that fuzzy-minded liberal Edward Teller wanted nuclear subs serviced only at offshore platforms or isolated islands.)

But the public has a strangely different reaction to Shuttle disasters: "Please Mr. Congressman, give NASA even more of our tax money to spend on the same flawed technology that just killed seven astronauts." You even hear this line from people who refuse to fly on a DC-10 because of a few crashes that occurred 25 years ago!

For several years before the second Shuttle disaster actually occurred, I would predict it whenever I got into a conversation with any intelligent layman who seemed interested in space. (In my scenario, the right wing failed during reentry instead of the left wing.) After convincing them that the Shuttle hadn't actually been "fixed" in 1988 and that a second disaster was inevitable, I would ask the intelligent layman what he or she would do in response.

The answer almost always was "Press on regardless of cost or casualties." Some were willing to spend lots of money on major safety upgrades, but virtually no one was willing to shut down the Shuttle and start over again. The more fanatical interviewees were so willing to let more bodies pile up that they sounded like World War I generals.

Further conversation usually revealed that the intelligent layman didn't actually know squat about the manned space program. What he did 'know' is that the Shuttle and the Space Station are somehow bringing about the future of routine interstellar spaceflight and intelligent aliens which they have seen on TV in SF shows like Star Trek and Babylon Five.

In fact this isn't even good Trekkie thinking. In the alternate history invented by Star Trek's technically illiterate writers, our current rocket-powered spacecraft have no connection with the starships of that imaginary future (except that Zephram Cochrane somehow found an old ICBM to boost his X-plane above the atmosphere).

Even the capsule video history of human flight shown in the teaser for the current Star Trek series doesn't include anything between an enlarged ISS and warp drive.

But the modern public has been conditioned to love space by the media in the same way that the public of the 1950s was conditioned to fear nuclear fission. The intense pressure that forced Rickover to establish his zero-defects policy does not apply to NASA. They don't fear being shut down by a catastrophic accident, but rather by the safety precautions that would avert that accident.

And we might yet see this happen. In the wake of the Columbia disaster, the CAIB laid down a very demanding set of safety requirements. These requirements are much more numerous and onerous than the ones imposed after Challenger, and NASA is visibly failing to meet many of them.

If by some management miracle all the CAIB demands were met, they might reduce the usefulness of the surviving Shuttles beyond that invisible red line into the zone of perceived worthlessness. The surviving Concordes were modified to withstand tire debris impacts and even carried rich passengers again for a short time, but that didn't save them from being barged away to museums. Governments were not willing to subsidize a program that had lost its symbolic value.

This is why NASA is progressively watering-down or evading many of the CAIB requirements (which were often presented with convenient weasel words that make them goals rather than hard requirements).

It's easy to put all the blame on the usual technical incompetence, but I believe that a major factor in NASA's dodging and weaving on this issue is a fear that full implementation of the CAIB program would cripple the Shuttle instead of "fixing" it.

At some point, Sean O'Keefe or his successor will have to make the decision on RTF. The Administrator will face a crowd of engineers and managers in a big room somewhere and ask the big question: "Have you done everything the CAIB asked for?"

The honest answer to that will be no, which puts the NASA Administrator right back in the old dilemma. But there is now a new factor in play: a new US manned space vehicle is actually being designed, and all current information on the CEV suggests that its basic design will be a technically sound design based on common sense and experience, like Admiral Rickover's PWR reactors.

So it will be a lot harder to make that "Go" decision for Shuttle than it ever was before, and a lot easier to adopt a Rickover-like safety culture for future manned missions.

Fortunately, the Kennedy Space Center has an excellent barge basin conveniently located near the Orbiter hangars.

Jeffrey F. Bell is a retired space scientist and recovering pro-space activist

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