The pressure was intensified by the fact that not only was less money coming in, more was going out. The cost of the shuttle program was soaring. A good deal of the increase was due to inflation, but much was not. The shuttle program was experiencing cost overruns of at least 30 percent.
Many of the overruns were the results of honest errors in estimating costs, but some had more dubious origins–in 1982, Rockwell agreed to repay the government for $1.5 million in overbillings that allegedly included charging the government for trips to Paris for a screening of the latest James Bond movie and putting up the girlfriends of aerospace executives in Florida motels.
Worst of all, the shuttle`s prospects for making money were dimming. When the program was begun, NASA had estimated the potential market for commercial satellite launchings at 143 between 1985 and 1990. By 1983, the number had shrunk to fewer than 100. On top of everything else, it no longer appeared that the shuttle would have a monopoly on the satellite-launching business.
In the years since the shuttle`s inception, a European government consortium dominated by the French had come on the scene, hiring out an unmanned rocket named the Ariane to launch commercial satellites for foreign governments and corporations. In an effort to lure business away from the American shuttle, the Europeans had began aggressively cutting their prices, charging from $3 million to $10 million below the prices NASA was quoting to its commercial customers.
NASA was forced to retaliate by keeping its price for booking the usable cargo space on each shuttle flight at an artifically low $38 million. The rates were to have been raised this year to $71 million. But even those rate are far below the true cost, so far below that NASA would have continued to lose $50 million on every flight.
As its budget diminished, as its cost of doing business soared, as it faced increasing competition from abroad and as the shuttle program fell farther and farther behind schedule, NASA began groping frantically for ways to recoup.
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If the shuttle program was going to survive, the space agency would have to find new ways to save money. The number of flights would have to increase and, in order for the shuttle to maintain its source of revenue from the Pentagon, it would have to lift ever-heavier military satellites into orbit.
NASA engineers first set about making the shuttle lighter, since each pound of weight saved could be replaced by a pound of money-making payload. Two tons were saved by thinning the stainless steel casings of the solid rocket boosters. Removing structural stiffeners and a pressure overflow line from the external fuel tank saved another 10,000 pounds.
The shuttle`s wings were lightened by 800 pounds. It all added up. On its first mission, Columbia had weighed nearly 220,000 pounds. Just before it exploded last month, the Challenger weighed less than 175,000 pounds.
Weight reductions are not unusual in aerospace research and development programs. But the items removed from the shuttle also included 10,000 pounds of sensors and instrumentation that some of those close to the program feared would reduce its margin of error.
NASA`s own Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel expressed concern that efforts to improve the shuttle`s performance might affect its safety. But the panel`s warnings did not always find a receptive audience at NASA. ”I guess some of the folks at NASA probably thought we were being nags,” said one panel member.
Another major economy was NASA`s decision, in 1983, to switch the contract for ”ground management services” at Cape Canaveral from Rockwell to Lockheed. The changeover saved money, but it also precipitated a costly turnover of skilled personnel and the dismissal of a number of safety inspectors.
Although NASA`s original goal of a two-week lapse between flights was still years away, the agency was hoping for a 35-day turnaround by the end of 1985 and 24 days in 1986. But that would mean 15 launches in a year`s time, and Lockheed had its ground crews working around the clock to make the extensive preparations needed to assemble each vehicle.
When NASA investigated a November, 1985 accident involving one of the shuttle`s solid-fuel boosters, it found that many of the launch preparations were performed by careless and overworked employees who suffered from morale problems, poor work habits and inexperience. ”The general attitude,” the agency`s report said, ”was one of `I was doing something else at the time,`
`I only look at what I have responsibility for,` and `That`s not part of my job.”`
In hopes of improving payload capacity even further, the shuttle`s main engines and its solid-fueled booster rockets, neither of which had yet achieved total reliability, were ”souped up” to obtain more thrust.
The main engine nozzles were still burning through on almost every flight. There were problems with the computer software that controlled the engines, and with the high-speed turbine pumps. On one shuttle mission, the entrails of one of the engines actually caught fire. When the fire was discovered, NASA replaced the engine with another just like it.
In 1984, William McInnes, a former risk assessment specialist for the space agency, conducted an investigation of the main engine problems which found, among other things, that the high-speed pumps were transmitting potentially fatal harmonic vibrations to the rest of the main engine.
”I would never fly with those main engines,” said McInnes, who left NASA in 1984 to return to private industry. He later summed up his concern in a paper which concluded that ”the possibility of catastrophic (main engine)
failure remains too high to be reasonably acceptable.”
The NASA philosophy, McInnes said, had become one of ”fix only those things you absolutely have to fix to fly.” Those like himself who raised safety concerns, he said, were labeled ”boat rockers” who had deviated from the prevailing attitude of ”don`t bring up problems.”
The harder NASA tried to catch up, it seemed, the farther behind it got. Only four shuttles were launched in 1983, and five the following year. In 1985 the number of launches increased to nine, but the delays allowed the French Ariane to capture 50 percent of the market for civilian satellites. NASA`s own estimates showed that unless the shuttle`s performance improved dramatically, the French might wind up with 70 percent of the world-wide business.
WHILE DELAYS MOUNT, SO DOES THE PRESSURE
Meanwhile, NASA`s inability to meet its launch schedule was raising serious concerns within the Pentagon. The shuttle was being delayed so often, Air Force Undersecretary Edward Aldridge told Congress, that there was at least a possibility that the spacecraft had a ”generic” problem, some fundamental flaw in the design of a hybrid collection of mismatched rockets and motors that could never be fixed.
The Air Force, afraid from the beginning of crucial delays in putting vital satellites into orbit via the shuttle, persuaded Congress to let it purchase a fleet of unmanned booster rockets as a backup.
Congress had been forced to concede the Air Force its point; there was simply no avoiding the reality that the shuttle was in serious trouble. In hopes of restoring some of the old congressional confidence, NASA resorted to buying time with public relations.
Republican Sen. Jake Garn of Utah and Rep. Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), the men who chaired the congressional committees that held NASA`s purse strings, were invited to become the first ”guest” astronauts. At about the same time, plans were laid to demonstrate the shuttle`s inherent reliability by lofting a teacher and then a journalist into space.
To put a teacher aboard the shuttle seemed seemed safe enough. There had, after all, been 55 manned launches since Alan Shepard`s first Mercury flight back in 1961 and never had an American astronaut been lost in flight.
In its 1983 budget, the Reagan administration had even gone so far as to declare that the space shuttle had entered ”its operational phase.” But neither of the flights that carried Garn and Nelson went smoothly.
Garn had been scheduled to go up in March, 1985. When that flight was cancelled because of ”equipment problems,” he was reassigned to the next flight a month later, bumping two regular astronauts who had been scheduled to make the trip. Nelson was aboard the Columbia last month when a pump failure caused an engine shutdown 14 seconds before launch. The liftoff of Nelson`s shuttle was delayed on the launch pad seven times, a record, before it finally took off.
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The next shuttle mission, the fatal flight of the Challenger, was postponed three times because of bad weather. After the shuttle exploded, NASA officials cited their willingness to delay the launch as proof of their commitment to safety. But in the days since then, it has become clear that as the delays mounted one upon the other, the pressure to launch increased.
As the presidential commission investigation discovered last week, however, several engineers at Morton-Thiokol had argued against the launch on the ground that the below-freezing temperatures to which the boosters had been subjected the night before were outside the known boundaries of safety.
In the end, a senior Thiokol executive gave NASA a document agreeing that the launch should take place. ”Time was of the essence,” said one official present that day. ”We were within two hours of starting to load the fuel tank. There was pressure on. We all knew there were a lot of other launches scheduled. We all knew that delays could cause problems. We all knew that delays could mess up the program.”
Only after the Challenger exploded did it become known that a consultant to the Air Force had assessed the risks of riding the shuttle as ”conceivably as bad as those faced by test pilots in high performance planes”–about one chance in 35 of a fatal accident. One former NASA official said that the astronauts themselves had been told ”damn little” about the real dangers of riding the shuttle.-MORE