The Few, the Tired

wice last October, Jorge Rivera's work delayed the launch of the space shuttle's 100th mission. But the NASA civil servant didn't get a reprimand. Instead, he got a medal.

Rivera works on the shuttle's fuel tanks at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The 43-year-old mechanical engineer also happily volunteers for hazardous duty inspecting the rocket ships on launch day-after their bullet-shaped external tanks have been loaded full with a half-million gallons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel. Inspecting is precisely what he was doing Oct. 10, when, looking through military field glasses, he spied a four inch, eight ounce pip pin lodged between the 4.5-million pound orbiter and its external fuel tank. With seven astronauts already aboard Discovery, Kennedy's controllers delayed liftoff 24 hours so workers could retrieve the pin. "God only knows what could have happened" if he hadn't seen the pin, Rivera told reporters. It could have gotten loose and been sucked into an engine with catastrophic results. Only a week earlier, Discovery had been grounded for a day because the eagle-eyed Rivera spotted a spring-loaded bolt that might not retract as designed, to separate the shuttle from its tank once the fuel was gone.

If science could clone Rivera, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration could have the answer to its greatest dilemma: How to emphasize research and development, as intended in the act of Congress that gave birth to NASA in 1958, while continuing to operate its maturing technologies responsibly. At the core of that dilemma is a staffing and infrastructure crisis born of nearly 10 years of downsizing and budget cuts. NASA's aging workforce and facilities are being stretched to their limits as the agency attempts to keep running regular shuttle trips to build the International Space Station while at the same time launching more and more "faster, better, cheaper" missions to discover the origins of the universe. In February, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, a group chartered by Congress to keep an eye on NASA, wrote of the agency's "tendency to 'make do' with job losses and infrastructure deficiencies, relying instead on short-run fixes. . . . Yet, with infrastructure, as with workforce, sustained shortfalls in these resources will eventually compromise NASA's ability to carry out its challenging mission."

In March, the NASA inspector general found the agency had failed to define its "faster, better, cheaper" approach and had not incorporated goals for it into the strategic plan. Further, the IG found, NASA has not aligned human resources with strategic goals and can't determine the appropriate number of people or the competencies they need to achieve strategic objectives.

Evidence of staffing shortfalls and their cost is widespread.

• Managers surveyed for the Federal Performance Report say inadequate staffing and training keep their programs from accomplishing goals.
• A year ago, four independent reports found that employees didn't always follow standard processes, failed to take some safety measures and, in fact, lacked some of the basic skills needed to do their jobs.
• A unique workforce review being done jointly by NASA, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management has revealed that the agency is short on information technologists, nanotechnologists and biologists.
• The same review pointed out that NASA doesn't have enough people qualified to manage the smaller, more abundant projects it is pursuing. Unless the pipeline of trained people is replenished immediately with new college graduates, NASA will be in dire straits when 25 percent of experienced employees reach retirement age in 2005.
  

Today's NASA also is burdened with the space shuttle, conceived in the late 1960s as a delivery truck for commercial satellites. When President Richard Nixon was deciding what Americans would do next after beating the Russians to the moon, huge projects such as a space station or a trip to Mars didn't fit the budget. NASA had consumed as much as 3.8 percent of the total federal budget in 1964 and 1965 but was expecting to be served smaller and smaller slices-more like today's 0.75 percent, its smallest percentage ever. Nevertheless, NASA found a reason to build another big system-the reusable shuttle-then oversold its capabilities.

NASA's most costly activities are operating the space shuttle (about $400 million per launch) and building-and eventually maintaining-the international space station, which is expected to cost more than $95 billion over 15 years, according to the General Accounting Office. In 1991, a year before NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin was appointed, human space flight accounted for 48 percent of the agency's total budget while its other key programs-space, Earth and aeronautical sciences-together accounted for just 31 percent. The funding imbalance was stifling research and development, and Goldin put in place a strategic management system to prove it.

Faster, Better, Cheaper

The hot-tempered, charismatic Goldin had been summoned from space and defense contractor TRW in April 1992, a few years after a Kennedy-style call for a human expedition to Mars by then-President George Bush fell on deaf ears at NASA. Bush told Goldin to reinvent the agency. A year later, with President Bill Clinton's tacit approval, Goldin began stripping bureaucratic layers. He cut long-range spending plans by at least $30 billion using a "faster, better, cheaper" credo borrowed from the "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative. The approach has had mixed results and some spectacular failures, but the idea behind it-more missions with shorter turnarounds-seems to have invigorated the agency.

Goldin also shrank the civil service and contractor workforce by thousands, in large part by resurrecting a controversial 1970s plan to spin the space shuttle off to a private company. Goldin redesigned the space station and-while prodding the agency to commercialize it, too-oversaw the start of construction, with Russia's help, in 1998.

Eight years after former President Bush's call for a technology focus, operations and research are in better fiscal balance. Only 38.5 percent of the funding pie now goes to human space flight, and after years of shrinking budgets, NASA is beginning to see its coffers swell. NASA's $14.3 billion appropriation for 2001 represented a 4.4 percent increase over its appropriation for 2000. Human space flight funding will shrink over the next four years. NASA multi-year funding forecasts show overall budget increases averaging 2 percent a year, but the forecast was called into question when President George W. Bush's budget blueprint for 2002 was released Feb. 28. It was a clear signal to NASA that it cannot sit back and relax. The agency still accounts for about 5 percent of non-Defense discretionary spending-which Goldin pegs at $325.5 billion in fiscal 2001.

Under Bush's plan, NASA funding would rise 2 percent in 2002 to $14.5 billion. However, the plan calls for significant cuts in the international space station program to eliminate $4 billion in projected overruns. NASA is now estimating U.S. software and hardware components will cost $29 billion-almost $12 billion above the original estimate. An angry Congress last year set a $25 billion cap. Among the sweeping changes outlined in the budget blueprint: cancellation of a crew habitation module, a propulsion module and a crew return vehicle. Without these three major components, the station will be smaller, accommodating only three instead of seven residents, and produce less science in the near term. The blueprint also cuts shuttle flights from seven to six a year and leaves no room for continued work on the troubled $1.3 billion X-33 and $205 million X-34 projects to develop technology for a space shuttle replacement. NASA, which had spent $912 million on the X-33 alone, axed both projects on March 1.

Longtime Johnson Space Center Director George Abbey took the fall for the space station cost overruns Feb. 25 when Goldin demoted him. Abbey now will serve as Goldin's senior assistant for international issues. The surprise move came in response to a memorandum from White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card just hours after George W. Bush's inauguration. The memo called for innovation and organizational reform across all federal agencies. At NASA, human space flight reform will involve delaying or canceling activities not focused on the space shuttle, the space station, and associated research in order to free up people and resources necessary for station support. Goldin said the Johnson Space Center needs help carrying its load, and that directors of other NASA centers are being asked to supply staff with needed skills, such as systems analysts, to back up engineers at Johnson.

While other political appointees in space agency management have gotten the heave-ho under the new President, Goldin remains-at least for now. Letting Goldin ride out the transfer of power in Washington is fine with leaders at the Kennedy Space Center, where a high-ranking official recalls that NASA had a temporary chief when the Challenger tragedy happened. "Leaderless, we're not launching," the official says.

Lean and green

Downsizing was supposed to make NASA leaner and meaner. Instead, it arguably has become weaker and less experienced. "We haven't broken anything yet, but it's shaking on the table," says James Jennings, the Kennedy Space Center's deputy director. In his previous job as the Florida installation's chief of human resources, Jennings presided over a workforce winnowing that left the shuttle launch site with roughly 35 percent fewer civil servants-and the rest stressing out to keep up. Kennedy is one of several field centers reporting ramped-up use of employee assistance programs. "Folks aren't going to be able to survive long under these current working conditions," Jennings says.

Although deficient communication ultimately got the blame for the back-to-back losses of a weather probe and a lander aimed at Mars in the fall of 1999, inexcusable mistakes in bargain-basement design, short staffs and long hours at NASA's university-operated Jet Propulsion Laboratory and probe builder Lockheed Martin played significant roles. In July that year, shortcuts taken to save time figured into a space shuttle's brush with disaster. Columbia blasted off with a hydrogen leak caused by an improperly installed part that jarred loose and punctured an engine nozzle. The post-flight inspection of an unrelated short-circuit experienced by Columbia during its climb to orbit revealed that miles of wiring in all four shuttles had been damaged by years of workers' careless trampling. The ensuing months of launch delays and repairs drove home the fact that the workforce was spread too thin.

Civil servants just didn't have enough hands to juggle all the shuttle improvements, space station developments and routine safety inspections they were required to make. "We were over-committing our resources," says shuttle program director Ron Dittemore in Houston. "With our head buried in downsizing we weren't looking as forward as we should have been," says NASA's Vicki Novak, associate administrator for human resources and education. "We've left ourselves in sort of a free fall. . . . We've got some real critical human resource issues on our plate."

Ironically, in March 2000, NASA was celebrating the news that it ranks among the best places to work in government. Nearly 80 percent of NASA employees responding to a 1999 governmentwide survey had said they were satisfied with their jobs. "NASA's an agency that has a really neat mission," an agency spokesman said when the survey results were released. "We explore the universe, we fly in space, we advance the science of flying airplanes. We do things that are cool." NASA scored high on the satisfaction scale again in 2000, but not everyone is smiling. The recent raft of unfavorable findings about human resources belies NASA's title as federal fun spot for the last two years. For example, the NASA-OMB-OPM workforce review cited a telling anecdote illustrating that the economics of pay are way out of kilter in Silicon Valley. There, young civil servants at NASA's Ames Research Center told reviewers they take on several roommates in small apartments and eat more than their fair share of rice and beans in order to make ends meet.

Down the Brain Drain

Line managers, in particular, are frowning about the dismal condition of human resources in the aftermath of downsizing. "The hypocrisy that reigns around here! 'Our No. 1 value is people?' Baloney. Our No. 1 value is getting ahead as an institution," gripes a manager at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

At Glenn Research Center in Cleveland-one of the few places on Earth with a tower tall enough for dropped objects to have the weightless free fall of orbit without leaving the planet-non-NASA scientists complain about the turnover of NASA civil servants who monitor their grants in the microgravity science division. "We have not provided our customers with the level of support that I feel we ought to, because I just have too many [non-NASA scientists] per civil servant," says Division Chief Jack Salzman. What's more, in a recent review of service contracts at Glenn, NASA's inspector general found that Glenn organizations increasingly have been contracting out functions as a result of more than 15 years of attrition of highly qualified civil service staff. Restrictions on staffing levels also have limited the center's ability to hire new civil servants. At the end of fiscal 1999, 44 percent of the estimated 3,564 people working at Glenn were contractor employees.

This isn't the first time in its 42-year history that NASA has found itself swirling in a brain drain. The workforce has fluctuated in size, peaking first at the height of the moon race in the mid-1960s and again in the early 1990s. The recent job cuts compounded the lingering effects of a post-Apollo downturn in the late 1970s. NASA is left with a graying workforce, an inferior blend of skills, and a dearth of fresh talent and leadership material. No one, including Goldin, denies it. "We probably cut too tight," Goldin told the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space on March 22, 2000. Goldin asked legislators to recognize that the engineering experience base of Apollo and the Cold War is retiring from the work environment at the same time NASA is facing very tough competition from dot-com organizations and the high-tech industry for the best scientists and engineers emerging from our universities."

Because the departures were voluntary, NASA could not target its personnel losses with precision. Most who left took early retirement or accepted buyouts. Despite efforts to retrain workers and realign the field centers' missions, the agency lost experience and corporate knowledge. Shortages began to emerge in critical skills and core competencies, such as specialized science, and technology areas, such as test and evaluation, contractor oversight, research and development, and crisis management. Hiring freezes, inter-center transfers, separation bonuses, buyouts, early retirement, attrition and outplacement helped lend a humanitarian air to it all, but the truth is, NASA had little choice. Federal law prohibits age-targeted buyouts, and an all-out reduction in force couldn't have won approval from Congress or the White House.

Mid-Course Correction

NASA fully recognizes its failings in human resource management and already is hard at work on short- and long-term improvements. With the fact-finding phase of its workforce review complete, NASA will shift its attention this year to correcting the skill mix. A strategic capability study by NASA's chief engineer will help determine what's best for the future. Already, NASA has restored hiring authority to centers that met their downsizing goals or saw their staffing levels dip into the danger zone. About 1,600 permanent and part-time employees were hired across the agency last year, and more will be hired this year. They will be targeted hires, thanks in part to an extended buyout authority that allows NASA to shed full-time employees and move the vacated positions where they're most needed. NASA is revamping its once-robust co-op education program, which brings college students into the agency on internships, and it is concentrating its recruitment efforts on young people fresh out of college. New college graduates made up 22 percent of full-time hires agencywide in 2000.

The agency also will take advantage of its never-used special pay authority to attract world-class scientists, even Nobel laureates, to key leadership posts. The provision bumps top pay up to $161,000 without White House approval; with approval the limit is $200,000. In the coming years, NASA will be using innovative hiring methods to boost employment without increasing the number of civil servants. This will require the agency to welcome temporary employees in targeted fields, such as information technology and the biosciences, and then return to their jobs in industry or academia. Training and development historically have gotten considerable attention at the entry, middle and leadership levels. Now NASA is paying special attention to distance learning and Internet training to limit demands on employees' time during the workday.

Notwithstanding these innovations, NASA has little flexibility to reallocate human, financial and capital resources in order to achieve its strategic and performance goals. Poor information-sharing between contractors and NASA, brought to light most recently in the 1999 Mars probe fiasco, will continue to be a management problem. In January, GAO identified contract management in NASA as a "high risk" federal management problem. "NASA-sponsored investigative boards recently found that opportunities to identify and resolve problems prior to launch [of the lost Mars probes] were missed due to poor communications, budget pressures, and poor management and engineering practices," GAO pointed out.

In the aftermath of the 1999 Mars probe fiasco, projects that exceed costs and schedule caps get canceled. But until recently, the tight fiscal policy has applied almost exclusively to projects that are small in size or infant in development and not to high-priced projects like the international space station. "There's a mentality within NASA that if a mission succeeds, all your past sins-like cost overruns-are forgiven. This goes back to the beginning of the agency," says Howard McCurdy, an American University public affairs professor who has written several books about the U.S. space program including Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). "They're reluctant to put a [performance goal] on mission success like the Postal Service puts on overnight delivery," McCurdy adds. "They're not really allowed to discuss mission failure, and yet we all know that that is how they progress."

The More-With-Less Quest

NASA has set for itself a vast, some say grandiose, mission of uncovering the origins of the universe. But at the same time, the agency still struggles to keep its work within fiscal bounds and still looks for ways to do more with less in the budget-constrained environment of government. The agency's more-with-less quest includes doing considerably more research and development, "seeking answers to fundamental questions of science and technology," as the agency's strategic plan puts it. But that expansive quest hasn't roused the kind of public interest and support the agency enjoyed in the heyday of its quest for a landing on the Moon. "NASA is an agency in search of a mission," says Mark Schlather, president of the citizens' group ProSpace, which takes its space-transportation-for-the-people agenda to Capitol Hill every March. "Like any organization, it is completely consumed with its own survival."

As its employment picture comes into focus, NASA will be challenged to house its workforce in adequate facilities. Its physical asset planning process is quite sophisticated on paper, but in reality, the agency has had trouble providing sufficient space in which to operate its programs. It has documented maintenance problems in many locations. "When the money got short, when [the] space station was pulling a lot of our resources a few years back, we weren't putting a lot of money into keeping up our facilities at all of the centers," says Bill Parsons, deputy director of the Johnson Space Center.

NASA is trying to integrate its management of physical assets and finances-an ambitious goal considering two failed attempts to develop the sophisticated financial management software it needs. Individual installations can spit out highly detailed financial reports, but in order to integrate them all, money managers at headquarters are reduced to the electronic equivalent of pencils and ledger paper-1960s and 1970s mainframe computers. With such antiquated equipment, it's no wonder acting NASA Chief Financial Officer Stephen Varholy likes to boast that last year, NASA was able to reconcile its Treasury fund balance to within $1.32.

Goldin boasts that NASA may be "the only organization in the country with a 25-year plan," but a decided lack of strategic workforce planning brought the space agency to the brink of crisis. Improvements will be slow to come, given the competition from higher paying industry. But with a long list of proposed changes, HR administrator Novak says, "We're on the road to a much rosier future."

Beth Dickey is a freelance writer who reports from Kennedy Space Center