Risky Business

NASA's new 'no' man has the power to stop a launch in the name of safety.

NASA passed a major milestone in its two-year recovery from the Columbia tragedy when it moved another space shuttle April 7 to a seaside Florida launchpad. Although the comeback mission was scheduled to start May 15, NASA insiders were anticipating a delay. The speed bump in front of shuttle Discovery and its seven astronauts was paperwork.

A stack of about 300 requests for waivers, or deviations from engineering requirements, still needed a stamp of approval from Chief Engineer Rex Geveden or one of the 29 shuttle experts he has authorized to act on his behalf. That's nowhere near the 6,000 waivers associated with Columbia, but the smaller number didn't make the job of reviewing them any less important.

"We want to shine a light on these things, evaluate them thoroughly, understand them thoroughly and then make rational decisions around how much risk we think can be accepted," says Geveden. A 15-year NASA veteran, he is the agency's supreme authority on technical decisions affecting the reliability of space operations and the safety of the astronauts, the workforce and the general public.

Geveden embodies the opposing argument that was missing from management deliberations over Columbia's readiness to fly. His authority is large, wide and deep. It's also new. The chief engineer's role is evolving as NASA restructures its management and rehabilitates its safety culture to satisfy investigators of the February 2003 disaster, which claimed the lives of seven astronauts.

Six months ago, under orders from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, NASA gave the chief engineer an active, managerially and fiscally independent role in the shuttle launch approval process. Agency leaders tapped Geveden, then deputy director of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., to bring what he calls a "dispassionate view" to the management circle in Washington.

Educated as a physicist and decorated with several leadership medals, including the astronaut corps' coveted Silver Snoopy, the Mayfield, Ky., native comes across to colleagues as "a strait-laced guy." That and the fact that, at age 44, he still thinks his mother doesn't know about his teenage past are the reasons he squirms when asked to recall the riskiest thing he ever did.

When he was in high school, Geveden drove a midnight-blue 1977 Chevy Nova with white stripes and a 350-cubic-inch engine. Occasional drag races along lonely Kentucky back roads bolstered his adolescent pride. Memories of hot rod days help him appreciate the meaning of risk. In space flight, "You can't drive risk to zero," he says. "The danger is to accept risk without knowing it or, worse yet, without adequately evaluating it."

Geveden is the first NASA executive to "own" the agency's technical requirements and the only one who can waive them. Without his signature on the flight readiness certificate NASA issues days before a launch, the space shuttle will not fly. His predecessors typically never wielded such power. They advised the NASA administrator on technical matters that became agency-level concerns, and not always with a lot of influence.

"I would certainly tell you that it's a cultural change for the agency. In fact, it's viewed by some as a litmus test for the agency's ability to change the balance of power," he told Government Executive in February, three months after his promotion to the post.

Bad management took as much blame as a broken wing in the accident board's final report on the Columbia catastrophe. A seven-month investigation uncovered chronic organizational problems lingering from before the first shuttle tragedy in 1986. Investigators said shuttle managers were dangerously preoccupied with costs and schedules and discouraged dissent.

In approving Columbia's launch, managers didn't consider numerous reports of shuttle orbiters being hit and damaged by foam insulation that popped off their external fuel tanks during the first minutes of flight. Columbia took just such a hit and burned up in the atmosphere on its way back to Earth at the end of a 16-day science mission.

At the time, NASA's reporting ladder had lots of steps. Technical concerns had to climb up through field installation management to reach mission directorate management, and even higher to reach a top decision-maker. Today, the least influential employee is no more than two complaints away from Geveden. "People feel like this is putting engineering back on equal footing with project management," he says.

Full-scale, effective implementation of the independent technical authority has been Geveden's biggest challenge. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board prescribed it as a cure for the shuttle program's management ills, but NASA is deploying it across the agency through a warrant system.

Geveden has delegated his authority so far to 44 others who are expert in spacecraft systems and a variety of aerospace disciplines such as thermal analysis and nondestructive testing. Their warrants empower them to make the technical decisions necessary to ensure safe and reliable operations in any program. They need not obtain Geveden's consent. They work hand-in-hand with project managers, but are funded from separate accounts to preclude cost and schedule compromises.

NASA has a schedule to keep. It must retire the space shuttle by 2010 to clear the way for a new lunar exploration program, but it also has to fly up to 28 more missions before then to finish construction of the International Space Station. As a giant tractor carrying the 12-million-pound space shuttle inched its way along a four-mile gravel path to the launch pad in April, there were private grumblings about the time it is taking to evaluate risk surrounding Discovery's impending flight.

Officially, however, NASA's leadership was impressed with Geveden and his warrant holders. "They're giving us a serious independent engineering evaluation. I think it will help keep program management on track," Wayne Hale, chairman of the shuttle mission management team, told Government Executive after a meeting with reporters at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Flight Check

Five key principles govern NASA's independent technical authority:

• Acts as an individual, not an organization.
• Is clear and unambiguous regarding authority, responsibility and accountability.
• Remains independent of program management.
• Uses credible personnel, technical requirements and decision-making tools.
• Makes and influences technical decisions through prestige, visibility and strong requirements and evaluations.