Week 10 - Posting by Will

 Interview with Doug Brown, NASA Communications Engineer, 2007-2011

Doug Brown worked as a NASA Cryptological Engineering Technician from 2007 to 2011.  Like his father before him, who worked at NASA during the Apollo program, Doug has always been passionate about space travel. In our interview he observed that there are two types of NASA personnel – those who came to NASA because it had been a lifelong dream, and those who come into NASA as a springboard for better jobs in the private sector.  The latter are largely the bureaucrats and managers, the “bean counters” as he calls them, who have come to monopolize NASA culture.

When did things change at NASA?  How did NASA become such a complicated bureaucracy?

After the Apollo mission. Nixon scrapped the last three moon landings to pour money into the shuttle program.  In the early days, NASA envisaged not five shuttles but a fleet of dozens of them, running missions every week.  But there was a five-year hiatus after Apollo, and there you had the first downsizing of NASA.  A lot of engineers who had come up through the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs moved on to other jobs. Then came these new guys who had less of a personal investment in space travel. It was just a job to them. They didn’t have the “NASA spirit.” Then came the contractors, as NASA began farming out work that it couldn’t afford to do in-house. So naturally the org chart became more and more bizarre.

What was the organizational culture like while you were working on the shuttle program?

It was very much a “cover your ass” environment. We’d lost two shuttles, one on liftoff, the other on re-entry. We’d learned from Columbia, but rather than improving communication it only made people more skittish about accepting blame.  We were experiencing more and more budget pressures, and so the spirit of exploration was replaced by a relentless focus on cost-effectiveness.  NASA had taken on the corporate mindset of the federal government.

Did NASA learn from the mistakes of Columbia?

It did, but NASA tends to be very reactionary rather than proactive.  Look at the Challenger disaster.  There were icicles hanging off the gantry, and yet they said, “let it fly.”  It costs something like half a million dollars a day for the shuttle to sit on the launch pad, and the people at the top constantly have that at the front of their mind. NASA learned to take o-rings seriously after Challenger.  Then came Columbia and NASA started putting cameras all over the space station so that every time a shuttle docked it would get a complete visual examination.  They learned their lesson.  But they haven’t always been good at looking ahead, to see problems before they become catastrophes.

Regarding the Columbia disaster, the CAIB in effect said, “The foam did it. . . . The institution allowed it." 

Yes, it was an organizational problem, no doubt about it.  The corporate mindset had taken over and suddenly it was the managers, not the scientists, who were making the big decisions.

Has anything changed since Columbia?

NASA really cleaned up its act in 2008.  They took the bean-counters out of the way and put the scientists back in charge.  The streamlined operations and got rid of a lot of middlemen. They went back to the old way of promoting from within and holding on to the people who had real passion.  I was a lowly operations guy on the shuttle, but if something didn’t add up, I had the ability to go to the flight director during a mission and voice a concern.

Do you think we’ll ever see a space program like we had in the 1960s?

In 1970, NASA’s budget was around 3% of the total federal budget.  In 2010 it was around 1 1/4 % of the federal budget.  And so much more is happening at NASA.  It’s learning how to do more with less.  Space travel is one of the noblest of human endeavors.  There will always be people who say: why spend so much on space exploration when there are so many problems here at home?  But people don’t realize how many technological advances come out of the space program. The problems you address in getting a manned mission to Mars will translate into meaningful solutions here on Earth.