NASA Official Gives Details of New Safety Center at Hampton, Va., Facility
Aug. 20–HAMPTON, Va.–The new director of NASA Langley Research Center gave fresh details but also left unanswered questions Tuesday about an emerging safety center that will help the space shuttle return to flight.
About 200 to 250 people will work for the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, but an unknown number will come from centers other than Langley, said Roy Bridges, who became NASA Langley’s ninth director last week.
The center will have enough money to conduct multimillion-dollar investigations, but the exact size of its annual budget won’t be clear until the Congressional budget season gears up in February.
The safety center’s director will not have veto power to stop shuttle launches, but he will report directly to someone who does — Bryan O’Connor, associate administrator for the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA headquarters.
“He’s now backed up by our best minds,” Bridges said during a meeting with reporters. The new center should make NASA employees feel empowered “to go directly to the top and be heard,” he said.
Langley received national attention earlier this year when NASA released e-mails from a local engineer who raised safety issues about the space shuttle Columbia while it was still in orbit. Those e-mails didn’t make it to NASA’s top brass until after the February tragedy.
Last month, NASA’s top administrator announced the new safety center at Langley to bolster the agency’s checks and balances in the wake of the Columbia disaster.
The true test will be how much and how long NASA intends to invest in the safety center, said Howard McCurdy, an American University professor who specializes in management and science policy.
People inside and outside of NASA are curious how Langley’s safety office will take shape as the Columbia Accident Investigation Board prepares to release its report by the end of the month.
NASA’s safety funding peaked after the Challenger disaster of 1986 but then dwindled, said McCurdy, who approves of how the center is going to be organized but wonders about its lifespan.
“Watch the budget,” he said. “That’s going to be key.”
The safety center’s top priority is to return the shuttle program to flight, Bridges said. But he wants the center to have a broad, NASA-wide approach to safety as well.
The center will have a full-time senior engineer, likely from Johnson Space Center in Houston, who will work on safety issues in the shuttle program. There also will be a “fast-response team” that can be staffed and sent out into the field within days when safety problems arise, Bridges said.
To keep their skills sharp, team members will tend to their normal NASA assignments when they are not working for the safety center.
Bridges picked Ralph Roe, a Columbia mission team member who formerly worked at Johnson Space Center, to help start the new center.
Roe has organized special meetings in Williamsburg with top NASA engineers and safety officials to discuss the new center in the coming weeks. Oct. 1 will be the center’s first day of operation.
Bridges and Roe said money for the center would come off the top of NASA’s overall budget, not from individual field center budgets.
The center’s leading engineers, not Bridges, will pick which safety issues to look into. “I will be more in charge administratively,” he said.
As for leading NASA Langley, Bridges said he’s been impressed with the local work force so far.
“It’s not my style to micromanage the programs that are here now,” he said. “I’m really more future-focused on how do we retool Langley for the next 25 years.”
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